I believe that there are not just random miracles but such that directly connected with Christian practice (like associated with objects of veneration or worship).
I do not believe that Christians are at all special here. There are many other contradictory religious traditions that make similar claims to miracles, if you can even call them that. No miracle claim I know of will stand up to reasonable scrutiny, and if you are willing to lower your standards to accept them, then to be fair you must also accept the similarly-attested miracle claims of the other religions, a completely untenable position for monotheists who don’t even attempt syncretism and categorically reject other gods as false. Not to mention the UFO sightings and various conspiracy theories that have similar levels of support.
I am not familiar with the miracles of other religions. I would even say I do not have a solid opinion about them. My idea of God does not forbid miracles outside Christianity. (It is not syncretism—it is just that the same God for some reason may do miracles for people outside Christianity too).
I would even agree that really a lot of things that are considered to be miracles are not such. However, I can name a couple things I believe to be actually miracles. This, for example https://www.orthodoxhawaii.org/icons
I don’t think you quite appreciate just how low my prior for your God is.
It would take a miracle on the level of instantly teleporting the entire Solar System to the Andromeda Galaxy to even approach the quality of evidence required to establish that only a literally omnipotent being could have been behind it. And that still doesn’t completely rule out alien teenagers using sufficiently advanced technology based on unknown physics! And even then, that would (tentatively) establish only one of the critical conjunctive attributes you say your God must have.
Should God open the heavens and reveal Himself in a sacred vision, saying unto me “The Eastern Orthodox Church is the one true religion”, then I still would not believe. My prior is that low. I already know that “visions” (hallucinations) can happen, and they can just as easily reveal the “wrong” gods. I know this because adherents of basically all of the old religions do claim at least this level of evidence, not just in the ancient past, but in the present day, and they still contradict each other.
And the best you can do is a sweating icon? I am sorry, but that is just not going to cut it.
This is exactly the type of “miracle” that I would expect to be an accident or a hoax. I don’t claim to know exactly how this particular trick works, but “it must have been God” is not even in the running. Liquid myrrh is sometimes added to the egg tempera in the painting of icons. “myrrh” can also refer to other oils, like the kind that might be in treated wood. Cold objects can also collect condensation in humid air, and wood can wick it up through capillary action. The human nose can detect even trace quantities of fragrant chemicals, even if it’s mostly water. That the paint is sweating ingredients it’s literally made of can hardly be called miraculous.
And that’s just a possible natural explanation for an accident. Do you honestly think a competent stage magician couldn’t produce a deception of a similar quality on purpose? There are documented examples of religious leaders using outright fraud of at least this caliber. James Randi has debunked a number of such “miracles” on live TV.
Well, ok we discuss priors later, I need some time to learn it.
why I don’t think it is natural effect—well, simply because of the amount and the longitude. Everything that could been inside should have gone away.
why I don’t think it is hoax. Well, it is more complicated. I would say the probability of it to be hoax is very low, and since my priors are not that low as yours, it works for me. Now why I estimate the probability of the hoax to be low:
1. If you read the story attentively, you see that there was an icon like that before (pretty recently actually, last quarter of XXth century), there also was a person who discovered it and was traveling with this icon everywhere (the same as current person travels now). The previous person was killed and tortured, the icon disappeared. The murderers were not found. It would be quite crazy idea, knowing this story, to make this mystification. To put your life under risk for what? For stupid hoax? You must be crazy to do it. And this person (current keeper) serves in police, so he must have some regular checks of his phychological state. Finally, simply anecdotical evidence—I saw him once, he seems to be normal guy (of course, I am not a specialist, it is just slight decreasing of probability him being a psycho)
2. If I would need to do such a hoax, I would put some source of myrrh inside, and refill it periodically. It can be done of course. I could even believe that it can be done such that observer, taking the icon, would not notice any difference from the usual icon. But is it possible to avoid X-rays somehow? They travel by plane, I bet they do not put icon into luggage (it is too precious). So they must go with it as hand luggage. There the custom, using X-rays, observe small vessels inside the icons and asks what is it. And it is done, the hoax is over.
I will disappear from here for few days—need to do my job, and also learn everything you send to me.
That this is not the first time an icon has produced myrrh is actually evidence in favor of a hoax or natural event. In either case, it’s happened before so it must not be all that difficult for the conditions to be right or to set it up.
As for the plane, at least several explanations are possible.
The event could actually be natural. Microscopic quantities of myrrh are quite detectible, and could be seeping from the paints for quite some time.
I can easily imagine the effect being encouraged by spraying a fine mist of oil, water, alcohol, or some other mild solvent over the icon. This could even be passed off as maintenance of some sort. “Just keeping it fresh. Travel is so hard on these paintings, you know.”
The paint could be formulated with an unusually high myrrh content for some reason. This would go a long way to explain why not all myrrh-containing paints do this.
The guy who travels with it might not even know how it really works, but actually believe that it’s a miracle.
Perhaps the myrrh could be applied directly to the icon in some way that doesn’t really show up on an x-ray scanner. “Be careful please! Of course it smells like that. Don’t you know what this is?”
The vessels containing the myrrh may be small enough that airport security doesn’t care. A little goes a long way, and people travel with essential oils all the time. I can think of several ways to produce a myrrh distribution system by carving small channels in the frame. These would likely not even show up at airport security, and could contain enough myrrh to last for quite some time.
The supply of myrrh could be shipped by another means, or in checked luggage.
Charter planes don’t have nearly the security considerations that public planes seem to require.
The myrrh supply doesn’t necessarily have to travel at all. Myrrh is, in fact, reasonably easy to get in many places. I understand that christian book shops, for example, routinely sell the stuff. Here it is on Amazon. You could even repackage it into tiny vials for sale “to recoup travel costs”. That would provide cover for your large orders.
The quantity of myrrh that the icons give off may have been vastly exaggerated over time to enhance the story, either by the originator of the story or by those retelling it. This is a widely known effect of word-of-mouth information transmission, and something that people are often perfectly happy to ignore when they encounter the truth.
Even combinations of several these explanations produce prior probabilities that are many orders larger than the probability for “God did it”. The amount of complexity hiding in the word “God” is pretty extreme.
because of the amount and the longitude. Everything that could been inside should have gone away.
I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Did you mean “latitude”? Hawaii has a more tropical climate because it is near the equator, not because it’s near the prime meridian. Or did you mean “longevity”? Either way, you can’t expect all oils to evaporate quickly like water, even in a warm or arid climate. It’s true that there are some oils used in paint that dry quickly, but there are other oils that do not dry out, even after a long time.
The previous person was killed and tortured, the icon disappeared. The murderers were not found. It would be quite crazy idea, knowing this story, to make this mystification. To put your life under risk for what? For stupid hoax? You must be crazy to do it.
Or greedy. How about for money? Fame? There are known examples of hoaxes with motives like these.
And this person (current keeper) serves in police
A policeman might be even less afraid of criminals trying to kill him, because he already has to deal with them.
If I would need to do such a hoax, I would put some source of myrrh inside, and refill it periodically. It can be done of course. I could even believe that it can be done such that observer, taking the icon, would not notice any difference from the usual icon. But is it possible to avoid X-rays somehow? They travel by plane, I bet they do not put icon into luggage (it is too precious). So they must go with it as hand luggage. There the custom, using X-rays, observe small vessels inside the icons and asks what is it. And it is done, the hoax is over.
If I needed to perform such a hoax, I wouldn’t have to modify the icon at all. The Roman Catholics tend to use statues instead of icons, and they have examples of those weeping too. I heard of one case where someone was caught applying the “tears” with a squirt gun. You don’t need to carve channels or secret compartments for a hoax. It’s enough to have a spray bottle and vegetable oil, which are available for purchase pretty much anywhere. And if you use a non-drying oil, you don’t even have to re-apply it! It will stay “wet” long after water would have dried out.
-different myrrh-streaming icons, as long as it passed the check by church officials not only on the local level
I don’t trust church officials any further than I can throw them. They have a fundamental conflict of interest. Their loyalty is to the Church, not the truth. The fact that someone is a priest makes me even less likely to trust them. The Roman Catholics have been rocked by child sexual abuse scandals which have been all over the news in this country, and worse, they attempted to cover them up to maintain the Church’s reputation. A cursory web search reveals the Eastern Orthodox seem to have similar problems for similar reasons. The Churches cannot be trusted to be honest with us.
These officials are clearly not rationalists (if they were, I would not expect them to be religious!) I don’t expect most of them to even be scientists. But even if they were, scientists can still be deceived.
My idea of God does not forbid miracles outside Christianity.
It’s not enough that evidence be consistent with your hypothesis. To count in favor, it must be more consistent with your hypothesis than its converse. One of the key insights rationalists derive from Bayes is that you cannot ignore the false positives. You use both sides to compute the likelihood ratio.
If you are equally good at explaining any outcome you have zero knowledge. The strength of a model is not what it can explain, but what it can’t, for only prohibitions constrain anticipation. --Yudkowsky, Your Strength as a Rationalist
(Also, if you think that gods may be willing to perform miracles for other religions, that makes it very difficult to use miracles as evidence for your God in particular, as opposed to some other power.)
I do not believe that Christians are at all special here. There are many other contradictory religious traditions that make similar claims to miracles, if you can even call them that. No miracle claim I know of will stand up to reasonable scrutiny, and if you are willing to lower your standards to accept them, then to be fair you must also accept the similarly-attested miracle claims of the other religions, a completely untenable position for monotheists who don’t even attempt syncretism and categorically reject other gods as false. Not to mention the UFO sightings and various conspiracy theories that have similar levels of support.
I am not familiar with the miracles of other religions. I would even say I do not have a solid opinion about them. My idea of God does not forbid miracles outside Christianity. (It is not syncretism—it is just that the same God for some reason may do miracles for people outside Christianity too).
I would even agree that really a lot of things that are considered to be miracles are not such. However, I can name a couple things I believe to be actually miracles. This, for example https://www.orthodoxhawaii.org/icons
I don’t think you quite appreciate just how low my prior for your God is.
It would take a miracle on the level of instantly teleporting the entire Solar System to the Andromeda Galaxy to even approach the quality of evidence required to establish that only a literally omnipotent being could have been behind it. And that still doesn’t completely rule out alien teenagers using sufficiently advanced technology based on unknown physics! And even then, that would (tentatively) establish only one of the critical conjunctive attributes you say your God must have.
Should God open the heavens and reveal Himself in a sacred vision, saying unto me “The Eastern Orthodox Church is the one true religion”, then I still would not believe. My prior is that low. I already know that “visions” (hallucinations) can happen, and they can just as easily reveal the “wrong” gods. I know this because adherents of basically all of the old religions do claim at least this level of evidence, not just in the ancient past, but in the present day, and they still contradict each other.
And the best you can do is a sweating icon? I am sorry, but that is just not going to cut it.
This is exactly the type of “miracle” that I would expect to be an accident or a hoax. I don’t claim to know exactly how this particular trick works, but “it must have been God” is not even in the running. Liquid myrrh is sometimes added to the egg tempera in the painting of icons. “myrrh” can also refer to other oils, like the kind that might be in treated wood. Cold objects can also collect condensation in humid air, and wood can wick it up through capillary action. The human nose can detect even trace quantities of fragrant chemicals, even if it’s mostly water. That the paint is sweating ingredients it’s literally made of can hardly be called miraculous.
And that’s just a possible natural explanation for an accident. Do you honestly think a competent stage magician couldn’t produce a deception of a similar quality on purpose? There are documented examples of religious leaders using outright fraud of at least this caliber. James Randi has debunked a number of such “miracles” on live TV.
Well, ok we discuss priors later, I need some time to learn it.
why I don’t think it is natural effect—well, simply because of the amount and the longitude. Everything that could been inside should have gone away.
why I don’t think it is hoax. Well, it is more complicated. I would say the probability of it to be hoax is very low, and since my priors are not that low as yours, it works for me. Now why I estimate the probability of the hoax to be low:
1. If you read the story attentively, you see that there was an icon like that before (pretty recently actually, last quarter of XXth century), there also was a person who discovered it and was traveling with this icon everywhere (the same as current person travels now). The previous person was killed and tortured, the icon disappeared. The murderers were not found. It would be quite crazy idea, knowing this story, to make this mystification. To put your life under risk for what? For stupid hoax? You must be crazy to do it. And this person (current keeper) serves in police, so he must have some regular checks of his phychological state. Finally, simply anecdotical evidence—I saw him once, he seems to be normal guy (of course, I am not a specialist, it is just slight decreasing of probability him being a psycho)
2. If I would need to do such a hoax, I would put some source of myrrh inside, and refill it periodically. It can be done of course. I could even believe that it can be done such that observer, taking the icon, would not notice any difference from the usual icon. But is it possible to avoid X-rays somehow? They travel by plane, I bet they do not put icon into luggage (it is too precious). So they must go with it as hand luggage. There the custom, using X-rays, observe small vessels inside the icons and asks what is it. And it is done, the hoax is over.
I will disappear from here for few days—need to do my job, and also learn everything you send to me.
That this is not the first time an icon has produced myrrh is actually evidence in favor of a hoax or natural event. In either case, it’s happened before so it must not be all that difficult for the conditions to be right or to set it up.
As for the plane, at least several explanations are possible.
The event could actually be natural. Microscopic quantities of myrrh are quite detectible, and could be seeping from the paints for quite some time.
I can easily imagine the effect being encouraged by spraying a fine mist of oil, water, alcohol, or some other mild solvent over the icon. This could even be passed off as maintenance of some sort. “Just keeping it fresh. Travel is so hard on these paintings, you know.”
The paint could be formulated with an unusually high myrrh content for some reason. This would go a long way to explain why not all myrrh-containing paints do this.
The guy who travels with it might not even know how it really works, but actually believe that it’s a miracle.
Perhaps the myrrh could be applied directly to the icon in some way that doesn’t really show up on an x-ray scanner. “Be careful please! Of course it smells like that. Don’t you know what this is?”
The vessels containing the myrrh may be small enough that airport security doesn’t care. A little goes a long way, and people travel with essential oils all the time. I can think of several ways to produce a myrrh distribution system by carving small channels in the frame. These would likely not even show up at airport security, and could contain enough myrrh to last for quite some time.
The supply of myrrh could be shipped by another means, or in checked luggage.
Charter planes don’t have nearly the security considerations that public planes seem to require.
The myrrh supply doesn’t necessarily have to travel at all. Myrrh is, in fact, reasonably easy to get in many places. I understand that christian book shops, for example, routinely sell the stuff. Here it is on Amazon. You could even repackage it into tiny vials for sale “to recoup travel costs”. That would provide cover for your large orders.
The quantity of myrrh that the icons give off may have been vastly exaggerated over time to enhance the story, either by the originator of the story or by those retelling it. This is a widely known effect of word-of-mouth information transmission, and something that people are often perfectly happy to ignore when they encounter the truth.
Even combinations of several these explanations produce prior probabilities that are many orders larger than the probability for “God did it”. The amount of complexity hiding in the word “God” is pretty extreme.
I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Did you mean “latitude”? Hawaii has a more tropical climate because it is near the equator, not because it’s near the prime meridian. Or did you mean “longevity”? Either way, you can’t expect all oils to evaporate quickly like water, even in a warm or arid climate. It’s true that there are some oils used in paint that dry quickly, but there are other oils that do not dry out, even after a long time.
Or greedy. How about for money? Fame? There are known examples of hoaxes with motives like these.
A policeman might be even less afraid of criminals trying to kill him, because he already has to deal with them.
If I needed to perform such a hoax, I wouldn’t have to modify the icon at all. The Roman Catholics tend to use statues instead of icons, and they have examples of those weeping too. I heard of one case where someone was caught applying the “tears” with a squirt gun. You don’t need to carve channels or secret compartments for a hoax. It’s enough to have a spray bottle and vegetable oil, which are available for purchase pretty much anywhere. And if you use a non-drying oil, you don’t even have to re-apply it! It will stay “wet” long after water would have dried out.
I don’t trust church officials any further than I can throw them. They have a fundamental conflict of interest. Their loyalty is to the Church, not the truth. The fact that someone is a priest makes me even less likely to trust them. The Roman Catholics have been rocked by child sexual abuse scandals which have been all over the news in this country, and worse, they attempted to cover them up to maintain the Church’s reputation. A cursory web search reveals the Eastern Orthodox seem to have similar problems for similar reasons. The Churches cannot be trusted to be honest with us.
These officials are clearly not rationalists (if they were, I would not expect them to be religious!) I don’t expect most of them to even be scientists. But even if they were, scientists can still be deceived.
It’s not enough that evidence be consistent with your hypothesis. To count in favor, it must be more consistent with your hypothesis than its converse. One of the key insights rationalists derive from Bayes is that you cannot ignore the false positives. You use both sides to compute the likelihood ratio.
(Also, if you think that gods may be willing to perform miracles for other religions, that makes it very difficult to use miracles as evidence for your God in particular, as opposed to some other power.)