In the discussion over Lawrence Krauss' op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, the new atheists, as they almost invariably do brought up The Virgin Birth of Jesus. Here's the challenge that Krauss issued, as he described it in his piece:
When I confronted my two Catholic colleagues on the panel with the apparent miracle of the virgin birth and asked how they could reconcile this with basic biology, I was ultimately told that perhaps this biblical claim merely meant to emphasize what an important event the birth was. Neither came to the explicit defense of what is undeniably one of the central tenets of Catholic theology.
Here's the claim as made by one "MadScientist:
– Krauss never suggests that science move out of its own realm; what he is saying is that claims such as the virgin birth do not conform to what we know of the world. The claim of a virgin birth is essentially hearsay. MadScientist
One of the often made boasts of scientists is that they are required by science to back up their claims with the evidence attained through sound methodology. Well, let's see them do it in this case. Here's the challenge I issued in response.
Then it’s up to any scientist claiming that they can address The Virgin Birth of Jesus, as described in the gospels attributed to Matthew and Luke and actually believed by those who believe it, and not in a modified version so science can be made ez, to show how they could do it. They have to do it with absolutely no physical evidence, through an unknown range of possible mechanisms, and without recourse to any other human birth since it is held by its believers to have happened in that way exactly once in the entire course of history.
If you accept this assignment, please have your methodology and proof in by next Tuesday. You can feel free to post it on the last comment of my blog which you can reach by clicking on my name.
If anyone can produce a method that takes in all of those aspects, I’ll gladly announce that I’ve been stumped. But only if it addresses what is actually believed by those who believe it. Which I don’t happen to for historical and literary reasons.
I'll keep you posted on the results. If there are any.
I should add that I fully believe in the allegorical truth of the story. But I'll save that for the Christmas season.
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And Krauss is a liar. Both the Catholics on the panel said they wouldn't even attempt to explain the miracle biologically because essentially that's a "contradiction in terms" (my words, not theirs).
ReplyDeleteThat is clearly a defense of the Virgin Birth. It's just one Krauss doesn't care about.
I don't know what tags are allowed, I only know a few. italics
ReplyDeletebold lol:
If I'm not too busy I type out everything in my extra large font word processor, select all, copy and paste. But I'm really lousy with computers.
I'm especially interested in how you'll try to get by the three restrictions I thought were a complete barrier. I hope analogy isn't going to be one of those. Remember, it's believed to be sui generis.
By the way, olvlzl is my old pseudonym. It has no pronounciation and means nothing.
ReplyDeleteAnthony McCarthy
JCS, I will be responding to this in several weeks, as I said at Chris Mooney's blog I will be out for several weeks. Until then.
ReplyDeleteI will answer the rest of your response over the next few weeks and post a fuller response as I am going to be out on medical leave. But as you’ve taken it to give a response, which I don’t really see as an answer, you deserve something. This is very rough because I’m very pressed.
A defect that every proposal to deal with this miracle with science in any way seems to rest on the insistence on not taking the actual nature of the belief, or the other beliefs on which it rests as essential to judging the proposition. This seems entirely unreasonable since to propose dealing with it with science also requires that you jettison the specific requirements necessary for science to be done. You would need to disallow things inherent to religion while exempting science from requirements inherent to science. There is no reason for a religious person to accept that double standard, there is every reason for someone who believes that the methods and tools of science are efficacious would ever find it any more acceptable. You can't exempt yourself as a purported representative of the science side from the necessary exigencies of science any more than a purported representative of religion should from practicing their asserted morality, certainly acknowledging the whole truth strictly is a requirement of both. You also have to take into account different aims, science wants to find where the physical evidence leads, it wants to arrive as close to knowledge as possible, religion's goal in this is belief.
I think you were right about it not satisfying me as an answer. It doesn't actually deal with my challenge which is to show how science could deal with the question of the authenticity of The Virgin Birth of Jesus. While I think you have actually offered a defense of Richard Dawkins, one that I don’t actually see as answering my assertion that it isn’t a scientific question. The assertion that a question that couldn’t be answered by science can be “strictly a scientific question” seems likely to lead to pretty dodgy reasoning. If the event being questioned claims that it happened by unknown means and is held to have happened in that way exactly that one time you would be entirely dependent on physical evidence to even define the task in the physical terms science could deal with it. I think Dawkins’ assertion is a lot like the idea of studying behaviors in the remote past which we can’t even know happened. I’ve got my theory about why Evo-psy adopted the entirely absurd pracitice of making up stories about those alleged behaviors and trying to stick them in their models and it’s specifically because the transfer of observable events in the contemporary world clear across the taxonomy across species, genera, orders and, in the pop understanding derived from that, even kingdoms. I’ve had people defend carnivorism on the basis that plants too are the equivalent of red tooth and claw. I don’t think Dawkins evidence free look at the Virgin Birth would be any more science than the illogical assertion that men in aggregate have sex with more women while women have sex with fewer men.
"Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question with a definite answer in principle: yes or no" (Dawkins, The God Delusion, pg. 60 [Emphasis added]).
ReplyDeleteYour quote leaves out a key clause which just happens to maintain its (and his) scientific integrity and does not assert the truth or falsity of the claim. As the paragraph continues, we discover more statements that clarify precisely what he means, and it is decidedly not that science definitely has an answer, or even remotely suggesting that someone should start looking for one (if only someone were to offer a grant, perhaps; the Templeton Foundation might be interested, wouldn't they?). Citing a couple other miracles as questions, Dawkins writes:
"There is an answer to every such question, whether or not we can discover it in practice, and it is a strictly scientific answer. The methods we should use to settle the matter, in the unlikely event that relevant evidence ever became available, would be purely and entirely scientific methods. To dramatize the point, imagine, by some remarkable set of circumstances, that forensic archaeologists unearthed DNA evidence to show that Jesus really did lack a biological father. Can you imagine religious apologists shrugging their shoulders and saying anything remotely like the following? 'Who cares? Scientific evidence is completely irrelevant to theological questions. Wrong magisterium! We're concerned only with ultimate questions and with moral values. Neither DNA nor any other scientific evidence could ever have any bearing on the matter, one way or the other.'" (Ibid., [Emphasis added])
My point is that the absence of physical evidence is exactly what renders The Virgin Birth absolutely not a question of science because the physical evidence is the only thing that could make this particular belief a question of science of any kind. I read the entire thing and excerpted the part necessary to respond to the proposal, the part I used included the fact that there was no physical evidence, the key disability that the proposal would fail by .
Without physical evidence you could not find a human father or male family line, period. You don’t know what you possibly could find by way of other evidence. Remember we are talking specifically about a proposed miracle performed by the same God who made our bodies, right down to the DNA, RNA the constituent molecules of those and the atoms, subatomic particles, etc. Science is only capable of telling us about those, not how the omnipotent, omniscient creator of those can use the creation. This odd idea that the Dawkins-Dennett has that the same God who created the mechanism for genetic inheritance would be unable to take a miraculous intervention at the molecular level is just one disconnect of reason among many others. For all we know Jesus had some unique physical aspect which is quite unlike our genetic makeup. The people who wrote the gospels and adopted the belief didn’t know anything about that, it isn’t relevant to what they thought was important enough to write down. It’s likely that there are issues in human reproduction within evolution which are yet to be discovered which Dawkins has no way of knowing about and which will overturn all of his work. My suspicion is that their rigid and oddly isolated insistence on putting all their chips on one aspect of genetic reproduction as interpreted through natural selection will mark their work for early desuetude. Though I doubt that any future developments will be any better at clearing up the miracle in question.
The answers to any of those questions would be very interesting to science, though, alas, none of the evidence is available, it really doesn’t have anything to do with the belief in the miracle since the people who believe it also hold that it is specifically UNLIKE any other human conception which did or ever will happen in the entire range of human reproduction. In fact, since it was by action of God, it might not even scientifically classify as human reproduction, though I hadn’t thought of that until writing this paragraph. What it could be called is not relevant to the scientific analysis of The Virgin Birth.
ReplyDeleteIn your part three you ask this. “All of this raises the question, why? Why are some miracles amenable to study and others are not? Is it because some miracles are fundamental to belief and therefore sacrosanct? Or is there some other reason?”
First: If there is physical evidence to examine, as in the matter of whether or not Genesis is true, you can find out if the time frame, geological and biological evidence supports the claim of seven days and the rest of the early chapters of Genesis. Clearly, science can show that it doesn’t. In a specific claim of a miracle cure you might be able to determine if there is any evidence that the proposed disease or disability was present to begin with and if it is still there afterwards. You could determine if there is any medical explanation of some cures. Those are open to scientific investigation which might be able to tell us something specific. You do know that the Vatican does look, or at least it used to look, at claims of miraculous cures etc. using science in order to try to verify if what was claimed actually happened. I’m not sure how the canonization process was altered under JPII but they used to incorporate quite a bit of skepticism in the process which is one of the reasons it used to be so long.
Second: If there is no physical evidence and the miracle is claimed to be a unique event, such as the miracle in question, then you can’t make an analogy to it and other events you might claim as the equivalent. No other event can be analogous to a unique event. When the unique event involves supernatural agency the question of analogies which are held to be entirely due to natural causes, the impossibility of making an analogy becomes impossible and absurd.
Third: The miracle is defined in only the simplest of terms. You don’t know how the genetic material presumed to have been necessary could have originated or what it would be like. You can assume since Jesus was male that parthenogenesis couldn’t have been an explanation but since the range of possible mechanisms is unknown you don’t know how far that could narrow down your alternatives. You would, further, have to assert that anything you wanted to exclude on the basis of a natural explanation, would be something that God would be bound to by law or rule. You would have to do that to people who believe, perhaps even more strongly than that The Virgin Birth happened, that God is not bound by the very laws governing the natural universe which God made.
As to how I “style myself” I try not to do that at all. I can say if you try to classify me in that way, you might be disappointed because I don’t really think in terms of a specific philosophical system or see any one way of seeing the world as being sufficiently encompassing to do the job. While I do take logic very seriously, even that has its limits and for all we know, that limit is found at the barrier of the material universe. We have no reason to believe it applies in any proposed extra-natural entities. We’re not even certain it applies to all aspects of the material universe.