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Is this argument about miracles fallacious and if so how?

  • Every miracle we have studied can be better explained without God's intervention.

  • So we infer via abduction and induction that God will never perform a miracle.

  • So we can define a miracle as something impossible: that's what is meant by 'miracle'

The problem I have with it is the last step. That's definitely not what some people mean by a miracle; even if they are indeed impossible, you cannot define 'miracle' as 'impossible event' without a significant loss of meaning. Why not just stop at the 2nd step?

Is it a fallacy to offer a necessary conclusion (I think that's what it says: that everything is necessarily not a miracle) based on an inductive inference?

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    simple answer is it's physically but not logically impossible. dwai
    – user62090
    Commented Aug 7, 2022 at 21:38
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    The argument is fallacious and artificial. Nothing seems to follow from any of the premises, and the premises themselves seem built to nominally prove a preordained conclusion.
    – Mark Andrews
    Commented Aug 7, 2022 at 23:08
  • First, any argument by abduction or induction is formally fallacious, those forms of inference can, by definition, produce false conclusions from true premises. Their conclusions are, at best, plausible, and that in favorable conditions. Second, "impossible" is ambiguous, there are many notions of possibility. "Miracles", strictly speaking, refer to physically impossible events, and often to just statistically improbable events. This is entirely lost in your "definition" exactly because conditions for applying abduction and induction are ignored, as is the relevant notion of possibility.
    – Conifold
    Commented Aug 8, 2022 at 5:42
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    One effect of this argument is that it points out the intellectual vacuity of the notion of "best explanation". What anyone considers the best explanation is entirely controlled by prejudices. To someone who believes in God, the best explanation for Jesus curing the blind is a miracle. To someone who does not believe in God, the best explanation is some sort of fraud, either on the part of Jesus or on the part of whoever passed on the history. There is no such thing as an objective best explanation, and therefore no such thing as objective abduction.
    – David Gudeman
    Commented Aug 8, 2022 at 6:28
  • I think that is a better insight, thanks @DavidGudeman
    – user62090
    Commented Aug 8, 2022 at 18:39

2 Answers 2

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If you use induction and/or abduction to derive general statement with certainty then it's pretty much always fallacious.

So we infer via abduction and induction that God will never perform a miracle.

That here is already problematic. Because that's not an implication of

Every miracle we have studied can be better explained without God's intervention.

Just because events can be better studied and explained without God's intervention doesn't necessarily mean that they can't still be caused by gods intervention. God, though he/she/it exists could work through nature. So it doesn't say that there is no god and that he doesn't interact with the world, just that it's more suitable for studying and explaining things to assume that it's not done by god.

I mean if it's a physical process that happens according to certain predictable patterns than that's infinitely more useful to predict what's going to happen next than if you'd assume things are the result of a person who acts on a whim, which makes pretty much any attempt at predicting anything bound to fail to begin with.

So we can define a miracle as something impossible: that's what is meant by 'miracle'

And that's not a conclusion. Like "can" and "define" aren't really the terms of certainty that you expect for a general statement. So no it doesn't follow from the previous. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense. Like if you can explain natural events better using the language of science than what's left for the "supernatural" is that what is not being able to be described by the language of the natural... And that's apparently literally the definition of miracle...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle

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  • Haxor789 -- this is a mostly good answer, but referring to intentional acts as "acting on a whim", and therefore unpredictable, is a drastic misrepresentation of agency as a cause. We humans developed a "theory of other minds" explicitly to decode intentional behavior, so one does not treat it as a "whim", but as a hypothesis of intention. That this can be generally applicable, is demonstrated by how the tools of detecting intentionality are deployed in the SETI program, to find the indications of intentionality elsewhere in the galaxy.
    – Dcleve
    Commented Aug 8, 2022 at 22:56
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The short answer is "yes". This argument contains a fallacy of asserting an unsupported conclusion. And that is common to all arguments which use inductive evidence to argue for a "never" or "always" conclusion.

A longer answer is: this argument would benefit from a much more explicit restructuring. Here is a suggestion, which I think captures your claim, and I think does so without being fallacious:

  1. Define the "physical" as the conclusions of a completed science
  2. Postulate that a completed science is causally closed
  3. Postulate that nothing considered "spiritual" or "abstract" or "conscious" today is part of the conclusions of a completed science -- IE Popper/Frege's worlds 2 and 3 are not needed for a scientific understanding of our universe.
  4. Define Gods and Spirits as world 2 entities.
  5. Define a miracle as an event in which a world 2 entity is causal on world 1, the physical, providing an causal exception violating the completed science.
  6. With our currently uncompleted science, there are events which have been postulated to be miracles, should science ever be completed.
  7. Investigation of these claims cannot be definitive with uncompleted science, but no investigations to date have provided any evidence for such claims to actually be miracles.
  8. Therefore it is reasonable to infer that there have been no miracles, and will not be any.

More complete answer:

Of my suggested alternate 1-8 argument, there is a LOT of legitimate criticism of 1-8 by philosophy.

For 1, it is impossible to define a completed science, that is Hempel's Dilemma. And IF science is completed, our current conception of it includes emergence, and is pluralist, and no pluralist logic structure can be complete and fully coherent -- which would lead to a fully complete science being IN coherent, so that one cannot MAKE valid universal claims about it.

Both 2 and 3, which are claims about 1, are highly suspect. We know that math seems to be causal on quantum events ("shut up and calculate" -- information theory based Quantum interpretation, etc). And that consciousness sure seems to be causal. Hunger (a qualia) motivates me.

And for 2 to be true, SCIENTISM must be true -- IE there is no value to history knowledge, math knowledge, etc., as every fact about the world must be derivable from scientific knowledge. This of course is not possible for a pluralist science as noted above. So for this argument to work, it needs both reductionism added to eliminate scientific pluralism, and scientism added to eliminate those pesky non-science knowledges. But our current best understanding is that reductionism and scientism are refuted ... which leaves this argument in conflict with scientific consensus of today...

For 3 to be true, then the emergent pluralism that is the most popular current form of physicalism, cannot be true. Emergent consciousness is not a consensus, but it is the currently most common position in philosophy of mind, and the majority view among physicalists.

I won't challenge 4, 5, or 6, but 7 appears to be false in multiple areas. The emergent consciousness and position is what most physicalists have been forced to adopt, rather than abandoning physicalism.

That our universe has apparent Fine Tuning, is an observation in need of an explanation, and currently intentionality is the only one consistent with Popper's testability criteria.

That abiogenesis could happen, is theoretically implausible in the extreme, with every mechanism proposed to date.

Every event of conscious agency, appears to be a miracle per our evolutionarily intrinsic model of consciousness (Caretesian dualism is adopted innately by all children).

Multiple areas of psi studies show consistent psi phenomenon, using our best science methods, as summarized by the AAAS scientific professional society that studies these questions. https://parapsych.org/articles/36/55/what_is_the_stateoftheevidence.aspx

So 1, 2, 3, and 7 all appear to be invalid assumptions, and to get to 8, one needs absolute reductionism and scientism too, both of which also appear untrue. So -- this more clearly articulated and non-fallacious argument, appears simply to be wrong.

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