Shrike
4mo ago
when the Chinese flew their next-gen fighter IRL, as opposed to in CGI like NGAD.
NGAD prototypes flew years before China's next-gen fighter broke cover. IIRC the US had one flying in 2020. We just didn't advertise.
Shrike
4mo ago
From a Bayesian perspective, I'd say that the claim that "miracles happen, but only in ways that are conveniently impossibly difficult to scientifically corroborate" is pretty good evidence that we should discount them unless we really do get some solid proof.
Well, firstly, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And as discussed, the evidence is (and your priors should be) that inexplicable things do happen, sometimes with enough frequency to be given a name. Which leads to goalpost shifting, because in the mind of many people, giving something a name explains it! But that's actually not so.
But secondly, that's very specifically not my claim. I am sure if we bothered to go around and look either of us could find instances of scientifically corroborated miracles, in the sense that
- a miracle was claimed (e.g. miraculous healing), and
- the miracle did occur (e.g. here's a CAT scan showing the person was healed)
My question is – how does the CAT scan showing the person was healed prove that it was miraculous?
Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence.
This all reminds me of the fact that scientists refused to accept the existence of meteorites for a very long period of time because they were one-off events.
But anyway, the claim here being made (by Voxel) is that miracles (or supernatural or if you prefer inexplicable events) aren't very uncommon or, shall you say, extraordinary.
Shrike
4mo ago
Bigfoot is an excellent example of this.
There are some pretty decent videos of Bigfoot, but I have no strong opinion on their veracity. I think it would be fairly easy to fake something like that. Which goes to my point: video evidence by itself is not great evidence.
They are few in number and invariably low quality. This is strange; as the number of cameras on the planet increased exponentially, you would expect the number of video captures of any given real phenomenon to increase exponentially
First off, I think we should all just acknowledge that cell phone cameras are not good at taking nighttime photographs at any real distance. I don't own the latest and greatest, so maybe they stole a march on me. But if hypothetically I had an encounter with a real Bigfoot (or an ape or, heck, a deer) at night and took a photo of it I would expect it would look low quality.
But secondly, by this argument, there are no weird (but perfectly mundane) things flying out of Dreamland, but there are. They just don't want to be seen, so they hang out in the middle of nowhere where the only thing likely to stumble across them are fighter jets. In fact, to use just one recent example, the US constructed and flew multiple prototypes of the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter jet for years, yet to my knowledge not a single photograph of them went public. (There are always one or two photos of "weird stuff in the sky" that circulate, so maybe one of them was a NGAD demonstrator).
If the position of XKCD is that an intelligence [including potentially our own] that can engineer a craft superior in performance (as reported by US defense officials) to conventional aircraft cannot keep a low profile in a way similar to that of our own bloated inefficient corrupt government bureaucracy can then, well, that position is very silly! Particularly when you realize that there are a couple of ways, such as lens detection or emissions detection, that would allow you to steer clear of would-be photographers, so if the 2024 iPhone - which is not an ideal platform for aviation photography - is really the threat vector you want to defend against you probably have options there, especially if you have advanced technology at your fingertips.
And indeed it turns out that if you read the actual US government reports on UFOs you'll note the term "signature management" is used. In fact one might certainly wonder why hypothetical UFOnauts would get caught on camera (or radar) at all, and if UFOs were real and preferred not to get caught on camera, one might expect that high-powered military sensors would be disproportionately likely to capture compelling evidence. And interestingly from what I recall the F/A-18s started picking up UAP on their radar regularly after receiving an upgraded AESA, which could be indica of a mundane sensor issue but also could be a sign that that a hypothetical UFO designer's signature management model was not up to the task of deceiving latest-gen hardware.
Finally, neither Bigfoot nor UFOs nor Flying Saucers are 'miraculous' things in the sense that the OP used the term - meaning divine or diabolical phenomenon.
That's certainly begging the question.
Shrike
4mo ago
Then by what definition of "diabolical" are other religions' miracles diabolical and how do we know they're diabolical? The review is very unclear about this.
Sure, I agree the review is unclear about it, as it is a bit of a tangent. As I laid out in my longer comment, every hypothesis has to explain why it is different from every other hypothesis. In some cases this requires accepting opposed supernatural forces (actually in most cases, I think most, perhaps all, religious traditions teach that not all supernatural forces are aligned).
In the case of prior myths and legends, I'd guess that the similarities are from blending common mythic elements with facts about the historical figure.
Yeah I mean, why are their common mythic elements? From what I understand Campbell was influenced by Jung, who had the psychological/mystical idea about some sort of collective unconscious (my apologies if I am butchering Jung, I have not read his work). But if you don't believe in the collective unconscious you have to do harder lifting.
From what I understand what e.g. Lewis does is says "isn't it odd that all stories have a Christ-figure-legend but none of the figures had historical backing until Christ shows up? That's very classic divine foreshadowing" which is an interesting take, but, well, I am not sure I buy the idea of a monomyth, at least in a very "tight" or specific sense.
Shrike
4mo ago
My understanding is that indigenous Australians are speculated to have extremely long oral traditions because some of them seem to line up with astronomic/geological phenomena. Example press release with overview, linking to the actual research (which I have not read): https://www.utas.edu.au/about/news-and-stories/articles/2023/tasmanian-aboriginal-oral-traditions-among-the-oldest-recorded-narratives-in-the-world
ETA: also, thanks for connecting "the measure becoming the target" to the monomyth.
Shrike
4mo ago
Do atheists commit crime or otherwise contribute to social dysfunction at a greater rate than theists?
Yes, at least in certain key aspects. Atheists are less likely to give to charity, for instance (I think that's the latest science), less likely to marry, and less likely to have children, all of which ultimately make society a less functional place.
Where does Chesterton suggest that we consider the possibility other religions are correct?
Well, I dunno about that phrasing, I have not read Chesterton. But here's the quote:
No religion that thinks itself true bothers about the miracles of another religion. It denies the doctrines of the religion; it denies its morals; but it never thinks it worth while to deny its signs and wonders.
In denying the doctrine of a religion you are (correctly or incorrectly) thereby sorting the diabolical from the divine, aren't you?
If Jesus was unique, why would his story have any connection to the monomyth? And if his story is true, why would stories from unaffected cultures resemble his story?
Well, first off, why (in your theory) do cultures unaffected by Christianity have stories resembling Christ!? Genuinely interested in your answer here!
From the Christian perspective, it's very clear that God, as revealed through Scripture, loves tropes (or memes) and Scripture plays with them repeatedly. It does not seem remotely odd from that perspective that similar ideas and tropes, echoing from the dawn of time and the Author of Man, would manifest in many separate cultures.
However if I put my Cranky Literalist hat on: I am actually very suspicious of the idea of the monomyth. I do think there are a number of tropes that are fairly common, perhaps to all mankind, possibly due to oral tradition but possibly also just due to human nature. (A separate POP SCIENCE tangent, but I am told there is evidence that oral traditions can persist up to 10,000 years, which is also, I am told, within "striking range" of humanity's most recent common ancestor, so presumably it's not crazy for cultures to share a monomyth by virtue of a common oral tradition). But from what I understand of the "monomyth" specifically, it derives from Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which, admittedly, I have not read. (One of my friends did read it, and gave me a very negative review, so perhaps I am unfairly prejudiced.) But I strongly suspect Campbell (who was influenced by Jung) constructed a Procrustean bed that anyone so inclined can torture nearly any notable person into a "monomyth."
Wikipedia quotes Campbell's formula as follows:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
You could apply this to a historical figures like Julius Caesar pretty easily, it proves nothing about their historicity. (If I was a professional apologist I would have a better example, my understanding is that there are some really fun ones out there.) In fact from what I understand many primitive cultures have initiation ceremonies into adulthood which means that you could apply the monomyth neatly to...practically everyone!
Now, I should note that comparative mythology is outside of my area of expertise. But I suspect that people whose expertise it is tend to overfit it. I'm particularly more than a little suspicious of Campbell (and people like Lewis and Tolkien) because I don't trust them to do the work to show that the "monomyth" is actually the same worldwide instead of just, basically, Western.
In short, my suspicion is that while there will be parallels between Christ and various other (mythical and real) people, suggesting that the Christ story is part of a monomyth (when done by friend or foe) is more a literary exercise than anything, and that while the idea of a "monomyth" is interesting taking it literally and seriously is a mistake (not just theologically, but as a matter of history and literature.)
I'm open to contrary takes on this, though!
Shrike
4mo ago
I'd ask the physicists how they feel about the replication crisis
Ask them how they feel about "dark matter"
Shrike
4mo ago
I think most of the miracles that people claim are happening quite frequently are things like:
- Inexplicable healing
- People understanding things in a foreign language
- Ghosts
- Unusual or prophetic dreams
I'm not really sure how to get proof that any of these things occur - most of them happen or may only happen inside the mind of the experiencer.
I could be wrong but my guess is that inexplicable healing (which would be the one pretty trivially verifiable thing, one would think) is not even particularly uncommon and that you don't hear about it because, well, does someone inexplicably healing strike you as slam-dunk proof of a miracle?
Apparently people inexplicably recovering from conditions such as dementia shortly before death is so common as to have its own name ("terminal lucidity") so it seems to me trivially easy to prove the "inexplicable healing" is real, but proving that the inexplicable healing involved supernatural powers is pretty hard and I'm not really sure how one would go about doing this.
I do think there have been experiments to see if people who were prayed over recovered at better rates than people who did not, and my recollection is that there did not seem to be a statistically significant difference. But it's been years since I read about that and I don't know any of the internals of the study, so I have no real informed opinion of its validity. At any rate, though, even an airtight study of that nature would not be able to prove that miracles were not real.
Shrike
4mo ago
Sure. I am not convinced they are aliens (but the cutting-edge UFO Believers/Enthusiasts/Fanatics often don't think this either). But (imho) that doesn't make them mundane and certainly not a good example of something that's obviously not real.
They are a pretty good example of something "science" has a hard time dealing with since you can't snap your fingers and reproduce them in a test tube. In that sense at least they are miraculous.
Shrike
4mo ago
No offense, but I'm not sure you would, since UFOs have been captured on camera (military targeting systems no less!) and it's been covered many many times in outlets like the New York Times and, yes, CNN.
Here's a video of the then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe (merely on Fox News, but still) pointedly telling the audience that US spy satellites and other sensors catch UFOs from time to time. (And although I don't think this made the news, here's relevant documents from the NRO about a possible UAP image capture and discussion of a "UAP model" as part of their SENTIENT AI image intelligence program.)
Shrike
4mo ago
The middle section has examples of atheist scholars being wrong... but are examples of atheists scholars being wrong evidence against atheism?
I think the sociological angle specifically (where the New Atheist types said that declining religion would make the world a better place and well that is not what happened) revealed that their religious opponents (who were often chided for the idea that "morality comes from religion") actually had a stronger grasp on reality than the New Atheist types did. In my opinion it does not slam-dunk prove anything about God one way or the other by itself.
But if two groups of people make predictions and one of them is better at the predictions, your priors should be that they understand reality better. I don't know that "religious people" are perfect scorers but against the New Atheists on the general question of whether (our) society would flourish without God...I think they've generally won.
Shouldn't we question which miracles are "diabolical" and which are "divine?
Well yes, that's what Chesterton is suggesting, isn't it? That you sort out the diabolical from the divine?
And doesn't this "prove too much," inasmuch as it's also true of conspiracy theories, cryptids (fun fact: Scotland's national animal isn't the unicorn, because someone thought it'd be funny - the Scots genuinely believed unicorns existed, at the time they chose it), and UFO sightings?
This is another pet peeve of mine, but UFOs (much like, topically, the historicity of Christ) is another one of those "midwit meme" moments where both people who have studied the topic and people who just absorb what's on Ancient Aliens both take UFOs much more seriously than people who take the superficially informed view that there's nothing there.
The last two paragraphs I quoted use opposing arguments to come to the same conclusion: Similarities to the "monomyth" are evidence of Truth and differences from the "monomyth" are also evidence of Truth.
I think it's incorrect to view this as trivially wrong. Imagine instead this was a purely scientific argument about a specific aspect of reality instead of a broader argument about the true nature of reality. Any would-be successor theory must explain why it is similar to and yet superior to alternative competing theories. Typically adherents of competing theories agree on the vast majority of the underlying facts, and so all theories will actually be quite similar, but the adherents of all of these theories must explain the distinctions in their theory from other theories, to show how it is the best theory.
If we threw out scientific theories on the basis that they were similar to (and therefore derivative of and thus incorrect) another similar theory we rejected, we would not be in a great place. Ultimately religion, too, is trying to explain reality as we know it, although on different terms.
And the reality is that materialism is unsatisfying, that people do have religious experiences and that those experiences sometimes conflict with each other.
Has anyone read this book?
I haven't, but noting the interest here in case I do.
Shrike
4mo ago
But never video footage.
In my humble opinion, video footage alone is actually not super good evidence. If it was, you (and everyone else) would believe in Bigfoot and UFOs, which you can see by the dozens on YouTube.
Shrike
4mo ago
Hahahaha was this written in 2013, a mere two years before the first story came out about the UFO that caught on FLIR and radar, which was then recycled into the New York Times, pretty much forcing an avalanche of "okay so UFOs are real" confessions from .gov types? Impeccable timing.
Shrike
4mo ago
To destroy their AI clusters, lowering the chance of a misaligned singularity of course!
But seriously, there are lots of potential reasons. One of them is superconductor control, although I think this gets less relevant every year. One of them is that China might attack the US as part of their opening salvos against Taiwan over uncertainty as to what the US would do, which essentially would render US desires moot – there's no world where we don't respond to that.
One of the most overlooked reasons, in my humble opinion, is to stop nuclear proliferation – my understanding is that Japan views a non-CCP-aligned Taiwan as a core national security interest. I think there's a nonzero chance that if Taiwan reunifies with China, Japan acquires nuclear weapons. If Japan acquires nuclear weapons, South Korea may follow.
Nuclear weapons proliferation is arguably bad for a lot of reasons but probably one of the core ones from the perspective of US policymakers is that it undermines American power relative to the rest of the world.
Shrike
4mo ago
No, what I mean is that it is possibly already baked in – I dunno how likely this is but Trump, as POTUS, may know that we're going to war with China in less than four years.
Also you're not obliterating the industrial capacity of China WW2-style with anything less than carpet-nuking.
On the one hand, touché.
On the other hand, Chinese trade flows through overseas shipping. A war with Taiwan might involve carpet nuking levels of destruction (the Three Gorges Dam is within Taiwanese striking range) but is more likely to involve interdicting Chinese trade routes and might also involve striking their port assets. If China loses the war, its fleet, its merchant marine, and its port infrastructure, even without destroying industrial capacity or critical infrastructure it will hamper their exports for years.
Shrike
4mo ago
After the Chinese kill American service members? Forget Trump declaring war, Congress will.
Shrike
4mo ago
You should consider that the odds of "literal war with China" happening in the next four years is relatively high, possibly 100%, the odds of the US winning are decent, and if Trump gets the US started onshoring before obliterating the industrial capacity of our main rival (which is why the US had such a nice industry between 1945 - 1979) before that happens he might be hailed as a hero and genius.
Shrike
4mo ago
it seems profoundly stupid to deliberately crash the good times in the hopes of producing strong men, instead of finding a way to preserve them for as long as possible, when we are on the cusp of technologies (AI, eugenics, etc.) that may allow us to do just that.
If you actually think that AI is going to make a big impact on the economy, it seems rational to try to onshore industry and crash the email/finance/coding class. In an AI boom scenario, the email/finance/coding classes will be out of a job first, and it will take time and human elbow grease to get the AI-run-and-assisted factories up and running. Whatever happens with the tariffs will be gentler than what would happen if every single corporation in America replaced ~everyone whose primary job was with a computer with GPT-7 Pro once it demoed.
If you are an AI near-term-ist it makes a ton of sense to blow up an industry that is going to be destroyed anyway in order to begin rebuilding an industrial industry that might-or-might-not be accelerated to stratospheric levels by AI. If we assume that AI can radically reshape industry, we might as well start working on that project now, particularly if we are in a competition with China, who is roughly on par with us in AI and already has a large industry. Supposing that AI makes industry 100% more powerful over the course of ten years: the United States needs as big of an industrial base as possible when that AI drops or it potentially loses in meatspace very badly to countries like China.
Eugenics will not meaningfully affect anything for 40+ years (if it takes off, which it is unlikely to).
I am not an AI near-term-ist but if you really think AI is going to take off, worth considering what that might mean.
Shrike
4mo ago
It shows that even when you control for education level, how much someone followed the race was negatively correlated with support for Trump in 2024.
I realize this is a tangent but I find this incredibly funny. To me, because of the very specific news media dynamics in the last couple of elections, that is like suggesting we should trust cocaine addicts to set drug policy.
Shrike
4mo ago
I definitely wonder if a smarter Jones Act (e.g. tariff discounts for goods delivered to US points in US vessels) would work better than the Jones Act as implemented.
Shrike
4mo ago
Absolutely. For fun I'd even add the AI in Alien (1979), which is programmed perfectly to serve its masters but by that very token is indifferent to its fellow humans and even its own survival in a way a rational human would not be.
Shrike
4mo ago
100%. I'd add that "AI going bad" arguably predates the computer as a trope, with Frankenstein unambiguously serving as a model for "humans create cool modern scientific innovation that thinks for itself and turns on them" and I am pretty sure that Frankenstein isn't even the oldest example of that trope, just a particularly notable one.
Shrike
4mo ago
As HBD advocates, they believe in a relatively static human nature that cannot be reshaped by social institutions.
If HBD advocates believe this then they have not thought their position through.
In fact I think HBD postulates a much more flexible view of human nature than blank-slate theories. It seems to me the blank-slate worldview suggests that all humans are basically alike and we absorb what is in our environment and reflect it outwards, and thus changes in groups are the result of external material forces – in other words, humans are all the same. This unavoidably leads to messy questions about to what degree culture versus, uh, guns, germs and steel, I guess? is "the environment" but the point is that humans are basically biologically the same.
Whereas the HBD line is that there are genetic differences between groups that meaningfully affect outcomes. Interestingly HBD people also tend to kick the can back up a level by suggesting those differences are downstream of the environment, but they also point to culture, e.g. it is HBD people you see suggesting that things like "banning cousin marriage" or "executing violent offenders" have meaningful downstream genetic impacts on groups of people. Which means, pretty obviously, for both biological and logical reasons that anyone who believes in HBD believes that meaningful parts of human nature can be reshaped by social institutions, given sufficiently aggressive methods.
In fact I'd go further and suggest that believing in HBD or really that genes have any downstream effects on culture/people groups means it is inevitable that you believe that social institutions will reshape human nature, perhaps not the big parts of Human Nature that people make movies and write novels about, but meaningful parts of human nature that make it possible to divide people meaningfully into groups with different natures.
See, this is a catch-22. If things "don't just happen" then we know they aren't real. If things that shouldn't happen happen (such as dementia patients recovering their cognizance) than it's just a random mystery of the universe, but not a miracle. If someone regrew a limb after prayer, which a minute of Googling shows has in fact allegedly happened! people would be like "wow, there must be a good scientific explanation for this!" or "oh, clearly an elaborate fraud!"
Which I don't even think is necessarily a bad attitude - in my opinion there needs to be a nonzero amount of healthy skepticism in the world. I can think of plausible materialistic mechanisms for terminal lucidity. I'm sure with ten minutes of research I could do the same for the regrowth of limbs. Shoot, I can also think of plausible scientific mechanisms for pretty much any miracle you can think of, including regrown limbs, if you posit Sufficiently Advanced Science (which was Clark points out is indistinguishable from magic). If you posit a world where entities indistinguishable from angels were scientifically verified to exist, a nonzero number of people would just be like "woah its The Entities up to their advanced science again" instead of becoming religious converts (and in fact this describes a lot of the UFO community, particularly the more "out there" parts).
I'm sorry, I guess I am rambling. My point is that I don't think there's a single standard from skeptics at large here, as a general rule, just some very mobile goalposts. If you disagree, and want to post the specific evidence you'd need to believe in something miraculous, as well as what you would define "miraculous" as, maybe we could investigate whether your criteria have been fulfilled.
One obvious problem is that scientists (and doctors) are so incompetent that any attempt to prove a miracle medically or scientifically can easily be dismissed as incompetence or fraud. And in fact this is what happens, there are plenty of allegedly scientific attempts to probe paranormal topics and the accusation hurled at the experimenters is always that they are frauds or that their study designs suck. Which is probably true! Probably most study designs suck! So any time you bring up a study or a "medically verified miracle" it is very easy to dismiss it on the basis of "fraudulence and/or incompetence."
I'm not Catholic, so I don't have a good perspective on their methodology (and miracles are not really my jam anyway, so I don't good sources or really strong opinions on the famously reported ones) but my understanding is that the Catholic church actually does scientifically investigate miracles as part of their canonization process. Maybe some other Mottizens can point out some specific compelling cases. But I doubt anyone who is not already sympathetic will find them persuasive since "well they are motivated to find miracles," which again goes to a catch-22, since few people who are not so motivated bother to go looking for them.
The long and short of it is, though, as I understand it, is that there have been scientific investigations of miracles, they do convince some people, and other people remain unconvinced.
Well, actually, things impossible according to the known laws of physics do happen. And when they are proven to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, scientists literally invent
magican invisible practically unfalsifiable mystery substance to explain them. But I don't particularly think this increases the credibility of religion, it just decreases the credibility of scientists. Which is much the same reaction skeptics of "woo" have when research that seems to validate "woo" comes out.More options
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