On miracles

Just a quick sketch of an argument against thinking of miracles as violations of laws of nature. I doubt it's very original (In fact, I know it isn't, because Geoff Anders was talking about something like this a while back), and I'm sure it's fairly naïve. But anyhow, into the breach.

First, I'm concerned with official laws of nature, rather than statistical laws. Official laws say what happens, categorically: all ravens are black; momentum is conserved; the evolution of the quantum wave-function obeys such-and-such a differential equation—€“that kind of thing.

(Statistical laws, on the other hand, say that certain things are more likely than others to occur, in whatever sense of "likely" is appropriate here. It's hard to say what precisely constitutes a "violation" of a statistical law, but at least on some readings miracles certainly do violate some statistical laws, simply by virtue of being unusual events. But the unusual, in various degrees, is really pretty commonplace.)

Second, i'm concerned with macroscopic miracles: events at the scale of people and everyday objects. Lazarus is raised from the dead, Moses parts the Red Sea, that kind of thing. Maybe there are miracles that occur on the Planck scale, which are only detectable with sensitive instruments; but these aren't the sort of miracles that make a difference to most religions.

Then the main argument is just this: on our best accounts, the official laws of nature don't rule out any macroscopic events to speak of. (This, by the way, is also a problem for "falsifiability" accounts of scientific theories---in case that coffin needed any more nails.)

For illustration, imagine that the official laws are Newtonian mechanics. People die, sometimes; this is one of the events that is consistent with the laws (I presume). Well, it's a fact about Newtonian mechanics that if an event is consistent with it, the time-reversal of that event is consistent too. So run the death backwards, and---presto!---Lazarus rises from the dead. (Statistical laws broken? Hell yeah (in some suitable sense of "broken"). But that, remember, is none of our concern.)

The kinds of observations we ordinarily make of the world aren't nearly fine-toothed enough to distinguish states of affairs in which (according to the dynamics) run-of-the-mill events are about to occur, from states of affairs in which (still according to the dynamics) great marvels are about to occur. And so miraculous events are never physically impossible, conditionalized on our knowledge of the physical state of the world. And, I claim, this situation isn't peculiar to Newtonian mechanics. It ought to be a feature of any good candidate for the official laws (have to think more about why this would be true).

(When quantum physics enters the picture, the story is even more fun. My grip on the quantum world is loose, but as I understand the folk tales, anything is possible.)

So if macroscopic events can count as miracles (as I assume they can), then miracles aren't violations of the official laws of nature.