Three Kinds of Miracle
There is the miracle of change, the miracle of possibility, and the miracle of serenity.
Bert Erdman says that theologians can say whatever they want regardless of facts while a historian of biblical history lille himself are disciplined in that they can only point out to what texts say and compare them to one another so as to arrive at an accurate historical narrative and so can conclude that Jesus never said He was God. THat point of view is too harsh on theologians. What they offer are explanations that make sense, which means can be expressed in words and internally consistent about supernal things, like the Trinity or the Resurrection. But these exercises in theology can do even more.Theological terms and distinctions addressed to explaining God and religion can be turned into philosophy in that tey apply to distinctions in the nature of existence, which is the realm of metaphysics.
A good example of the transition from theology to metaphysics are the proofs of the existence of God that are exhibited by St. Thomas. They may fail as proofs but the devices each do catch a feature of what it is to be. Aquinas says that existence is better than non-existence and that means God exists because that is the preferred state and God is whatever is best. Revealing the fallacy of that argument allows considerations of the nature of existence. Not all attributes are scalar and so being existent is not better than being non-existent, just a different stage. Moreover, even things that are scaler need not mean there is a best or most. Yes, there is an absolute zero for temperature but there is no such thing as the hottest or that there is a most perfect and therefore best beauty. There are different kinds of beauty. The idea that grecian urn is the most perfect form is conventional rather than necessary. So Aquinas’s failures advance metaphysics.
Another valuable example of a theological controversy that can be generalized into a description of metaphysics, which is the study of being for itself, is available in the three interpretations that are offered for miracles, which is clearly a feature of religion, the experience of it made meaningful by finding words to describe it. The first and most ordinary description of miracles is that these are events which violate nature. These include the parting of the Red Sea and the Resurrection. (The communion in the Catholic Mass is not strictly a miracle even though the claim is that bread and wine are transformed into flesh and blood because there is no claim that the transformation is at all visible, as the claim of the named miracles are, but shrouded in words so that the altered states are different in name or in essence rather than in reality.) It is no use to say the Israelites crossed over the Sea of Reeds and so was a natural event because if that were the case it was no longer a miracle in this meaning of “miracle”.
Such an explanation away from a miracle that violates nature would put it into the second category of miracle which is a term used, which is that a miracle is any event so earth shatteringly significant that it is not divinely inspired or created and so the change just had to be because a person could not imagine a world where that event did not come to be. So people quite appropriately speak of the birth of a baby or finding your true love as a miracle because you can no longer imagine having had a life without them, life before that chaos or a limbo without enlightenment, accidents rather than necessities. Here, in this second case, there is no violation of nature, just the sense that the past was coincidental while the miraculous event was necessary. You are fated to meet your spouse because it is so important that you cannot treat it as coincidental. A miracle is whatever is singularly or collectively important, whether or not the Red Sea was divided and that created flounders. It was just absolutely necessary that it happened.
A third and viable meaning for miracle that is even further removed from a violation of nature is a subjective evaluation about how the processes of nature as well as of the supernatural are so awesome as to make oneself in the presence of a God-like power. Looking at the sunset creates a feeling of beauty even if you learn it is the result of a lot of soot in the sky. It is overwhelming as well in scope.Scientists can be awed at the immensity of the universe or the intricacies of biological evolution, people insignificant next to those immensities, just as people are awed by the overly large structures of skyscrapers or the plans Hitler had for a newly built Berlin after the war was successfully completed. That is so even if the awesome things are also cringeworthy, as is the case with a world of pterodactyls many ages ago without the presence of people or even most mammals. Babies and puppies are also awesome, perhaps because they are fragile rather than enormous and so it is very lucky to have them and so think they could not be lucky, which makes this third kind of miracle into examples of the second type, all three types sharing a familiarity of necessary specialness.
The third kind of miracle can create an ambivalent response. Spinoza was considered God intoxicated because he had what he considered his identification with the all of everything because that is just the intensification of an experience of all that is, including both the natural and the conceptual realms. But Spinoza can also be considered as an atheist in that he redefined terms so that God is the name for everything and can’t make choices and that ethics is reduced into psychology. So modern day scientists can be in awe of the immensity of space or the intricacies of biology and call that religious and treat science as the how rather than the why or else say, following others, there is no need for the God hypothesis. There is no why, only how.
A theological definition of three kinds of miracles can be generalized so as to describe three kinds of a property of existence, which is the concept of cause, which is about how and what happens when things change. A first definition of cause is parallel to the idea that a miracle intervenes or violates nature. In this case, a cause is whatever it is that can disrupt or give resistance to what already exists. You push a boulder up the mountain; you finagle an internal combustion engine so you can speed at eighty miles an hour; you insist your colleagues are all wrong in the way the committee should proceed. In that sense, cause is told in the form of a story because stories involve people doing something to change an initial condition, such as the placement of Claudius on the throne when,. Perhaps, Hamlet would be thought the rightful heir since he was son of the king and been superseded because he was away at Wittenberg and has now returned to Denmark. What is to be done with him or by him? Some plays are said to have n o action that changes things but Ibsenism shows that from Chekov and Shaw, activities in plays can change a mood. Eliza not only has become able to act like an aristocrat; she is able to verbally battle with Higgins as an equal person. If there is nothing to overcome, there is no cause.
That causation is regarded as a miracle in the ordinary sense that comes about in that it is problematic, events occurring within time to change from one state to another. How is it that one moment is connected to the next, the first transformed into the latter? That is the mystery of time. Malebranche, the underappreciated Seventeenth Century Catholic theologian and philosopher, solved the problem by asserting that every moment was a miracle in that God intervened agt every moment to make the next thing happen. Rather than desacralizing nature, miracles are available if you understand them right. That allows all people to feel serene, because every moment is guided even if free just as any scientist will say that people are free because they are in accord with the laws that in this special sense that they need not be enforced to be real.
A particular kind of cause of this first type, as change, is the phenomenon of a trial, where people are found responsible for the consequences of their actions in the past and so as to include anticipated actions, such as planning a crime, because that is also an action if a person has planned with confederates to do a bank robbery. This kind of cause is, however, very specialized, in that only people can be ascribed to having been the cause of a crime because criminal justice is out to blame people for not having acted properly rather than the crime being the result of a defective brain or what is called acts of God. So a trial eliminates all the forces or conditions not relevant for a person's intention . You may have had a weak septum but only the punch in the nose is considered as an impact that caused the crime. Only people can be blameworthy while biology is a natural process and not a person. That people die is natural, while a mistake in surgery is subject to a suit.
The second kind of miracle, which is a consequence that is momentous, can be generalized into a meaning for cause, which is that some events will be more likely than others to play a significant role in the future. So a butterfly can cause a catastrophe, but a hurricane is more likely. The idea of probability does not depend on contemporary elaborations of inferential statistics, but has always been with people. They knew the sun would set but, unlike Bertrand Russell’s chicken, who did not know it would be sacrificed in the morning when the sun came up, people do wonder at how regular were natural and celestial cycles and so built Stonehenge and calendars to chart the miraculous ways they repeated rather than were unreliable.and that they would face the cold of winter without knowing how harsh it might be and appealed to the gods to intervene to make the winter more mild, and that one species was likely to be more dangerous than another if approached by a human. People, one can presume, the likelihood of whether an approaching stranger is a danger and lessens or intensifies distrust on the basis of telling signs, such as one's tattoos or the person’s gestures, it always, nonetheless, that you can’t be certain even if you and he smoke the peace pipe.
People are still amazed at possible momentous things and so speculate about whether storms are the sign of the Second Coming or that weather variations will lead to climatic catastrophes, and need to heed the warning that view events are really apocalyptic however much there is a chance of being killed on the highway during the drive home, or that you might find your wife has left home when you get home. There is no reason to think that we have all become less superstitious because we calculate better. To the contrary, the danger of momentous but statistical outcomes becomes more present and horrifying as we consider whether your medical testing means you have a larger chance of getting prostate surgery or whether genetic testing shows your unborn child may have abnormalities. The era of statistics increases uncertainty and so makes religious solace even more attractive than when intrusions might be made in life by witches and demons.
When possibility is the object of attention, it shows that the universe is not ordained and allows for choice. That is introduced into the inventory of reality and so free will is not a property of persons but of existence, some mammals better or worse at engaging in it, thinking ahead. A dog knows when called to dinner that the bowl will become full and people wonder whether they can anticipate they will succeed at a task and reflect on the task as well as the separation between the anticipation of a task and its accomplishment.
The third definition of cause corresponds to the third definition of miracle, which is to stand back at the amazement of nature rather than resist it to notice its own probabilistic nature. That, in effect, is to negate the ordinary sense that cause means impact by reducing nature to formulas or other descriptions where nature is rule-like but does not intervene in nature but only describes it, magical formulas which provoke interventions now understood as descriptions alone. Invoking “F=MA” doesn’t accomplish anything, however profound the formula may be as the way the universe works. You can use physical or biological forces but the words are only words, except in comic books, where “Shazam” turned a mere mortal into a superhero, however many superhero movies wish it were so. How a formula seems to guide nature and is said to be akin to the dictates of a lawgiver, a divine legislator, remains a mystery.
The three definitions of miracle can be applied to politics as well as to the idea of cause. The first view is that not much changes in political life throughout the ages because it is always an uphill fight, overcoming resistance, so that a politician can grasp the brass ring of power. Politics hasn’t changed since David went from being the king’s courtier to becoming a rebel leader and then an overbearing king himself. What seems in retrospect seems inevitable, had to be accomplished through political and, in modern times, electoral mobilization. So people take the Federal Drug Administration to supervise the safety of their pharmaceuticals, but that had to be legislated into existence, and faced a contentious fight, as happened with the Affordable Care Act which was unpopular until it was in place for a few years and is regarded as necessary now by most vogters. What seems like it is stable, like Roe v. Wade, is not when people act against it just as what seems uncertain becomes certain, when people have the National Labor Relations Act in place as has been the case for ninety or so years. Indeed, Max Weber insisted on imaging charismatic or otherwise called singular figures as essential so as to overcome the entropy of custom and beau racracy. There had to be some first cause whereby politics could change and so the necessary job, the logical need for a compensating force to bring about change that would otherwise never happen, was the charismatic, a religious like invocation of a miraculous figure that every once in a while emerges to overcome the applecart, which is what politics, because there never was a time before politics that was not resistance, whether to overcome a Platonic city state imbued with loyalty replaced by a cosmopolitanism described by aristotle in a generation or two, or an American Republic so successful that we forget that the idea was at the time revolutionary.
The second type of miracle that applies to politics presents a very different view than is available as the ever ending struggle of politicians to change things. It is the idea that there are new political structures that come into place that are so formidable that all aspects of social life are overshadowed by them, however murky may be the origins of these structures, however much their designs become part of their national histories and are taught in schools at all levels of education. It seems remarkable and astonishing that the collection of people who made up the Founding Fathers were so perspicacious as to create their perpetual motion machine called the Constitution. It seems like a miracle no matter how much these people can be placed in their lives and circumstances and engaged in proposals and compromises before coming up with the document. Democracy is another one of these large scale movements which came to dominate Western societies in the early Nineteenth Century and has sustained itself, encompassing Europe and North America and large parts of Asia, despite what might seem the cumbersome apparatus of arranging for reasonably legitimate elections and short terms of office, whereby royal regimes had long tenure and succession was most of the time assured, rueing the day when that secession was not clear.
The possibility of a successful new alternative political formation that would have great consequence for governments and even the psyches of people was totalitarianism, which arose about a hundred years ago, but was vanquished by 1989, with the fall of the Soviet Union and where Russian government was replaced soon enough by authoritarianism, a very o;ld form of government,,where leaders only kill off their political rivals.Other social structures such as bureaucracy are very old, as old as the pyramids, as are also such social structures like professionalism, but there are also innovations, like cultic religions becoming congregation al at the time of Jesus and the rise of Protestantism, which insisted that miracles were accomplished in spiritual personal transformations rather than miracles, like confession or the Mass, however much the officiant was legitimately designated. So major political upheavals into new forms of social and political structures are uncertain of origin however profound their impact and people who bother can wonder how that could have come about. Just like being amazed at finding a spouse or a child especially in that people cling to the idea that whatever is has to be and so these developments are a rejection of politics as just the usual resistances.
The third way of understanding politics is applying the idea of standing back and experiencing political and social life as in accord with general principles, that is a substitute for it being individually or collectively motivated. There might be cycles which dominate, such as a circulation of elites, or more familiar to American politics, the idea that periods of innovation are replaced by periods of consolidation as when, again, Eisenhower accepted the New Deal, or when Jim Crow replaced Radical Republicanism. Or else there might be a secular trend whereby incrementally there grows up a greater suffrage or the extension of medical insurance so that it began for the elderly and now is all but universal. Necessary social mechanisms are discovered, like regulated collective bargaining, though the guarantee of reliable and comprehensive voting frights has had a setback in recent years, while the ability to control; the business cycle has not found to be a satisfactory solution in that the Federal Reserve has only the crude device of changing interest rates up and down but has added quantitative easing into its repertoire.
Some sociologists like Parsons rely less on season-like changes to see the patterns of social and political life. Instead, they try to abstract to the level of what are the inevitably necessary aspects of social life so that societies have to meet their perquisites one way or the other or else society will turn into chaos. This is very different from single factor theories which say that avoiding inflation is the main thing so that an economy will collapse and so will the entire society, forgetting that there are many ways for a society to collapse: if it doesn’t maintain an educational system or if it allows great ethnic unrest. And, anyway, stability is not the only way to describe a society, in that there is always its march towards inclusiveness and greater personal liberty.
Here is a reverse miracle in politics. While low information voters do not have to be conspiracy theorists, people of the working class and poverty areas mobilized by class and ethnic loyalties, low information voters can find conspiracy theories, whereby some diabolical people secretly plan to control politics, quite attractive. Conspiracy theorists as identifying an easily mastered mechanism with magical properties rather than attending to what os a[p[parently real, which is that people vote their interests and preferences and legislators are concerned to get reelected and that you have to put up with your boss even if he is nasty because you want to keep your job. Getting rid of miracles means appealing to ordinary situations and motives. Just the opposite of miraculous thinking which is beneficial and instead spreads gloom and doom.
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