You raise many standard objections to the miracles which fill Catholic history, but the only thing that matters is to note what God has done, not what we think he could or should have done.
But “what God has done” is precisely the point at issue here, and I don’t see how your reply even begins to answer the evidential and philosophical objections to the notion that there is a God who disrupts the workings of the Universe in order to effect cures of illnesses
There is no substitute for simply reading the accounts for yourself, and I have given you some sources previously. Many readers of CAF already know the arguments and have sorted the evidence for themselves. One site about Lourdes you might check out is
metacrock.blogspot.com/2008/08/lourdes-and-healing.html . As has been said, for the unbeliever, no amount of evidence will convince.
In saying so, you invert my reasoning again. I am not an unbeliever for whom no amount of evidence will suffice, but I am unbeliever
because compelling evidence is not forthcoming. As I have pointed out, when stringent criteria are applied, the miracles all but dry up. They filled the lives of mediaeval people whose understanding of natural processes was limited - where are they now? There is absolutely no evidence that any one of these anecdotal cases even if unexplained, is *unexplainable *by natural causes, nor that what is observed at Lourdes lies outside that which happens statistically across the general population in the usual run of things. It is like intercessory prayer - individuals are convinced that prayer is efficacious in their case, but when tested rigorously no significant effect is found. That is why medicines are not approved on anecdotal evidence, or in open trials, because of the placebo effect and observer bias - instead, a statistically significant effect is required in a double blind trial.
Still, you should understand that this perspective is a rockbed of truth for many Catholics, and that the Church Herself insists that miracles are Her evidence.
I don’t suppose you are claiming that this is an argument in favour of their truth are you? The fact that some Catholics regard it as a rockbed of truth and that the Church insists that miracles are Her evidence is merely to restate the assertion for which we are seeking evidence.
(Incidentally, I never said “thousands” of miracles had been proclaimed by the Church at Lourdes. I said “only some 100 have thus far been accepted,” which is pretty close to the 67 you cite.) As to numbers of miracles, would it have been more impressive had Christ died and risen from the dead ten times instead of once?
Well, the once would be quite impressive if it was based on more than hearsay evidence written decades after the putative event by hagiographers.
You say the scientific evidence is “totally incompatible with a literal Adam and Eve.” What matters here is not my personal speculations, but what the Church has claimed. Pius XII in Humani generis addressed polygenism carefully, saying simply that “it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to Original Sin” (HG 37)." What the Church as taught, though, is the “special creation of man.”
It really doesn’t matter what Pius XII thinks about the biological ancestry of living humans because it is beyond his competence (and to be fair to him, most of the compelling evidence for polygenism in the Catholic sense postdates Humani Generis. Note that the scientific meaning of polygenism is different from the Catholic meaning - in the scientific sense polygenism refers to the concept that modern humans arise from separate and non-interbreeding populations of pre-humans, and has been falsified). The fact is that the scientific evidence is incompatible with a bottleneck of two individuals in the ancestry of extant humans. From a biological point of view, living humans are descended from a breeding population that never fell below a thousand or more individuals, so the story of Adam and Eve as sole parents of all humans cannot be true.
You claim that “Aquinas’s notions of causality, motion, contingency, perfection and teleology are hopelessly outmoded,” and that “common sense and intuition is denied by modern findings of natural science.” In so saying, you would have us accept the findings of modern science which “undermines the necessity of causality” [and other metaphysical first principles]. But you fail to grasp the force of my point. Science in fact does accept the universal validity of non-contradiction, sufficient reason, causality, etc., in its very methodology.
You appear to be unfamiliar with the findings of modern science so that you attempt to apply a naive philosophy of science. Science does not require all the axioms that you claim it does - indeed were science to require all of those axioms, and in particular strict causality, then it would really be in a logical pickle, because its findings demonstrate that those axioms are not universal. The only axiom that science requires is that what we observe of the external world corresponds to reality, and that reality is not capricious. The many cases in which causality applies are conclusions of our observations, not axioms themselves, and our observation of uncaused events and phenomena which result in contradictions show that they are neither universal truths nor axioms.
If its methodology cannot be universally applied, then it becomes mere faith and whim.
I never said that its methodology cannot be universally applied, and it is precisely the application of the methodology of science that has revealed deeply non-intuitive, uncaused and logically contradictory phenomena. When I say that the necessity of causality (one damned thing after another
) is undermined by findings of modern science, I mean what I say - we have observed uncaused phenomena, even if most macroscopic phenomena do indeed follow a causal structure, so the
necessity of causality in all circumstances has gone. Aquinas is in even deeper hot water when it comes to motion and contingency.
Your admission that we cannot exclude the “universe as uncaused brute fact” is the ultimate avoidance of reason’s universal application.
It’s not an “admission” but a reasonable hypothesis. What logic excludes the possibility of the universe as uncaused brute fact when we know that uncaused phenomena exist?
Antony Flew and Kai Neilsen avoid God with the same “reasoning.” But such is the ultimate abdication of reason, the same reason that always demands consistency in direct laboratory observations and causal explanations for observed phenomena.If these principles are selectively applied, why should we take seriously the claims of positivism that science alone provides true guidance to reality?
But the axioms underlying science as I have described them do not preclude the possibility, indeed the actuality of testing these contradictions, uncaused phenomena, and perceptive distortions of time and space over and over again. The relevant disciplines are Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity which have made many predictions that have been confirmed by observation.
On the contrary, natural science presupposes these first principles which it “borrows” from metaphysics. (See Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s God: His Existence and Nature, vol. 1.) If metaphysics is a pseudoscience, as positivists claim, then so is natural science, and all the claims you make on its behalf.
I disagree with the claim that natural science depends on metaphysics for its axioms and that its validity depends on the validity of metaphysics. As we have seen, the only axioms that science requires is the acceptance that our sensory (name removed by moderator)uts correspond to external reality which is not capricious, an assumption that we all make in crossing the road - all else follows. We are warranted in making those assumptions, because without them, existence in the world would be impossible. The methodology of natural science is validated by its superior performance - it works and can be shown to work, because it seems that the human sensory and information processing system has been honed by millions of years of evolution to correspond to external reality.
Alec
evolutionpages.com
