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.”
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.”