Question on Atheism

[tonyrey]

Science has pushed the miracle story further and further back…

I’m afraid that is an illusion. Each successive stage of development of life on earth was increasingly improbable in the face of overwhelming odds against the survival of increasingly complex organisms. The fact that life did so in spite of coming so close to extinction several times requires explanation - unless one has blind faith that fortuitous events are the most potent factor known to science. It is ironic that the power of reason is used to derive itself and science from purposeless particles! If that isn’t the supreme miracle what is? How could that belief be falsified?

 

[shoe]

But the creationist idea, which was hard to contend with 300 years ago, given the dearth of knowledge we had then, is laughable now, to think that man and the other species were just “poofed” in some kind of cartoonish way, across six days of creation or even billions of years.-TS

Yes, but to think that evolutionists believe that a couple of bacteria met each other while swimming about in a primordial pool that just “poofed” into existence from nothingness, fell in love, and created a family that included snakes, toads, and humans. I personally don’t see how “no-thing” can be the creator of anything, though I admit that I know a lot of good people who do believe that it can. But I think I have to go along with Aristotle when he said that “nothing is what rocks dream about.”

 

[Touchstone]

This is exactly what I keep asking you to show but you just give me sentences with different adjectives every time. That is hardly a logical argument. Please show how you go from “Science is doing great” to “God is irrelevant”.

If you cannot do so, then it seems like you are being emotional in this matter. Am I right?

The example I gave was the theory of evolution. But basic Newtonian physics as the model for the movement of sun and planets would work just as well, along with any number of other points of scientific progress in knowledge building. By 'science succeeding" I mean that science is producing models and frameworks (and integrating them into a coherent whole, to boot!) that are performative. They successful explain, predict and economize; they render the natural world more intelligible in purely natural terms. That is science’s stated goal, and by our observations, it’s been successful in a general sense, and astonishingly successful in some areas.

So the progression goes like this:

1. Species are explained with direct miracles. [religion]
2. Species are explained with natural, mechanistic processes. [science]
3. Explanation 2) gradually replaces explanation 1). [religion gives way to science]

or

1. The gods push and pull the planets and sun across the sky. [religion]
2. Natural, mechanistic physical laws govern the motion of celestial bodies (and all bodies). [science]
3. Explanation 5 gradually replaces explanation 4). [religion gives way to science]

Scientific explanations, where they obtain, outperform superstitious explanations, because they have features we value over the features of superstitious explanations (for most of us, a lot of the time, anyway): intersubjectivity, falsifiability, predictive power, economy, the usual suspects.

One the ‘emotion thing’, you ask that again, but didn’t address my syllogism from my last response to you, which I offered to dispel that notion. What problem do you have with the syllogism I offered?

To the contrary, Nietzsche had great trouble reconciling morality with the absence of God. But again, I don’t know why you bring up these things because none of them show the conclusion of which you said.

I keep hearing that what atheists say (or just what I say) in this thread “doesn’t disprove God”. Well, no it doesn’t not, because nothing does, nothing can, not possibly. Rather than “proving a universal negative”, the argument is that God just shrinks, and become irrelevant, superfluous as a concept. The trend converges on the realization that we just don’t care anymore if the God concept is “true” or not. It’s not germane.

Um… this is not about my claim. I have made no claim and in fact this whole discussion is me attacking your claim that “Science is doing great” logically leads to “God is irrelevant now”. I think it might be better if you ‘stop goofing off’ on this one because you don’t seem to be sure what you are doing.

If science can explain it, you don’t need God to explain it. We used to “need” a miracle from God to account for movement of planets, or the formation of species, directly. With the advent of science, God is just not needed for those questions. God must now be pushed back a level, and theists must retreat beyond the perimeter of human knowledge and say, for example, “oh yeah, well the only reason the naturalistic explanation for evolution as the mechanism of species development works is because God miraculously front-loaded the design of DNA or abiogenesis so it worked out that way”.

And then, when the riddle of abiogenesis is worked out, you’ll retreat even farther back – “so what? God just designed the physics in some mysterious, miraculous way we can’t understand such that mechanistic-abiogenesis-unto-mechanistic-species-development-through-evolution would automatically happen!”

At each step, God is less and less integral to our understanding of the world and how it works. He “shrinks” and “disappears” in to the cracks, the gaps in our knowledge where science cannot yet reach and God can be appealed to as the “other kind of truth” that grows and throws in the soil of our ignorance.

Listen, we don’t have to part ways. It’s a very simple argument here that you are making overly complicated. Just show me how “Science is doing great” logically leads to “God/Religion is irrelevant”. I noticed you write a lot along tangential issues in your replies. Lets just concentrate on one thing and it will save you some time too.

I think the part immediately above shows the linkage and progression. Here’s another, from a little further up? Do you understand that religious/miraculous answers were long embraced as the explanation of the movement of the planets? If so, do you understand how now, thanks to the progress of science, religion has had to retreat from direct miracles to “God miraculously designed physics so they would work in this non-miraculous fashion that we previously believed to be the result of direct supernatural intervention”?

If you understand that history, you understand the advance of Science, and the retreat of religious explanations that appealed to supernaturalist superstitions that got replaced and rendered archaic, obsolete by those scientific advances.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

Ok first, I am not passing off anything here. I am attacking your position that ‘‘Scientific success means God/religion is now irrelevant’’.

If I don’t need God to explain something, where previously it was thought I did to explain that very thing, and God’s direct intervention, then I have “irrelevantized” God on that question. It’s simple economy; if you don’t need an explanatory resource, don’t invoke it gratuitously. On question after question, God is a gratuitous invocation: nothing is added or helped by adding God to the mix. He is irrelevant to a textured understanding of that phenomenon or process.

You say ‘Self-evidence is established by impossibility or absurdity of its absence’ but you first have to define absurdity in order to do that. Are you trying to say what is absurd is proven by absurdity as well? That’s circular reasoning.

It’s not circular. It if can’t be otherwise, logically, then we affirm it, by necessity. QED. “God exists”, or “God is love” or “infinite chains cannot actually exist” are not “self-evident”; they present no logical problems in their denial. Observing something “tree-like” is self-evident in its observation, even if it is not actually a tree. Self-evidently something tree-like is appear to me, and it can’t be otherwise, even if I’m mistaken and it’s not a tree.

Even if we grant your definition of self-evident truths, it just proves that we have set of truths that are ESSENTIAL for any knowledge YET are non-Scientific truths which are very much RELEVANT for Science it-self.

Right, this is what I’ve maintained all along – see the “reality is real an at least partially intelligible” stuff I’ve said over and over now in this thread. It’s transcendentally necessary. “God is Love” just doesn’t qualify. Not hardly.

ddarko:

So I don’t think you are paying attention to your own arguments here. I don’t appreciate that. If you have multiple threads you partake in and cannot multi-thread, take your time to reply rather than give me something for really fast for the sake of “goofing off”.

God Bless

I’m just parachuting into this thread at the request/referral of someone I know who saw it and emailed me. My posts here aren’t goofing off in content, my very presence at all is just unplanned, probably unwise in my time investments – it’s goofing off in terms of what other obligations I have going. But the statements I stand by. It’s fast, but you aren’t covering anything here that hasn’t been beaten to death in dozens of previous threads I’ve worked through on this over the past several years. That doesn’t mean I don’t read it and consider it, it’s just not covering any novel ground, so the answers tend to be equally routine.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

I am not talking about private experiences - you are reading that into 2).

Again, no one is talking about private religious experience. When we move from the existence of God to the fact of revelation, we move from natural theology to history. Using historical methods, we can judge if God is acting in history through miracles.

Not objectively, no. That’s preposterous. That’s also precisely why faith is needed – once again – because the intersubjective analysis doesn’t compel any such conclusion by means of reasoning.

What you are suggesting, that knowledge is only knowledge if it can be falsified, is positivism.

No it’s not. You are misinformed. Maybe start here, a Catholic resource?:

newadvent.org/cathen/12312c.htm

This is easy to figure out just by thinking it through. The “positive” in “positivism” (hence the name!) demands a positive validation or demonstration for knowledge. That’s not at all what falsification entails, which is not positive, but negative (or, as we say, “eliminative”). Falsification doesn’t provide a means for positive validation, but something wholly different, the semantic and conceptual grounds for identifying a proposition as empirically false, at least in principle.

This has, among other things, the signal benefit of being self-coherent and self-consistent, unlike positivist or verificationalist paradigms. See here, for a light start on falsifiability, perhaps:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Self-refuting, and you did not address that when warpspeedey brought it up.

You (and apparently now WSP) are confusing distinct (and mutually contradictory!) concepts. And not to be nitpicking, but positivism’s problem is not that it’s self-refuting (that’s again, another concept altogether), but rather that it’s not self-validating. A statement that fails to validate itself doesn’t refute itself, it just… fails to validate itself! Refutation discredits and idea where non-validation just fails to validate it – different concepts! Any theist should be well aware of this, as it’s the difference between failing to prove God’s existence and such a failure-to-prove being itself a refutation of God’s existence. It’s not a refutation, it’s just… a failure to validate.

-TS

 

[Windfish]

Not objectively, no. That’s preposterous. That’s also precisely why faith is needed – once again – because the intersubjective analysis doesn’t compel any such conclusion by means of reasoning.

What is preposterous? Reason establishes the existence of God with certainty. We then move to history to see if he has revealed himself in the motives of credibility that we call miracles. He has. Boom. See you at Mass. What is so difficult about that?

No it’s not. You are misinformed. Maybe start here, a Catholic resource?:

newadvent.org/cathen/12312c.htm

This is easy to figure out just by thinking it through. The “positive” in “positivism” (hence the name!) demands a positive validation or demonstration for knowledge. That’s not at all what falsification entails, which is not positive, but negative (or, as we say, “eliminative”). Falsification doesn’t provide a means for positive validation, but something wholly different, the semantic and conceptual grounds for identifying a proposition as empirically false, at least in principle.

The principle of falsification is a part of positivist epistemology, Touchstone.

 

[ddarko]

The example I gave was the theory of evolution. But basic Newtonian physics as the model for the movement of sun and planets would work just as well, along with any number of other points of scientific progress in knowledge building. By 'science succeeding" I mean that science is producing models and frameworks (and integrating them into a coherent whole, to boot!) that are performative. They successful explain, predict and economize; they render the natural world more intelligible in purely natural terms. That is science’s stated goal, and by our observations, it’s been successful in a general sense, and astonishingly successful in some areas.

So the progression goes like this:

1. Species are explained with direct miracles. [religion]
2. Species are explained with natural, mechanistic processes. [science]
3. Explanation 2) gradually replaces explanation 1). [religion gives way to science]

or

1. The gods push and pull the planets and sun across the sky. [religion]
2. Natural, mechanistic physical laws govern the motion of celestial bodies (and all bodies). [science]
3. Explanation 5 gradually replaces explanation 4). [religion gives way to science]

Ok I think this is shedding more light on why you are an atheist as well. Your whole argument revolves around a straw man position that God is Christianity is a God of the gaps and a presupposition that the natural world is all there is.

First, God of Christianity is the First cause of everything. He is a deductive conclusion of all you hold true from human experience. The conclusion of God’s existence is as certain as your certainty on self-evident truths. He is the ultimate explanation of everything. Science can explain things enough for our practical use. But it does not give ultimate explanations both in its inductive and falsifiability forms.

Secondly on naturalism, we have no reason to believe its true. At a certain level, it is self-refuting. So this Science’s progress dismissing the supernatural business DOES NOT LOGICALLY Follow either.

So your argument above collapses because

1. Premise 1 attacks a straw man. Christian God is not a God of the gaps
2. Premise 2 presupposes Scientific Naturalism, which in a way the very thing it tries to prove

I keep hearing that what atheists say (or just what I say) in this thread “doesn’t disprove God”. Well, no it doesn’t not, because nothing does, nothing can, not possibly. Rather than “proving a universal negative”, the argument is that God just shrinks, and become irrelevant, superfluous as a concept. The trend converges on the realization that we just don’t care anymore if the God concept is “true” or not. It’s not germane.

Of course, possibilities are overrated. One believes in a God because there are reasons to do so. Not because its possible he exists.

But whats ironic here is that you based your initial comment on a possibility that Scientific Naturalism is true. There is no deductive argument I’ve heard that leads to scientific naturalism and in fact, there are many that show its self-refuting.

I am going to skip the rest of your reply because its a prolonged re-iteration of the same erroneous ideas you said above.

God Bless

 

[Touchstone]

What is preposterous? Reason establishes the existence of God with certainty.

Where is this from? I’m not aware of that undeniable argument. Can you cite it please? I thought that was one of the major points of contention, not to mention the deficit that implicates a need for faith – the surety of things hoped for. If reason alone establishes God’s existence, revelation and faith are not needed. Reason is, by definition, sufficient.

We then move to history to see if he has revealed himself in the motives of credibility that we call miracles. He has. Boom. See you at Mass. What is so difficult about that?

I deny that any of those supposed miracles occurred. Now what? That seems a great difficulty.

If I deny heliocentric astronomy, my physicist friend will make fantastically detailed and entailed predictions about future locations of the planets, and my denial will fold. What will you provide that is not “private”, and is undeniable?

The principle of falsification is a part of positivist epistemology, Touchstone.

No it’s not. The sine qua non of positivism is the positive validation of propositions and models. Showing a proposition to be falsifiable doesn’t qualify it in positivist terms. It must be “positivized”, validated in positive (again, hence the name) terms. This is important as a distinction as it implicates a whole range of verifiable semantics to clear a positivist hurdle that falsifiability itself doesn’t demand. And that’s precisely the point were positive fails to support itself – it can’t show that the positivist demands for verified (and verificationalist) validation are a test the paradigm itself can withstand.

This isn’t the case for falsifiability.

-TS

 

[ddarko]

It’s fast, but you aren’t covering anything here that hasn’t been beaten to death in dozens of previous threads I’ve worked through on this over the past several years. …

I am sure it has been beaten to death but I am more certain that your logic is not sound with respect to what you stated i.e. “Science is successful = Religion is no longer relevant”.

God Bless

 

[Windfish]

I have no idea what Touchstone’s faith background was, but he is imposing a historical narrative between science and religion that is alien to the informed Catholic. Science has its ground in a religious view of the world. Historians of science and a spade of books, including the most recent God’s Philosophers, show that science sprang forth from Medieval Catholicism. Science is a part of our worldview so that the statement water boils at 100 degrees celsius is just as much a Catholic truth as the hypostatic union of Christ. We don’t have to compartmentalize our minds. There is a union and an understanding that all truth is from God since he IS truth and reason. God is the ground of everything - he is not a wizard that intervenes in his creation to make adjustments like some ID’ers are proposing.There is no clash, no retreat of Catholicism from science. That is a purely ad hoc, atheistic narrative that it is amusing to us.

 

[Touchstone]

I am sure it has been beaten to death but I am more certain that your logic is not sound with respect to what you stated i.e. “Science is successful = Religion is no longer relevant”.

God Bless

Well, just answer this. For a given question Q, where historically God has been invoked as the direct agent of causation/explanation for the phenomenon, if science provides a mechanistic and performative natural model for the phenomenon, one where God is no longer invoked, and not even addressed, has God’s role been reduced in the explanation of Q as that explanation moves from the previous religious one to the scientific one?

Or is God just as directly relevant on Q even though God does not even appear or get invoked in the new mechanistic explanation?

-TS

 

[warpspeedpetey]

…You (and apparently now WSP) are confusing distinct (and mutually contradictory!) concepts.

Which are those specifically?

And not to be nitpicking, but positivism’s problem is not that it’s self-refuting (that’s again, another concept altogether), but rather that it’s not self-validating. A statement that fails to validate itself doesn’t refute itself, it just… fails to validate itself! Refutation discredits and idea where non-validation just fails to validate it – different concepts! Any theist should be well aware of this, as it’s the difference between failing to prove God’s existence and such a failure-to-prove being itself a refutation of God’s existence. It’s not a refutation, it’s just… a failure to validate.

1. Being self refuting means to be a logical contradiction, an impossibility. The proposition cannot be both true and false. If verification/falsification schemes are true then they are false. P=~P. Your positions violate the Law of Non-Contradiction.
2. If it just fails to validate, then you have the same problem that you claim we dio. Namely that your position cannot be validated! So why is your position any better than ours if it commits the very same mistake?

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Touchstone

I’m not certain. There may exist a god. I’ve said that here and elsewhere repeatedly.

If God does exist, and you concede that He might, is it irrational for us to live as though He doesn’t?

Or are you saying it doesn’t really matter whether He exists, you plan not to have anything to do with Him in either case.

If you use the term “falsifiable” one more time I’m going to smack you!

 

[Touchstone]

I have no idea what Touchstone’s faith background was, but he is imposing a historical narrative between science and religion that is alien to the informed Catholic. Science has its ground in a religious view of the world. Historians of science and a spade of books, including the most recent God’s Philosophers, show that science sprang forth from Medieval Catholicism. Science is a part of our worldview so that the statement water boils at 100 degrees celsius is just as much a Catholic truth as the hypostatic union of Christ. We don’t have to compartmentalize our minds. There is a union and an understanding that all truth is from God since he IS truth and reason. God is the ground of everything - he is not a wizard that intervenes in his creation to make adjustments like some ID’ers are proposing.There is no clash, no retreat of Catholicism from science. That is a purely ad hoc, atheistic narrative that it is amusing to us.

I’m not suggesting that there is a conflict. Quite the opposite, actually – Catholics give way to mechanistic explanations where they succeed, and “yield the right of way” to it, relegating their supernaturalist explanations elsewhere. Boiling water is a great example. No God needed to explain why water boils at 100 deg C. Such a mechanistic explanation doesn’t disprove God, it just has no need or knowledge of God. So, Catholics don’t post “water demons” supernaturally exciting the molecules – it militates against a perfectly adequate bit of naturalism, a mechanistic model. They “compatibilize” around it, gerrymandering their supernatural insertions into places where miracles are not so transparently superfluous, places where ignorance abounds, and thus cannot (presently) rise to be in conflict with science.

So, the Church grudgingly gives way to the arrogant Galileo (even if belatedly), and “harmony is restored”, because the mechanistic and empirically accountable ideas horn their way in establish a perimeter where superstitious answers are no longer credible, and Catholic believers make their piece with that, and find places to hang their supernaturalism elsewhere. It’s not a conflict, because Catholics simply concede the ground that science gains in terms of explanations, and adjust to find a working equilibrium once a new perimeter is established.

Per Catholic doctrine, God is ver much the Wizard That Intervenes™ – that is the whole point of the resurrection, that is the point of the water-turned-to-wine at Cana, the healing of the person who touched Jesus’ garment. And the uh, “miracle” of modern wizards like Padre Pio, or whoever is the contemporary miracle-vessel of the modern day. Those are just instances and stories where science does not, and cannot garner sufficient empirical evidence and testability to provide scientific knowledge. So the wizardry thrives in the absence of this knowledge, and in many of those cases, will thrive in perpetuity, because our ignorance on the particulars (we shall never expect to have good examination of the water/wine at Cana, for example, or test the eyes in a serious medical way of the person(s) miraculously healed in their vision by Padre Pio’s faith, etc.) well endure indefinitely.

Thus is the harmony maintained.

-TS

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Touchstone
**
Or is God just as directly relevant on Q even though God does not even appear or get invoked in the new mechanistic explanation?**

Again, your god is the god of Descartes … totally useless for our discussion.

You want to limit God to what can be comprehended by your brain, not by your heart. You once believed in God I suppose with all your mind and heart (maybe, maybe not), but you have thrown Him off for a giant serving of mashed scientism?

 

[Windfish]

oops

 

[Touchstone]

Which are those specifically?

1. Being self refuting means to be a logical contradiction, an impossibility. The proposition cannot be both true and false. If verification/falsification schemes are true then they are false. P=~P. Your positions violate the Law of Non-Contradiction.

No, that’s not the problem. Non-verification of verificationalism is just weak, not self-refuting – or even more bizarrely, now, as you have it – logically contradictory. Verificationism could be true without its recipes themselves successfully verification. I’m not a proponent of verificationism, but even if its protocol fails to verify itself, self-referentially, the protocol maybe effective, even optimal, as knowledge building- heuristic. We just don’t have a way to verify the protocol on its own terms. That’s not self-refuting, it’s just week.

Here is an example of self-refutation:

1. God is undeniably knowable through reason alone.
2. Faith is necessary to know God.

On it’s own terms, it cannot be true. By contrast:

1. Natural model-based knowledge is maximized and optimized through the principle of verification.
2. 1. is not verifiable by the principle of verification.

That is not self-contradictory, because 3) is not a natural model, not an explanatory framework for some natural phenomena. It’s an epistemic principle. All the better for verificationism if 3) bears out when the verification principle is used on itself. But it’s logically possible for 3) and 4) to both be true and consistent. Verification may be the optimal approach, and we just aren’t able to verify that this is the case, epistemically.

1. If it just fails to validate, then you have the same problem that you claim we dio. Namely that your position cannot be validated! So why is your position any better than ours if it commits the very same mistake?

Please hear me: I’m not a positivist! That’s not a set of claims I make. The problem is that windfish can’t apparently be bothered to distinguish positive verification from falsifiability. Science as a research program (including falsifiability as a pillar of its epistemology) very much does cohere and succeed with reference to itself, where positivism does not.

-TS

 

[ddarko]

Well, just answer this. For a given question Q, where historically God has been invoked as the direct agent of causation/explanation for the phenomenon, if science provides a mechanistic and performative natural model for the phenomenon, one where God is no longer invoked, and not even addressed, has God’s role been reduced in the explanation of Q as that explanation moves from the previous religious one to the scientific one?

Or is God just as directly relevant on Q even though God does not even appear or get invoked in the new mechanistic explanation?

-TS

God is just as relevant. Because even the scientific mechanism that one postulates is simply degree of explanation that is satisfactory. There is no reason to believe that the ultimate explanation can be scientific and in fact, considering certain elements of Scientific methodology cannot be explained by Science, the ultimate explanation definitely cannot be a Scientific explanation.

Now however, this is NOT why Christians believe in the existence of God. Existence of God is through deductive reasoning based on self-evident truths.

Btw, you might have missed my post right before (Post 67) where I refute your original argument. Did you miss it or are you agreeing that it was wrong?

God Bless

 

[Touchstone]

Touchstone
**
Or is God just as directly relevant on Q even though God does not even appear or get invoked in the new mechanistic explanation?**

Again, your god is the god of Descartes … totally useless for our discussion.

You want to limit God to what can be comprehended by your brain, not by your heart. You once believed in God I suppose with all your mind and heart (maybe, maybe not), but you have thrown Him off for a giant serving of mashed scientism?

That doesn’t answer the question. If we were to have some robust and solid model that explained the Church’s resurrection claims as mistaken in their invocation of supernatural powers and miracles, and that Jesus was not reanimated, the body was never missing, and Jesus never appeared to or interacted with anyone ever again after his death, would you say that would be “Descartes’ God” and not the Official Catholic God orchestrating the resurrection?

What then? If you have, at that point, a perfectly sufficient and thoroughly natural, non-miraculous explanation of the resurrection claims, does you God get pushed back then?

At some point, your God has nothing left to contribue, explain, or be responsible for, if you don’t think God is marginalized by such explanations.

-TS

 

[Windfish]

Where is this from? I’m not aware of that undeniable argument. Can you cite it please? I thought that was one of the major points of contention, not to mention the deficit that implicates a need for faith – the surety of things hoped for. If reason alone establishes God’s existence, revelation and faith are not needed. Reason is, by definition, sufficient.

It is a dogma of Catholicism that the existence of God can be known through reason with certainty. It is also a dogma that the fact of revelation through the Catholic Church can be known. The contents of that revelation cannot be plainly seen or known and so we have faith in it because it is God who reveals it, who can neither deceive nor be deceived (and that can be known through reason as well). But even that faith is rational because we know that God is faithful and true.

Now, just what those reasonable proofs are is besides the point. You had a misunderstanding about what we mean by faith, and now I have corrected you.

I deny that any of those supposed miracles occurred. Now what? That seems a great difficulty.

Why is it a difficulty? Anyone can deny anything. So what? Historical methods cannot demonstrate anything for certain since there is always the possibility of events happening differently than how they are recorded. It is possible, for example, that the moon landing was a government conspiracy. That possibility should not paralyze us, though, from making a historical judgment. Historical methods deal with probabilities, but not all possibilities are probable. So with miracles. All things being equal, sure, we should favor an ordinary explanation over an extraordinary one, but not all instances are ceteris paribus. All situations are unique, and we can use historical methods and tools of epistemology to evaluate the evidence and see if there is a confluence of factors that makes a particular explanation more probable than the others. Sure, there is always the possibility of an alternative explanation, but that means squat. We can show it to be so much unnecessary ad hoc with significantly low epistemic warrant. We need not consider it too seriously anymore than we need to seriously consider 9/11 conspiracies. So deny them. I really don’t care unless you have a rational argument to disprove them.

If I deny heliocentric astronomy, my physicist friend will make fantastically detailed and entailed predictions about future locations of the planets, and my denial will fold. What will you provide that is not “private”, and is undeniable?

Any of a number of miracles that are open to historical inquiry.

No it’s not.

Yes, it is. warpspeedey even provided a citation earlier.

I’m not suggesting that there is a conflict. Quite the opposite, actually – Catholics give way to mechanistic explanations where they succeed, and “yield the right of way” to it, relegating their supernaturalist explanations elsewhere. Boiling water is a great example. No God needed to explain why water boils at 100 deg C. Such a mechanistic explanation doesn’t disprove God, it just has no need or knowledge of God. So, Catholics don’t post “water demons” supernaturally exciting the molecules – it militates against a perfectly adequate bit of naturalism, a mechanistic model. They “compatibilize” around it, gerrymandering their supernatural insertions into places where miracles are not so transparently superfluous, places where ignorance abounds, and thus cannot (presently) rise to be in conflict with science.

This is pure ********. We recognize in the first place that God is not just another mechanistic cause competing with others to explain a mechanistic event - rather, he is the ground for all of it! Far from being irrelevant, he is essential and vitally immanent in this, just not in a mechanistic way! It is your reductionism to mechanistic causes that produces your view, but that is not our view, and so your narrative fails.

So, the Church grudgingly gives way to the arrogant Galileo (even if belatedly), and “harmony is restored”, because the mechanistic and empirically accountable ideas horn their way in establish a perimeter where superstitious answers are no longer credible, and Catholic believers make their piece with that, and find places to hang their supernaturalism elsewhere. It’s not a conflict, because Catholics simply concede the ground that science gains in terms of explanations, and adjust to find a working equilibrium once a new perimeter is established.

See above. I’ll ignore your historical revisionism with Galileo.