Right, as far as I know. Years ago, someone confided in me (I’m not saying who) that they experienced a perceptual miracle: something they could see that no one else could see. That kind of miracle is consistent with physical facts—it’s a subjective decision to conclude whether the vision is meaningful or not.
I once asked at that Faith and Reason study group “if angels have backs.” That is, if Mary is seeing Gabriel talking to her, whether only as much as she needs to see is manifested—namely, the front. Everyone else was of the opinion that this was beside the point, as in it doesn’t really matter. I conceded that we’d never know, anyway.
Maybe I’m overstating this lack of belief in miracles: nearly all Christians, liberal Catholics included, believe that Jesus rose from the dead, which you’d think is a physical event—blood flowing again, muscles moving, etc. On the other hand, it’s an odd sort of body to be appearing and disappearing, passing through locked doors, being unrecognized or recognized at will, etc. I’ve never understood how eating fish is supposed to prove that he’s not a ghost when he passed through a locked door in the same scene. This doesn’t go against physical fact, it just confuses the issue for me. I don’t know quite what is meant by “alive again.”
And to really clinch the oddness of the language, nearly all Catholics, liberal Catholics included, believe that the Eucharist “physically” becomes the body and blood of Jesus, while also being indistinguishable from bread at all physical levels—they will say that microscopes and chemical analysis would reveal gluten, not muscle and red blood cells. These can’t be statements in the same reality-box, the first use of “physically” (quoted above) must be in an interpretive sense like the sense in which I interpret the material tubes hanging off my hands as “my” fingers. That’s a choice of interpretation that can neither be confirmed nor denied by any experimental measurements—experimental measurements only conclude that these fleshy tubes are made of cells and bones and such, I’m the one who calls it part of my body. That’s what I’m assuming my co-religionists believe about the Eucharist because the direct statement is not contrary with fact, it’s contrary to logic.
Actually, in all cases when I ask about this, the response I get is along the lines of “that’s beside the point,” i.e. the metaphysics of miracles isn’t a subject of interest. It is the case that my community is equally unconcerned with claims for physical miracles, like real blood coming out of a statue-Mary’s eyes or something. There are other groups who are very focused on things like that, and this isn’t one of them.
Have you ever been stuck debugging code and made a breakthrough by explaining it to someone else, even if they weren’t following what you’re saying? I think that’s happened here, so thanks for asking me the question!
The religious community I’m in is not keen on proving the physical reality of miracles, the way that some will put a lot of effort into explaining, for instance, how and why the sun stayed still in the sky when Joshua prayed for it. (My community would quickly call something like that mythological.) The miracles that my community does assert—I was wrong when I said that they don’t assert any miracles—are not an affront to physical evidence, they’re an affront to logic.
Saying “affront to logic” makes it sound bad, but these are statements that are not supposed to be logical—that’s not their social purpose. (Wrong “language game,” as Wittgenstein put it.) The positions taken on Jesus’s resurrection and the Eucharist, as described above, are not illogical but antilogical: they’re constructed in such a way as to make analysis impossible, on purpose. We didn’t just not notice that we’re saying “the Eucharist is physically body and blood” and also “materially, it’s bread,” which is an obvious contradiction, in the same way that “Tell me you’re X without telling me you’re X,” is an impossible imperative—it can’t be the same “tell” in both cases.
I’ve previously noticed this about the Trinity. Most of the early heresies were trinitarian, and it was the most reasonable-sounding theories that were rejected as heresies. One mainstream statement is, “The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father, but the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God.” That deliberately breaks the transitivity of the word “is,” so it’s not an equivalence relation. If you ask someone about the logic of that, they’ll remind you it’s a mystery, which puts it in a category of things that are not allowed to be figured out; they’re intended for contemplation.
This is sounding to me like a koan. Zen koans are also supposed to be contemplated but not solved. In mainstream Buddhism (broader than Zen), I came across this astonishing statement, that none of the following are true about the Buddha after his death:
The Buddha exists.
The Buddha does not exist.
The Buddha exists and does not exist.
The Buddha neither exists nor does not exist.
Just as the trinitarian formulation breaks transitivity, the above breaks the law of excluded middle. Or maybe not “breaks,” since it’s possible to have logical systems in which a relation is not transitive and the law of excluded middle is not used in proofs, but the people who think about these things are not in a hurry to replace them with formulations that are logically sound. That’s clearly not the point.
So it’s antilogical, which renders moot the question of whether it’s consistent with physical reality. That’s why my initial impression was, “No, they/we don’t believe in physical miracles.”
Right, as far as I know. Years ago, someone confided in me (I’m not saying who) that they experienced a perceptual miracle: something they could see that no one else could see. That kind of miracle is consistent with physical facts—it’s a subjective decision to conclude whether the vision is meaningful or not.
I once asked at that Faith and Reason study group “if angels have backs.” That is, if Mary is seeing Gabriel talking to her, whether only as much as she needs to see is manifested—namely, the front. Everyone else was of the opinion that this was beside the point, as in it doesn’t really matter. I conceded that we’d never know, anyway.
Maybe I’m overstating this lack of belief in miracles: nearly all Christians, liberal Catholics included, believe that Jesus rose from the dead, which you’d think is a physical event—blood flowing again, muscles moving, etc. On the other hand, it’s an odd sort of body to be appearing and disappearing, passing through locked doors, being unrecognized or recognized at will, etc. I’ve never understood how eating fish is supposed to prove that he’s not a ghost when he passed through a locked door in the same scene. This doesn’t go against physical fact, it just confuses the issue for me. I don’t know quite what is meant by “alive again.”
And to really clinch the oddness of the language, nearly all Catholics, liberal Catholics included, believe that the Eucharist “physically” becomes the body and blood of Jesus, while also being indistinguishable from bread at all physical levels—they will say that microscopes and chemical analysis would reveal gluten, not muscle and red blood cells. These can’t be statements in the same reality-box, the first use of “physically” (quoted above) must be in an interpretive sense like the sense in which I interpret the material tubes hanging off my hands as “my” fingers. That’s a choice of interpretation that can neither be confirmed nor denied by any experimental measurements—experimental measurements only conclude that these fleshy tubes are made of cells and bones and such, I’m the one who calls it part of my body. That’s what I’m assuming my co-religionists believe about the Eucharist because the direct statement is not contrary with fact, it’s contrary to logic.
Actually, in all cases when I ask about this, the response I get is along the lines of “that’s beside the point,” i.e. the metaphysics of miracles isn’t a subject of interest. It is the case that my community is equally unconcerned with claims for physical miracles, like real blood coming out of a statue-Mary’s eyes or something. There are other groups who are very focused on things like that, and this isn’t one of them.
Have you ever been stuck debugging code and made a breakthrough by explaining it to someone else, even if they weren’t following what you’re saying? I think that’s happened here, so thanks for asking me the question!
The religious community I’m in is not keen on proving the physical reality of miracles, the way that some will put a lot of effort into explaining, for instance, how and why the sun stayed still in the sky when Joshua prayed for it. (My community would quickly call something like that mythological.) The miracles that my community does assert—I was wrong when I said that they don’t assert any miracles—are not an affront to physical evidence, they’re an affront to logic.
Saying “affront to logic” makes it sound bad, but these are statements that are not supposed to be logical—that’s not their social purpose. (Wrong “language game,” as Wittgenstein put it.) The positions taken on Jesus’s resurrection and the Eucharist, as described above, are not illogical but antilogical: they’re constructed in such a way as to make analysis impossible, on purpose. We didn’t just not notice that we’re saying “the Eucharist is physically body and blood” and also “materially, it’s bread,” which is an obvious contradiction, in the same way that “Tell me you’re X without telling me you’re X,” is an impossible imperative—it can’t be the same “tell” in both cases.
I’ve previously noticed this about the Trinity. Most of the early heresies were trinitarian, and it was the most reasonable-sounding theories that were rejected as heresies. One mainstream statement is, “The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father, but the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God.” That deliberately breaks the transitivity of the word “is,” so it’s not an equivalence relation. If you ask someone about the logic of that, they’ll remind you it’s a mystery, which puts it in a category of things that are not allowed to be figured out; they’re intended for contemplation.
This is sounding to me like a koan. Zen koans are also supposed to be contemplated but not solved. In mainstream Buddhism (broader than Zen), I came across this astonishing statement, that none of the following are true about the Buddha after his death:
The Buddha exists.
The Buddha does not exist.
The Buddha exists and does not exist.
The Buddha neither exists nor does not exist.
Just as the trinitarian formulation breaks transitivity, the above breaks the law of excluded middle. Or maybe not “breaks,” since it’s possible to have logical systems in which a relation is not transitive and the law of excluded middle is not used in proofs, but the people who think about these things are not in a hurry to replace them with formulations that are logically sound. That’s clearly not the point.
So it’s antilogical, which renders moot the question of whether it’s consistent with physical reality. That’s why my initial impression was, “No, they/we don’t believe in physical miracles.”