Skills to be Successful!

Why major in philosophy? One of the things one sometimes hears coming from the folks at the orientation tables on some college campuses is something along the lines of the following: "With a philosophy major you learn to think and write clearly and critically, and you grow into a thoughtful, mature person of the sort that any business, corporation, or government office would be happy to hire." In short, the message seems to be, you should major in philosophy because those jokes about being the most articulate person in the unemployment line are all wrong--you will too be able to get a good job with this major! A recent story in the New York Times showed some evidence of similar thinking:

Ms. Onejeme, now a senior applying to law school, ended up changing her major to philosophy, which she thinks has armed her with the skills to be successful. “My mother was like, what are you going to do with that?” said Ms. Onejeme, 22. “She wanted me to be a pharmacy major, but I persuaded her with my argumentative skills.”

In this particular case, the "skills to be successful" turned out to be skills to get an argumentative relative off one's back--a skill that I myself found useful when my family tried to convince me that I should get a job as a computer programmer back in the days when that sort of job actually seemed alluring to some people (mostly, folks who did not have to work in cubicles themselves).

The difficulty with seeing philosophy this way is that it really masks what philosophy genuinely is. Another passage from the NYT story has this to say:

Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world, from the morality of the war in Iraq to the latest political scandal. The economic downturn has done little, if anything, to dampen this enthusiasm among students, who say that what they learn in class can translate into practical skills and careers. On many campuses, debate over modern issues like war and technology is emphasized over the study of classic ancient texts.

While I am certainly all in favor of the study of classic ancient texts, I would want to point out that the emphasis on "modern issues like war and technology" is already a misrepresentation of what philosophy is. Granted, there is such a discipline as "applied ethics" within philosophy, but too often this sub-field gets turned into The Field in philosophy, and courses in it wind up being massively useless bull-sessions in which poorly trained students are asked to present "arguments" in favor and against all sorts of contemporary issues, and these arguments are then moderated by only marginally better trained graduate assistants.

I'm not saying that philosophy courses should make more of a point to get at metaphysical and epistemological issues, or even that Plato and Aristotle need to be mentioned when discussing justice or moral virtue. I will say, however, that any good philosophy student needs to have the intellectual curiosity to find these sorts of things of interest whether or not they impinge upon any "modern issues like war and technology." If you're just not interested in the core elements of philosophy, then you are not a particularly good philosopher, no matter how passionate you are about peace, freedom, and a clean environment.

Sadly, in today's educational environment, a subject like philosophy has to be "sold" in order to attract any students at all, and the selling that gets done usually has to do with explaining why studying philosophy will be a good background training for doing something other than philosophy. I am certainly not claiming that every philosophy major should go on to become a professional philosopher. But it's just plain silly to say that a person who wants to work in business, or law, or the government, should major in philosophy, unless that person genuinely loves wisdom for its own sake. If she does love wisdom for its own sake, then philosophy is a fine major provided it does not hamper the person's chances in the career he really desires. (Note the evidence, in that last sentence, that I am myself a professional philosopher: I used both the masculine and the feminine relative pronouns in referring to a single, abstract person. You can't say I wasted my time at the university!)

Barry Loewer, the department chairman, said that Rutgers started building its philosophy program in the late 1980s, when the field was branching into new research areas like cognitive science and becoming more interdisciplinary. He said that many students have double-majored in philosophy and, say, psychology or economics, in recent years, and go on to become doctors, lawyers, writers, investment bankers and even commodities traders.

As long as they don't go on to become philosopher who think that the sort of philosophy that gets done at Rutgers is the heart of the profession. Don't get me wrong: I'm fascinated by neurophilosophy, and have done some work in that area myself. However, the skills required to excel in that particular sub-field of philosophy often require a student to sacrifice other areas of the discipline. There are exceptions, of course, but many of the students who focus on such cutting-edge aspects of the discipline wind up having to cut corners in other areas. That's bad enough in itself, but what's worse is the fact that many of them don't mind cutting those corners, because they don't really see the relevance or interest in those other areas.

I had a friend like that in, of all places, classics grad school. You'd think that classicists, of all people, would be the paradigm cases of the Renaissance Scholar, with wide, interdisciplinary interests. But this friend of mine did Roman history, and just about literally nothing else. His interests were so narrowly restricted that his knowledge of Greek was poor enough that he had trouble passing his qualifying exams in that language. He was an excellent historian, of course, but it is hard to see in what sense he was a "classicist", if that term is meant to pick out something as interdisciplinary as classical philology. Philosophy is very similar, in many respects, to classical philology, because the best philosophers are all-arounders, who know enough about a wide variety of sub-fields to have something intelligent and interesting to say in just about any of them. Most importantly, however, the best philosophers work in philosophy, not in some other field. Not everyone has the luxury to do that, of course, so the next best thing is someone who majors in philosophy because of an innate sense of intellectual curiosity, not out of some utilitarian quest to get the ultimate job offer after graduation.

Nothing wrong with job offers, of course, especially "ultimate" ones. But for the philosopher, they are merely icing on the cake. I am sometimes asked if I regret having done an advanced degree in classics, seeing as how I wound up in philosophy (in order to get the two PhD degrees I spent 14 years in graduate school, while working and starting a family). Quite frankly, I don't regret it at all, and if I were required to go look for a job tomorrow at someplace like Borders or Starbucks I still would not regret it, even though I might be able to get a better job somewhere else if I had majored in engineering or chemistry, because I really believe that the unexamined life isn't worth living. If, indeed, that is what one ought to call "living" at all. Of course engineers and chemists can live examined lives, too, but for anyone in any sort of job it will be easier to examine one's life if one has that spark of intellectual curiosity that lies behind an authentic desire to major in philosophy:

That [philosophy] is not a science of production is clear even from the history of the earliest philosophers. For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters....a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant...therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.

Aristotle, Metaphysics A.2 982b12-22

Against Determinism

Well, I was somewhat surprised that Alexander Pruss chose to simply blow me off in our "discussion" of incompatibilism over at his blog, but to see how a genuinely effective argument against determinism might go, I recommend having a look at the one I give here.

When Does God Need a Lawyer?

When you take the Bible too literally.

Save A Life

From the National Marrow Donor Program website:

On any given day, more than 6,000 men, women and children desperately search the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) Registry for a matching bone marrow donor or cord blood unit. These patients have leukemia, lymphoma and other life-threatening diseases that can be treated by a bone marrow or cord blood transplant.

Even with a Registry of millions, there are many patients waiting and hoping, unable to find a match. Donors with diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds are especially needed.

Donating does not necessarily involve surgery. Most often, what is taken is blood and not marrow, and the procedure is painless. Even when marrow is needed, the procedure is painless and the recovery period is quick and easy. No bone is removed from your body. The tissues that you donate could save someone's life. Admit it: if you were dying of leukemia, lymphoma, or some other life-threatening disease, you would hope against hope that someone would donate tissues for you. Here is a prime example of one way to fulfill a Kantian imperfect duty.

I strongly urge everyone who can to consider joining the Registry. The NMDP website has lots of information about the various procedures and risks involved, who is a good candidate and who isn't, and what you're getting yourself into. It's a good idea to discuss this issue with your physician before committing yourself, but please give it some thought.

Ikhthus

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting essay in the online edition of the LA Times today, in which he puts the contemporary fad of Darwin Fish (the ignorant parodies of the 1st century Christian symbol that certain morons like to put on their car) into the context of the persecution of Christians in contemporary Islamic societies.

I see these Darwin Fish all over the place, but of course I see the regular Fish stickers, too. I'm not a fan of either, but the Darwin one is more irritating because it's both more puerile and more banal. Some of the people who put the regular Fish on their car may think that evolution is false, but, let's be real about this: a lot of Christians understand that evolution is one of the best confirmed scientific theories in history, but I doubt that any of the folks who put the Darwin Fish on their car have any idea that the truth of evolutionary theory is compatible with the truth of Christianity. These are people who are trying, in their own vapid way, to say something, and what, exactly, would be the point of that, in this particular context? There are two groups of people they could conceivably be targeting. One group would be the people who think as they do. I suppose it would be reasonable enough to expect people who think as they do to get their thoughts from the backs of cars, but I doubt that preaching to the choir in this way is really what they're after. It seems more likely to me that what they want to do is tweak the sensibilities of the regular Fish people.

So who is the bigger idiot: the person who believes that God created the world and who wonders at the same time whether any given scientific theory can really fully account for that, or the person who believes that having a high degree of confidence in a particular empirical hypothesis can give certainty (or even a very high degree of probability) about the falsity of a metaphysical thesis? Clearly the latter, and yet these ignoramuses think that by putting a Darwin Fish on their car they have made a really funny joke at some fundamentalist's expense.

While I agree that the fundamentalist view is silly and worth smiling at the way one might smile at a child's innocence, the other view is ridiculous for all the wrong reasons.

Suddenly the Good Friday Prayer Doesn't Seem So Bad

The New York Times online version has a story today about the ways in which the mass marketed opinions of Hamas, including videos aimed at children, target Jews (and sometimes Christians) in unmistakably violent and bigoted terms:

At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the “Crusaders,” or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as “the brothers of apes and pigs,” while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.

Its videos praise fighters and rocket-launching teams; its broadcasts insult the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for talking to Israel and the United States; its children’s programs praise “martyrdom,” teach what it calls the perfidy of the Jews and the need to end Israeli occupation over Palestinian land, meaning any part of the state of Israel.

And, just so as to leave no doubt:

For example, in a column in the weekly Al Risalah, Sheik Yunus al-Astal, a Hamas legislator and imam, discussed a Koranic verse suggesting that “suffering by fire is the Jews’ destiny in this world and the next.”

“The reason for the punishment of burning is that it is fitting retribution for what they have done,” Mr. Astal wrote on March 13. “But the urgent question is, is it possible that they will have the punishment of burning in this world, before the great punishment” of hell? Many religious leaders believe so, he said, adding, “Therefore we are sure that the holocaust is still to come upon the Jews.”

But what about the children? Are they really going to understand all of this complicated political discourse? Well, just in case they don't:

Another children’s program, “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” has become infamous for its puppet characters — a kind of Mickey Mouse, a bee and a rabbit — who speak, like Assud the rabbit, of conquering the Jews to the young hostess, Saraa Barhoum, 11. “We will liberate Al Aksa mosque from the Zionists’ filth,” Assud said recently. “We will liberate Jaffa and Acre,” cities now in Israel proper. “We will liberate the whole homeland.”

The mouse, Farfour, was murdered by an Israeli interrogator and replaced by Nahoul, the bee, who died “a martyr’s death” from lack of health care because of Gaza’s closed borders. He has been supplanted by Assud, the rabbit, who vows “to get rid of the Jews, God willing, and I will eat them up, God willing.”

When Assud first made his appearance, he said to Saraa: “We are all martyrdom-seekers, are we not, Saraa?” She responded: “Of course we are. We are all ready to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of our homeland. We will sacrifice our souls and everything we own for the homeland.”

Ahh, good old fashioned family values there! Why can't Sesame Street do a better job of getting our children to martyr themselves for our homeland? I mean, after all, that way our imams won't have to do it themselves.

Plus ça Change....

An interesting interview with a Bishop.

Of course, he was an Episcopalian.

HT: Maverick Philosopher.

Shame and the Body

A couple of years ago I mentioned the following story in a blog entry:

When I first moved into the house where I now live (it was August of 1997, by the way, for those of you with a prurient interest in the boring details of my existence) my neighbor noticed that we got up en famille on Sundays and went out. She asked me what was up, and I told her we were Catholics and were off to Mass.

"Catholic! You must love guilt, then!" she said with a smile, then went back to mowing her lawn.

The view of Catholic moral theology here expressed has the remarkable, if unsurprising in this day and age, property of being both banal and widely shared. The idea appears to be that Catholics live their lives as slaves to some set of Divine Command moral rules that are inscribed upon their hearts like prison tats on burly forearms, and infractions of these rules inspire in their benighted adherents spasms of fear borne of a superstitious belief in places of eternal flame. The old joke, based upon the instructions one once found on shampoo bottles, went "Sin; confess; repeat", but what seems to strike most outsiders about Catholic life is a perceived emphasis on sin--especially of the sexual kind--that drives the people in the pews to distraction.

I went on to remark, in that particular post, that in reality the Christian view of sexuality and the human body is far more salutary than the limited, and delimiting, view of contemporary secular society, in which we are reduced to a bundle of drives and desires. On the view I defended, following God's commandments with respect to sexual morality is not something that constrains us, but rather it sets us free in a way that the pagan cannot readily comprehend. I think that this freedom is the more obscure to the pagans because of their strange view of the nature of the Christian theology of the body. Is it really true that the Christian view of sexuality is all about guilt and shame? I would say no, but even many Catholics seem to view the matter rather differently, and that is perplexing.

I am thinking about this now because just today I received notice of a rather interesting-looking book recently out from the University of Pennsylvania Press. The book is Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects by Virginia Burrus, professor of early Church history at Drew University. She appears to work often in the field of sexuality, as her other books have titles like Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguing Passion at the Limits of Discipline, The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography, "Begotten, Not Made": Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (I would love to hear Mike Liccione's opinion of that one!) and the like. Sex and gender studies is not an area in which I have any significant expertise to speak of, so I cannot pronounce on the scholarly quality of these tomes, other than to note that there are rather a lot of them for such a young scholar and they get good reviews, so I assume that she knows what she's doing. The book would not have come to my attention at all were it not for my subscription to Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews, which sense out email notifications of new book reviews as they come in. Saving Shame was reviews for BMCR by Walter Roberts, a visiting assistant professor of history at Ashland University here in Ohio. According to Roberts's review

Essentially, Burrus challenges the traditional thesis that in its early development, Christianity replaced public shame with private guilt as a model of social control and communal identity. Her rebuttal is that shame, rather than disappearing and being replaced by guilt, was transformed from a public to a private force in Christianity and then back to a public phenomenon that becomes the basis for both personal salvation and the conversion of non-believers. This was a very gradual
transformation that began with Apostolic ideas of shame, the body, and salvation, which attempted to reconcile the public role of shame with the private notion of personal salvation. The basic idea that the human body served as a conduit between public shame and personal salvation was introduced in Apostolic literature and was then transferred to the phenomenon of martyrdom, which in turn influenced the Christological debates of the second to fourth centuries. From there, these ideas were incorporated into the ascetic movements of late antiquity, where they
culminated in notions of grace and salvation, which contained elements of both shame and guilt, that were passed on to Medieval and later Christian thought. In many ways this is an intensely personal book for Burrus, and she also tries to link the modern culture that seems to embrace shame as a method of social protest with the ascetic movements of the ancient and late antique Greco-Roman world.

I think it would be interesting to read this book along with selections from early Church Fathers and, of course, JPII's Theology of the Body. My intuition is that the thesis, as interesting and remarkable as it sounds, will prove to be underdetermined by the data, but that, I suspect, is not uncommon as theses about historical trends go. Apparently, the really interesting stuff comes in the third chapter. Roberts again:

Chapter three presents one of Burrus's more novel arguments, tying developments of Christology and martyrdom into the burgeoning ascetic movements of the late antique period. Traditional interpretations of late antique ascetic movements put the emphasis on subjecting the body to abjection in order to be free of the body and to transcend to the spiritual world in imitation of Christ. Using her interesting
interpretations of John's teleology of the logos and the subsequent appearance of John's thought in the Christological debates of the second to fourth centuries, Burrus reexamines the underlying attitude of fourth to seventh century Christian ascetic ideology regarding the role of the body in salvation. She argues that
embracing physical, human existence is a key to becoming closer to God and salvation. By acknowledging the inherent shame and weakness of the human condition, we are forced to confront and ultimately transcend our limitations in this form. In addition, in keeping with the imagery of spectacle that she has cultivated throughout the book, the body and our struggle with it becomes a stage for showing our devotion to God and our disdain for the temptations of this world.

I wonder whether "shame" and "guilt" are really the right categories in this context, though of the two I suppose "shame" is closer to the mark than "guilt". What is "shame", exactly, in a Christian context? In classical virtue theory shame is an emotional response, but Aristotle points out that modesty, properly speaking, is not a virtue, even though it is praised (Nicomachean Ethics 2.7 1108a30-36). The reason he says that it is not a virtue is simply because of the fact that it is merely an emotional response, not a state of character that can be governed by reason, and so even though it can come in more or less moderate degrees we do not call it a virtue. In this sort of a context the Christian account of shame has got to build something further into the matrix if it is to fill the role assigned to it in this book, and I wonder where, exactly, that building got done (if, indeed, it did get done). I suspect that there is some interesting work still to be done in this area.

Quiz Show

Update: OK, I realize that it's a little too hard as is, so I've added a few more hints at the end of the post.

I want to test your wits, but to do so you have to promise to play fair. As most folks know, I am something of an anti-realist about science (in a very loose sense of "anti-realism"), and I have blogged often about the relationship between theory and observation and how perspectives in the working scientist can influence that relationship (this was, indeed, a theme behind my most recent posts on the "verification" of the miraculous). I have come across various statements of this theme in a wide variety of authors, from the usual suspects such as Bas Van Fraassen and Paul Feyerabend to some less obvious but perhaps for that even more interesting suspects such as Ernst Cassirer and Pierre Duhem, but recently I came across a version of this theme in a writer in whom I was quite surprised to find it, and I am wondering if anyone will be able to guess who it is.

When I say you have to play fair, what I mean is this. I'm going to offer some quotations from this author relevant to this theme, and I want you to try to figure out who the author of these quotations is, but of course you could easily discover it simply by Googling these quotations, because this author is very famous--so famous, in fact, that I'm quite sure that you have all heard of this person and, indeed, I would be willing to bet money that all of you have read at least one book by this person. So to play this game I must ask that you not use Google or any other electronic resource. Instead, rely on your wits and, if possible, your memory, or perhaps your collection of books or a good library. But if you think you know who the author of these quotations is, let me know in a comment, and I will announce the winner (the first person to correctly identify the source) as soon as we have one.

Now, on to the game. Here are the quotations, all from relatively close together in the one book from which they are all drawn. At the end of the post I will give some hints.

In every age it will be apparent to accurate thinkers that scientific theories, being arrived at in the way I have described, are never statements of fact. That stars appear to move in such and such ways, or that substances behaved thus and thus in the laboratory--these are statements of fact. The astronomical or chemical theory can never be more than provisional. It will have to be abandoned if a more ingenious person thinks of a supposal which would 'save' the observed phenomena with still fewer assumptions, or if we discover new phenomena which it cannot save at all.

This would, I believe, be recognized by all thoughtful scientists today. It was recognized by Newton if, as I am told, he wrote not 'the attraction varies inversely as the square of the distance', but 'all happens as if' it so varied. It was certainly recognized in the Middle Ages. 'In astronomy', says Aquinas, 'an account is given of eccentrics and epicycles on the ground that if their assumption is made (hac positione facta) the sensible appearances as regards celestial motions can be saved. But this is not a strict proof (sufficienter probans) since for all we know they could also be saved by some different assumption.' The real reason why Copernicus raised no ripple and Galileo raised a storm, may well be that whereas the one offered a new supposal about celestial motions, the other insisted on treating this supposal as fact. If so, the real revolution consisted not in a new theory of the heaves but in 'a new theory of the nature of theory'.

Some hints. The author is no longer living. The author was an expert in a particular academic field but also wrote popular works, both in the author's own field and in other fields. As I have already mentioned, it is extremely likely that you have already read at least one of this author's books, and I imagine that it is also likely that the book that you read was a work of fiction.

Note, too, that there are still some scientists out there who seem to want to treat their "supposals" as facts. One thinks, for example, of Richard Dawkins, but there are others who do the same.

More hints: The author wrote, in addition to scholarly articles and books, in more than one genre of fiction, including science fiction and fantasy. One of these works was made into a movie, and the author was also the subject of a book that was turned into a movie.

Now What Do I Do?

Well, I just can't vote for Obama, because I can't vote for someone who won't fight to protect unborn life, nor can I endorse his economic or foreign policy views or any of his plans for domestic programs, etc. etc., but this is a real quandary. How can I not vote for this guy?

Explanation and the Inexplicable

If a fine follow-up to my posts on the miraculous, Dr. Mike Liccione of Sacramentum Vitae offers a cogent and illuminating defense of the Vatican's perspective on the role of empirical verification in the canonization process. There is much in his discussion to agree with, and my intention here is not seriously to dispute any of his major findings, but merely to quibble with some of his distinctions. In short, I intend to put the "anal" in "analytic philosophy", and with a vengeance.

Let me begin by reminding my teeming following of the excruciatingly banal point that I was trying to make in the first place. My view can be put succinctly this way:

(1) Miracles do occur. (I'm just putting this one in here for full disclosure.)
(2) Miracles are supernatural events.
(3) Hence, no scientific findings are ever relevant to the miraculous.

In my posts I had addressed these claims from the point of view of scientific explanation, since the point at issue was the utility, or lack thereof, of obtaining statements from medical professionals about alleged miraculous cures. Mike agrees with me, apparently, that medical evidence from professionals is not a sufficient condition for declaring a cure miraculous, but he asserts that it is at least a necessary condition. He goes on to say many fine things about the role of the miraculous in the life of a believer that I do not dispute at all, but he says these things partly with a view to defending the thesis that miracles are not, as I claimed, "inexplicable", so I will confine my remarks, at least for the nonce, to the questions:

(a) Is empirical evidence a necessary condition in the present case?
(b) In what sense may the miraculous be regarded as explicable?

Let me begin by stating at once that I think Mike has, as usual, done a marvelous job of making clearer points that I, in my haste and exuberance, left remarkably cloudy, and (again, as usual) I am in his debt.

Regarding question (a), let me say first of all that I myself did not put the thing in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions not because I wanted to avoid the argot of analytic philosophy (mê genoito!), and not because I did not think the conditions were neither necessary nor sufficient, but because I regard the application of such conditions to the present case something of a category mistake. The difficulty is not that empirical evidence fails to be sufficient, or that it is not necessary, but that empirical evidence is completely irrelevant to the question of the miraculous in general.

Having said that, however, let me address Mike's positive claim in a different way, namely, by assuming with him that such evidence actually is relevant. Still it would not be necessary, and this, I think, for reasons that Mike himself will accept. To assert that medical evidence of a certain kind is a necessary condition on the miraculous is to say that, absent that medical evidence, it is necessarily the case that a miracle did not occur. This, I think, is simply too strong a claim, given the sort of evidence we're talking about.

What sort of evidence is that? Well, ex hypothesi (as found in Fr. Martin's comments to my posts) we're talking about a situation in which, on one day a noxious condition (say, a lethal cancer) is present, and on the next day (or within some suitably short period of time) that condition is entirely gone, without a trace, and with no empirical evidence of any naturalistically describable sequence of explanatory causes that could suffice to "explain" the disappearance of the condition. For the time being, we must put aside any questions about how one might go about verifying something like this (the only way to investigate the matter, it seems, is to cut the patient open and find that there is no tumor there when the X-ray or MRI said that there was one; but by that time there is no way to ascertain whether the X-ray or MRI in which it appeared two days earlier was in the least reliable). Hence, the evidence that we're talking about in the case of the miraculous is an assertion from a scientific professional to the effect that the situation just described actually obtains in some particular case. The question, then, is, should we require that specifically this sort of evidence be a necessary condition on declaring a cure "miraculous"?

In thinking about this question, consider another kind of case. Suppose we want to explain why some particular bit of water is frozen solid. One sort of explanation says, "It's frozen because its temperature was held to 32 degrees Fahrenheit or less at one atmosphere for a certain length of time." That is, I take it, a sufficient condition on the water's freezing, and it is a fully naturalistic explanation of the water's freezing. Suppose we were not to ask, however, "Why is the water frozen", but rather, "How did the water's temperature come to be held to 32 degrees Fahrenheit or less at one atmosphere?" On certain sorts of occasions, that question might have an equally straightforward answer: "Well, it's the middle of a freezing cold January day in Minnesota and the Arctic Clipper has been blowing on this glass of water for two days straight now, and so the temperature in the water went way down and it froze." But suppose our question is this: "How did the water's temperature come to be held to 32 degrees Fahrenheit or less at one atmosphere, given that it is a balmy summer day in Florida, and this glass of water, which was quite warm yesterday, has been sitting here in the warm summer Florida sun for nearly 12 hours?" This gives our earlier "explanation" of the water's being frozen quite a different status.

If you're wondering about the relevance of all this, I'm trying to motivate the view I defended earlier, namely, that empirical evidence ought to be regarded as irrelevant, not necessary, to our believing something to be miraculous. Suppose a medical condition clears up for reasons that the medical community declares fully naturalistic. Does it follow that the disappearance of the condition was not miraculous simply because certain proximate causes can be identified as part of the process? Not necessarily, and yet we would be forced to say that it was necessarily not miraculous if we hold to the necessary condition that Mike has stipulated. While that might satisfy the non-believer, surely it should not satisfy the believer.

The evidence of medical experts is supposed to reassure us that there's been no funny-business, no "perfectly ordinary" or natural cure, and this, in turn, is supposed to reassure us that what happened was, in fact, a miracle. But empirical evidence, as such, can accomplish none of this. Indeed, the whole situation is a massive confusion of the ontological with the epistemic. Ontologically, a given event is either miraculous or not miraculous independently of any empirically observable phenomena; epistemically, of course, it is precisely the observable phenomena that we look to for reassurance that what happened was a miracle, but, as I showed in my earlier post, there is no rational reason why our confidence that a miracle occurred should either increase or decrease as a consequence of any empirical evidence, because the miraculous is not an empirical category. To say that our confidence in the miraculous should be affected by the empirical is like saying that we can determine the pitch of a particular sound by tasting it.

If empirical observations were rationally compelling in the case of the miraculous, then non-believers would be manifestly irrational, since the testimony of literally hundreds of witnesses has been handed down to us that Our Lord performed many miracles. And yet there are those who do not believe that testimony. If a medical expert tells us that there is no scientific evidence to explain the disappearance of a tumor that was present the day before in an X-ray or MRI, any good medical expert worth his salt would have to admit that there are all sorts of alternative, naturalistic explanations available as to why the disappearance of the condition ought not to be regarded as miraculous, if what one is after is a scientific standard of empirical verification. True, the Church is able to find medical experts willing to take part in the exercise and who will say that there is "no explanation", but that means nothing; for every non-believing medical expert the Church finds who is willing to take part in the "verification" process, there are dozens of other non-believing scientific experts who will tell you that the whole process is a waste of time. These folks will never say that there is "no scientific explanation" for such things, they will say that the scientific explanation has yet to be found.

This brings us to question (b). Mike wants to say that the miraculous is, in fact, explicable, but in saying this he equivocates on the notion of explanation. I had specifically confined my remarks to scientific explanation, because it is the relevance of the scientific method to the verification of the miraculous that is at issue. In this sort of a context, the miraculous simply must be inexplicable, otherwise it is not miraculous. Obviously there is a metaphorical sense in which the miraculous is explicable: it is the work of God. But to say this is not to explain the miraculous, it is to describe it (and in terms that are not acceptable to everyone). We do not know how God accomplishes the miraculous, and that is the sort of knowledge that would be required if we were to say that miracles are literally explicable. Similarly, to say that a miracle explains something else may satisfy some, but it will certainly not satisfy everyone: in order for the answer "It is miraculous" to satisfy any such question as "How did that happen?" one must antecedently be willing to accept that such things as the miraculous can occur, and the capacity to accept such things is already something supernatural and, hence, outside the scope of the notion of explanation as such.

I think that Mike is on the firmest ground when he notes that "for those who 'get it'", that is, for the believer, the miraculous can confirm faith; but this is to admit that faith is present to be confirmed. Without faith, one will not "get it" to begin with: the miraculous is simply impossible at best, meaningless at worst. For those who do "get it", however, it simply is not necessary at all that a cure be scientifically inexplicable in order to be regarded as miraculous, since everything, even the ordinary workings of nature, are the handiwork of God. Even if a cure appears to result from perfectly ordinary "scientifically verifiable" naturalistic processes, we may still ask "Why did those processes kick in in this particular case, allowing for full recovery, when in certain other identical cases they do not kick in and the patient dies?" Just as water may freeze for the perfectly ordinary reason that it reached a certain temperature, we may always seek beyond the proximate cause for a deeper explanation. In some cases, such as the Minnesota winter, we may not have any reason to believe that anything out of the ordinary has happened, but that fact should not deter us from being willing to believe that there is sometimes something extraordinary even in the ordinary. The willingness to entertain such beliefs has absolutely nothing to do with scientific empiricism, and can in no way be affected (either up or down) by any results flowing from empirical methods.