On the purpose of miracles

[drwex]

I am a confirmed (sometimes militant) agnostic. I don't know what's out there. I don't know whether there's a God, goddess, G-d, Allah, divine spirit, you name it. I lack faith and find no credible evidence in the modern world that would support any sort of self-consistent belief system without that key element. All the preacher-men in their oh-so-sure ways fail to move me.

At the same time I refuse to take the final step into atheism. I greatly admire many of the scientists and thinkers who take the viewpoint that since we can't demonstrate either the presence of - or a logical requirement for - a god-entity then we're required to postulate such an entity doesn't exist. I don't believe in unicorns, fey, Osiris, or Santa Claus, but the monotheistic abstract god is sui generis to me and not easily classed with the category "mythical entities."

At this time of year, and particularly with the recent sharing of shivah services I find myself thinking about such things and sometimes odd thoughts occur to me. This is one of those.

If we trust ancient texts then miracles occurred in the past, which do not occur today. Sorry, Catholics, I'm going to rule out the supposed miracles performed by modern saints. I'm not trying to diss any particular religion - it's just become obvious how much of modern sainthood is a political process, not anything else.

This raises the logical question: why? Why would miracles happen back then but not now? Obviously if G-d existed and if He so wished He could write "BELIEVE!" in great flaming letters on the face of the moon so that it would be indisputably visible to all. Done and done, end of discussion. But would it be a good thing to end that discussion? What if miracles really DID occur back then and their purpose was to awaken a curious inquisitive spirit? What if miracles and stories of miracles were a form of instruction - a challenge to ancient minds to open up a quest for knowledge and understanding?

Think of it this way: you drop an object you are holding. It falls. One explanation is that it falls because the gods wanted it to fall. Done and done - there's really nothing more to it. Then one day a miracle occurs and it doesn't fall. This miracle causes you to wonder - why don't things float ALL the time? And eventually it sets you on a path towards an understanding that there are indeed hidden things in the world, but they're a governing set of rules. One of them is gravity and now we understand more about why things fall when we let them go, but along the way we've gotten an entire body of knowledge and possibilities we didn't have before. If you don't have the idea of gravity you can't think about zero-g or antigravity. Each such thought lets you spin off dozens more.

A person who believes that the gods are responsible for cause-and-effect everyday ordinary observations isn't open to the notion that there may be more. There just is what the gods will there to be. But miracles - things that stand out as so clearly different you must take notice of them. What thoughts could those lead to in a mind that existed in a limited, pre-scientific mode?

And, like a child who grows past the need for elementary lessons, have we as an evolving species grown past the need for miracles? I like to think so.

Comments

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I think that's really interesting to think about, too.

[goddessfarmer.livejournal.com]

That's really insightful and well written. Thank you. For my part, I do believe in gods, because of experiences I have had. I do not expect anyone else to believe based on my belief; everyone has their own experiences and for them, that is the truth. My particular experience was of speaking with some form during meditation, having her tell me her name and then, years later, finding her name and persona as I experienced it, documented in mythological literature. That being said, I also am very much in favor of science/scientific method.

[ciani.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure exactly what you'd call me other than spiritual. I have a belief in connectedness. I'm ok with calling that divinity but then I'm essentially saying it is within us and around us which some religions just aren't cool with.

I also feel that perceptions vary wildly and what we may see as nothing special today was completely mysterious to ancient people.

Another thing: the concept of cycles. If you believe in reincarnation you usually have a belief in some concept of a wheel where there isn't a beginning or an end. I think the same can be true of our attunement to natural forces we don't understand. Energy work in it's many guises proliferates our society now which it hadn't for quite a few generations.

I don't believe in miracles, but I do believe in things that can't be proven by our current level of scientific knowledge.

[drwex]

You're welcome. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[drwex]

Thank you. I definitely recognize that faith exists. I had it at one time, myself. So I'm not ever going to say someone doesn't our oughtn't have it (though I do think we have a lot of fakers out there).

[drwex]

Nod. I think there's a lot we can't currently prove. I also believe Goedel and Heiesenberg were right - there will ALWAYS be things we can't prove or can't completely know. But I think of things like Goedel sentences as being a different beast than the ineffable nature of divine connectedness (in which I don't believe, sorry).

[ciani.livejournal.com]

A lot of people don't believe in it, and my belief in it is potentially a lot different than others'. I wouldn't use the word divine except that people are always tacking it on. And there are other things too.. it's very amorphous, and I think the only reason I believe in interconnectedness is because of some experiences I've had.

Still when people see a statue of Ganesh or something in my house they assume I believe in Ganesh which isn't even remotely true. I think of Ganesh as a representation of something, a focus. Not as a god.

[cos]

Have we grown past the need for dragons residing off the edge of the map?

[drwex]

I know it's un-hip to say so, but I hope so. We don't need to fill the blank spaces with trumped-up warnings nor mythical enticements. The drive to know has its own inertia now. Show people an unknown, an unexplored, an unconquered and they'll go after it. We don't need to populate it with dragons.

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

But some of us use that as, "what if there are dragons out there?"...a way of wondering, imagining, creating, thinking up new ideas. I always saw that expression "here be dragons" and mentally read it as "Here be Wonders. Come and see."

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

First off, well written and interesting. Thanks for posting.

Second...Aha. I misread your second paragraph multiple times, I suspect. I currently think that you are okay with postulating the nonexistence of mythical creatures, excepting monotheistic deities. Personally, I'd quibble with your wording, but it's probably not worth the hassle to figure out whether we disagree minorly or not at all.

Third, I can tell we disagree in one place because frankly, I see absolutely nothing special about a monotheistic god worthy of shifting it out of the unicorns and fairies category.

Fourth...I find atheists just as disappointing as theists. The latter say, "we don't know, therefore I'm right," and the former say, "we don't know, therefore you're wrong." Next to nobody has the courage to doubt or keep an open mind anymore. I remember years ago feeling crushed when I read a collection of Martin Gardener essays entitled Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, in which he admitted that he couldn't wrap his head around agnosticism, on the basis that the issue was too important not to have a position on. I find that both baffling and sad. It's on a par with believing in something because you can't bear the thought of it not being true, completely ignoring that there might be a fact of the matter out there, and that it might bite you in the butt later. It's the kind of wishful thinking that we try to help toddlers grow out of. And yet when it comes to one particular myth, everybody throws the rules out the window. Oh well. Nobody ever said the human race was logical.

[drwex]

In re the second paragraph: yes. I do class the deistic entity differently than what I'd call a mythological entity. I can't claim to have any rational reason for doing so, except possibly the personal.

I won't defend atheists in general, nor even Gardener in specific, but the basic notion that "if an entity has no evidence nor obvious purpose then it ought not to be part of the theory" is basic sound rationalism as we understand it. To our best understanding, there is evidence of any effect of a god in the functional universe, so why postulate one?

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

i think the fact that you find the Judeo-Christian god to be sui generis, is just because of the culture you're in.

[drwex]

Oh, totally. Though I also place the monotheistic Allah in the same group. I don't understand enough about non-Western religions to have an opinion on those systems.

[awfief.livejournal.com]

For me a deity is a way to explain the unexplainable. That's my take on it; the concept is similar to yours.

It's very easy to shove something aside and say "it's how G-d wants it" or "G-d will see to it." I don't do that with everything, but there's only so much I can do in this world, and it's much better for my mental health to let go of a grudge thinking, "G-d will give them their due." Bad things happen to people all the time, so eventually something will happen and I can point to it and feel like that's "proof". I know it's not, but it reinforces that I can let something go.

I think it's important to understand the world, and I think there are a lot of bad scientists out there, that "prove" things the way I just did. Folks thought they were being scientific when they sacrificed offerings to G-d or to the gods.

But pretty much I do it in order to put things out of my mind. Especially when I'm in a low time, a la "why do bad things happen to good people?" But also in good times, because I want to be thankful, and it's easier to be grateful specifically to an entity than just be grateful in general. Things like luck and coincidence are easier swallowed if it's personified. Miracles like babies and love and nature and fire and water are somehow easier to comprehend if you put one or multiple entities behind it all, with some motivation or another.

So, yeah, to explain the unexplainable so I can rest easy at night. That's a poor excuse not to be curious about the world and study it, as creationists do. But for me, I that concept pervades my spirituality.

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

I think i'm with you there. I'm not sure what i could posit right now other than that "it's all this big system and we're all interconnected", and "our science can't possibly know everything yet". Gods, like Ganesh or others, are a good Jungian way of focusing our thoughts on an aspect of existence or collection of traits we'd like to pay more attention to.

(I could go further and theorize that the judeo-christian-muslim Sky Father is the strict paternal moralistic archetype, for when people want to measure their behavior against a standard of "am i being good", or can fill the role of the caring parent figure when people need to regress and feel loved and protected. But let's not, cause that could be interpreted as questioning the belief systems of people we actually know :)

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

yeah, the response to "what if there are dragons out there?" being, "Cool, let's go see!"

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

There's also some evidence that humans are hardwired to be religious. Feed our brains the right chemicals or electrical stimuli, and we tend to have a "religious experience". I just read somewhere that this trait may have coincided with our early modern homo sapiens ancestors becoming able to live in larger and more complex social groups.