Apologetic Pigs, Answered Prayers, and other Miscellanies

Before I got sidetracked on my summer reading challenge I was discussing synchronicity and specifically the question "Does meticulously-tuned evil count as a defeater for meticulously-tuned good?" (That itself was a side track off of the review of The Christian Delusion.) While I need to get back to CD, it ain't gonna happen in the next week. You see, we're leaving in an hour for a week of fun and frolic in Vancouver/Whistler. (I'm looking forward in particular to mastering the luge.)

Apologetic pigs and other general insults

In the interim I have but a moment to wrap things up on that earlier post on evil and synchronicity. I am thankful to BrapGronk who dealt directly with the post, even if in the process I was compared to a pig:

"Hopefully we all know by now that arguing good vs. evil with an apologist is like mud-wrestling with a pig: They like it. It's what they do. They're good at it."

That's a great multi-purpose insult by analogy. Here's the general form for use in other contexts:

"Hopefully we all know by now that arguing _____ with a(n) _____ is like mud-wrestling with a pig: They like it. It's what they do. They're good at it."

For instance,

"Hopefully we all know by now that arguing Grand Theft Auto IV with a PS3 gamer is like mud-wrestling with a pig: They like it. It's what they do. They're good at it."

Atheists and their focus on high E-MDS events

Anyway, beyond that rhetorical nugget of gold, BrapGronk says that cases of meticulously-tuned evil do not necessarily count against meticulously-tuned good. Interestingly, BrapGronk observes: "Through no fault of their own, people are more likely to propagate and suggest divine intervention for stories with a high G-MDS than they are for stories with a high E-MDS."

This may be true for Christians; I suspect it is. But it is obviously not true for other people like atheists. If Christians tend to screen out the evil events as counting against divine action, atheists. skeptics, et cetera tend to screen out events with a high G-MDS as counting for divine action.

"As I'll say in my next post"

I tend to use that line a lot. But rarely do I follow through because there is always a new distraction by the time I get to the next post. So in "Does meticulously-tuned evil count as a defeater for meticulously-tuned good?" I made the usual mistake as I wrote:

as I'll say in my next post, I think that the lack of evidence for answered prayers (e.g. in a statistically significant way under controlled conditions) is not evidentially significant insofar as we are dealing here not with a natural, testable law but with an agent.

Well not surprisingly, I didn't say that in my next post. But I'll make good by saying it here. Critics of synchronous events pointing to a divine intelligence commonly complain that these suggestive events cannot be replicated under controlled laboratory conditions. (Consider the well known studies of imprecatory prayer.)

This is actually a doubly flawed red herring/canard. (Yes, not just a mere red herring, but one that gets a 'slash canard' too. That's a deluxe.)

1: Science in the lab, but only in the lab?

To begin with, science is not exhausted by tests which can be reproduced under laboratory conditions, and to say they are would be an absurdly restrictive view of science. There are many anomalous events in the past which are studied by the historical sciences and which are not addressed by laboratory experiments.

For instance, how are you going to explain the mass extinction of the dinosaurs through lab experiments? On the contrary, when you're on this case, you pursue a method of abduction, inferring the best explanation for the past event. The fact that you cannot reproduce a past event in the lab isn't an argument against that event, whether it is a meteorite hurtling into the Yucatan or an answered prayer.

2: God is an agent not a natural effect

This brings us to the even deeper problem.

Any putative event has two possible explanatory causes: an event cause and an agent cause. At least some event causes are repeatable and testable in laboratory conditions, but only if the same conditions can be replicated and often they cannot (as I noted above). But agent causes (that is, you and I) are not like that.

Consider this case:

Suzy walks into work on Monday. As she walks past Don's desk he says "Good Morning Suzy!"

Suzy ensures the same conditions obtain on Tuesday morning. She wears the same dress and walks by Don's desk at the same time and following the exact same path. But now Don says "What's the good word Suze?"

On Wednesday Suzy repeats the experiment and this morning Don yawns and nods as Suzy walks by. No verbal greeting at all!

What's going on?

Um, Don's an agent. You can't expect him to act in the same way as if he were like a law of nature.
So why do these skeptics complain when God acts like an agent, which is precisely what Christians believe God to be. If Christians believed God was, say, "The Fifth Fundamental Force," then things might be different. But they don't. So unanswered prayers and events that lack synchronicity is no argument against answered prayers and highly synchronous events anymore than Don's varying greetings are an argument against Don's agency.

Gotta go

Okay, it's time to pack up the car. I'm probably not going to have internet access for the next week so as Nelson Muntz used to say on The Simpsons, "smell ya later."