Are Miracles Possible?

Definitions are important.  David Hume defined that a "miracle" is that which is in opposition to the natural laws of the universe.  He defined the "universe" to be all that is, and that the laws are how they ran.  A miracle, by that definition, would be in opposition to reality.  Therefore nothing.

But a standard definition of "miracle" wouldn't be understood that way.  A "miracle" might be understood to be the action of a power of reality ( a subgroup of all that exists) that is beyond the perception of humanity to explain.  Then a miracle would just mean that the universe contains more than humanity can see.

Science has no problem with this.  They admit that gravity exists, but they do not know how or even how it works or where this force comes from. No one would call gravity a "miracle", because it follows certain predictable laws, but perhaps the origin of gravity is.  It is certainly beyond human comprehension.

A chronically ill person is sick, they are prayed for and then they are healed.  Is that not a miracle, whether you believe in God or not?  We experience hope with no reason to found it on and our hope is realized.  Is that not a miracle?  Science claims humanity will cease by a certain date, but humanity continues.  Is that a miracle, or simply progress?

The problem of a miracle is when we take a event or experience that is beyond human explanation or knowledge and determine absolutely what the source of that miracle is.  A miracle is, by its very nature, mysterious.  To claim that a source of a miracle is a powerful being or to claim it is a psychological phenomena are both equally premature.

Perhaps we need to embrace the mysterious nature of the universe?  Recognizing that we simply will not know all there is to be known?  Can we ever understand all causes of all things?

A Life of Questions is the Answer

Wonderfully animated film about a life of seeking truth, Stairs to No End:

http://vimeo.com/42507822

What is Your Relationship to Truth?

Stephen Crane writes:

"Truth," said a traveller,

"is a rock, a mighty fortress;
Often have I been to see it,
Even to its highest tower, 
From whence the world looks black."

"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom;
Long have I pursued it,
But never have I touched
The hem of it's garment"

Are you more like the first or the second traveller? Or is your relationship to truth different than either? What is your experience?

Perhaps truth is more of an archipelago, where you travel to one island, only to find a larger island behind it?

Perhaps truth is a library, where there are so many opinions and detail that cannot be measured, but there is no determining factor between them?  Even the distinction between "fiction" and "non-fiction" get us no closer to truth.

Perhaps truth is a dense, rich book, written in another language, which we cannot understand, nor learn?

Perhaps truth is a pool, in which one swims daily and is refreshed?

Perhaps truth is a dream in which one sleeps and rests, but when awakened both the substance and the content of the dream can no longer be grasped?

What do you think?

What Makes Good or Bad Food?

Who is eating who?

Recently there has been a whole glut of books and articles about food and growing practices.  Organic is good and genetically modified food is bad.  The movie Food Inc., the author Michael Pollan and the book and movie Fast Food Nation has stirred the pot and caused us to question a lot about what we eat.  However, there seems to be a lot of finger pointing and not many questions about the nature of our food.

What is the purpose of food?  Is food only about eating and health?  Of course if there is a food that is actually a poison, that would be bad, like the wells in Bangladesh that was discovered to have a natural arsenic in them, and so was killing off many villagers, over a period of years.  But should we look at food as only "healthy and unhealthy"?  Even though we all recognize that a pack of M&Ms aren't necessarily healthy, a starving child in Darfur would be overjoyed to have such a pack and no one would refuse it to her.  Nor a genetically modified carrot.

Of course, food isn't only about health.  There are many cultural factors involved in food.  Most places in the world would find pickled caterpillars to be distasteful, but not in Congo (and they really are tasty... nutty).  When we look at food, we want to know it's source and who made it and what it is made of because if there is horse or Monsanto or bugs involved, we don't want to have anything to do with it.  But these are cultural factors.  What is the difference between horsemeat and beef?  What is the difference between Monsanto and your local farmer who might (or might not) beat his wife?  What is the difference between bug-filled food and the fact that we are actually filled with bugs ourselves?  The fact that our culture teaches us that one is acceptable and the other not, for many reasons.  Perhaps we need to distinguish issues of culture and acceptability within our society and actual health.  Just because a cake looks like a newborn baby doesn't mean it isn't tasty (nor does it mean that we should eat it).  If we are concerned about cultural issues, should we rise a cry of alarm, if the health risks are actually minimal?

Super Size Me star getting a checkup

Of course, science should determine what is healthy and not healthy.  But which science?  The science of thirty years ago that told me that eggs were bad for me or the science of twenty years ago that said that eggs were healthy?  The science of modern medicine that focuses on medicine or of naturopathic medicine that focuses on naturally grown medicines?  Western science or Chinese or Indian?  Each of these sciences can give very different options and, for the most part, their methods are a black box to almost all of us and we only know their conclusions.  We trust one and not another, often because we grew up with one and not another.  We might change our minds radically from what we grew up with, and we might not, but who is to say that one choice or another in listening to science makes us live better or not?  It is not given for us to know what would happen, only what did.

Who makes our decisions about our food?

In the end, the questions about food come down to epistemological ones-- how do we know that this information or that is true for me?  And even if it is true for me, how do I know it is true for someone else?  Do I have enough time to follow up every study ever written?  And should I bother about it when I am relatively healthy?  Are there conclusions that every form of science agrees with (like a high level of some cholesterol is bad), and should we look for consensus between different disciplines?  How much should we remember that everything we put into our bodies-- whether a carrot or an M&M-- creates a chemical change in us, and which chemical changes do we really want? How much of our food should be medicinal, and how much of it preventative and how much of it enjoyment?  And how much should we insist that our family and friends make the same choices as we about our food?

Truth in the Library

When I introduce the parts of the library to my children as preschoolers I show them the basic sections: there is fiction, which is not true and non-fiction, which is true.  Of course, my statement is a lie, as are many things we tell preschoolers: babies appear in a mommy's tummy; the tooth fairy takes your teeth; the sky is green (don't you tell that to YOUR preschoolers?)  Anyway...

Non-fiction, of course, isn't true, in some ways.  There is a literature section of the Dewey Decimal Code (800s), which is as full of fictional narratives as the fiction section is.  And we have a lot of books which give, at best, spurious opinions-- political pundits, spiritual wackos, celebrity narratives-- which might give a version of the truth, but certainly are not completely true.

But what about other books on the shelves?  A self-help book is non-fiction, even though it won't actually help most of the people who read it.  A children's book about another nation can be misleading because it deals in such broad generalities.  And isn't that basically true about history?  If history is supposed to be a narrative about the past, then why does history need to be re-written by so many people with so many perspectives?  Isn't history just a fiction built up with facts?  The actual past is so complex it couldn't fit into a book.

And couldn't we say the same thing about almost any book?  It isn't actually the "truth" but it is a perspective on the truth.  Is there any kind of book that is actually "true"?

Of course, fiction has it's own kind of "truth", and it is simpler because we know the story isn't true.  Or at least most of it.  A lot of novels contain aspects of real people, especially autobiography.  But we don't concern ourselves with that kind of factual truth in fiction-- that's not the point.  The point is the narrative truth, the truth behind the details.

Is there any such thing as truth in details?  Or if we try to say anything about "facts" are we simply stating our opinion?  Certainly one opinion is better than another, suits the facts better than the other, but will we ever have enough information to make a determination of truth in any area?  One year eggs are good, the next they are bad, the next the egg whites are good and the next we are told its all good in moderation.  What about next year?  Will we ever discover truth, or is truth simply the opinion of the moment?

And there are truths from different points of view.  An ancient war looks very different from the winning general to a soldier on the losing side to the peasant who owned the land the battle was fought on.  Is there actually truth to be found, or only perspectives?  And we find that the more we talk about our memories, the more we rehearse them, the more they change.  So the memory we have today of an event yesterday isn't the memory we will have next week after we talked about it ten times.  Is next week's story as "true" as this weeks?  Is the imaginary event in the mind of the listener "true" at all?

Is there any such thing as truth?  And if there is, must it be so carefully worded as to be not worth listening to?  Are we better off just sticking with fiction because there we know what kind of truth we are dealing with?  Or should we not have a "fiction" and "non-fiction" sections in the library, but just a big sign over the door that says "OPINIONS"?

Religious Tolerance

Most people think that religious tolerance is a good thing.  We should live and let live and if a group wants to believe in something, even if it is weird, they should be allowed to do so.

But what if one's belief is that all other beliefs are wrong and that they would be severely judged if they continued to believe in the wrong thing?  Some might go to extreme measures (and many have) to convince others that they need to believe the same as oneself.  Does "live and let live" extend to beliefs that cannot accept a "live and let live" standard?  Frankly, any religion that holds itself exclusively (such as most monotheistic religionists) cannot accept tolerance as an overall standard, because their beliefs are too serious, too much a matter of life and death for it to be taken lightly enough to easily tolerate other beliefs.  Can all religions really be tolerant without compromising their faith?

And should all religions be tolerated?  Some worshipers of Kali acted on the belief that anyone not worshiping Kali should be killed.  How different is that from the 30 Years' War in Europe, when hundreds of thousands of people killed each other over which version of Christianity they accepted?  Or the Crusades, who killed people in the name of a belief?  Should such religion be tolerated?  

What about doing something less than direct killing? What if a religious practice (or a belief in general) doesn't trust modern medicine based on a scientific model?  What if they believe in an alternative model of medicine?  What if they insist upon faith healing and prayer without medicine?  Is our medicine so foolproof that we must demand that they take it?  Must we demand that they give it to their children, even against their beliefs?  Can we legislate lack of trust?  Can we afford not to?

And what about cultural tolerance?  Many religionists want to teach their children instead of sending them to public school, so they can promote their world view without outside influence.  Doesn't that warp the children for their whole lives?  Isn't that a form of enforced belief, even cult behavior?  Or are they right that legistlating public education is also a form of enforced acculturation, enforced belief?  If we don't know who is right and who is wrong, does anyone have the right to believe as we believe?

Does one cultural group have the right, ever, to enforce their beliefs on others?

Implications of Questions

Some think that to ask a question is to express doubt, which lacks confidence and faith.  But is that what a question does?  There are many reasons for asking a question:

-An openness to examine a subject critically
-An opportunity to hear another point of view
-A confession that you may not have all the answers, yourself
-A re-examination of something you may already know
-An opportunity to bring others down a path of inquiry you have already gone down

Are there times when questions imply weakness?  Or is it humility?  Are questions controlling, trying to determine the agenda?  Or are they serving others? Can questions be manipulative?  In what context can they be one or the other?

Do questions limit knowledge or increase knowledge?

Are There Absolutes?

How can we know anything?  I mean ANYTHING?

Frankly, it is often a good policy to doubt everything.  And the more information we get, the more we doubt.  Every time someone sends me information, I want to check it out on snopes.com.  But how do I know that snopes is accurate?  We've learned that the maps we learn geography on are inaccurate, that dictionaries are changable, that encyclopedias only give one point of view.  What our grade school teachers taught us is corrected in high school and that is corrected in college and in real life we learn the issues we spent so much time on in school are insignificant (think about the various things we learned about the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving).

How can we absolutely trust any piece of information, let alone answers to big questions?  Is anything we learn actually, permanently true?  Or is it only temporarily true until the next scientific study?  Is our most firm observations and truths that we base our lives on merely guesses?  Are they only cultural artifacts that will be replaced in the next generation?

Is there anything that we can rest on as solid evidence?  Descartes claimed that the only solid evidential proof we can have is "I think, therefore I am".  But even in that, aren't there assumptions in that statement about what "I" is?  Am "I" personal?  Perhaps "I" is not an "I", meaning an individual, but an entity, a machine, or a collective?

And what if we can know nothing in an absolute sense-- does this mean that we cannot make truth claims? Is every bit of truth only able to be proceeded with "I think" or "I believe"?

Question Everything?

I have had times that my questions threatened people.  Just asking a question or exploring a topic frightened them, because they were afraid of what the answer might bring.

Are there questions that shouldn't be asked?  Are there questions that are so dangerous that they would cause the downfall of the world?  Or of a personal world?  Should we ever be afraid of questions, or of finding out the truth?

Is there a wrong time for certain questions?  Perhaps all questions are good at certain times, but not others?  Is there ever a time in our lives that we can stop asking questions-- not because we know everything (that's not possible), but because discovering truth won't benefit us anymore?

Do questions always lead to truth?  Is there a kind of question that leads to a false conclusion, just by asking it?  Is it better to ask questions or to make statements of truth, assuming we know it?  

Can we ask questions which uses a lot of time in deliberation when our time could be better spent doing something else?