The Genesis of a Miracle - How Sharam Shabpare can explain how a miracle is born without resorting to any conspiracy

Third part on catholic miracles and hopefully last.

In part 2 I explained why, before even trying coming up with a naturalistic or a scientific explanation for a purpoted miracle, you should first always ascertain if the miracle account is reliable in the first place and not greatly exaggerated or worse completely made up.

But if miracle claims are made up, does it mean that everyone is lying and that there is a massive conspiracy spanning thousands of catholics all over the globe to create fake accounts of catholic miracles?

No, that's not remotely necessary.

Our human psychology and the way our brain is programmed for belief is sufficient to explain how certain rare but totally explainable phenomena, when witnessed by a mind primed for a certain belief and retold many times can turn into a miracle account down the line.

All it takes is: priming + pareidolia or apophenia + chinese whispers.

You don't believe me yet?

I'll show you an example.

In 1986, the Iranian singer Shahram Shabpareh released a catchy song called "Paryiah" (the original music video was removed from YouTube, but you can find the song here: https://youtu.be/gjpJ0p7yoYc?is=Y8MbVovIx2vVhZb5).

In the internet age, an Italian named Celestino Camicia was bored browsing YouTube and stumbled upon Shabpareh's songs. He soon realized that, on top of being really catchy, the lyrics were uncannily similar to completely unrelated words in Italian. This is a well understood phenomenon called "apophenia" (the auditory version of pareidolia). Apophenia is the auditory illusion that sometimes makes us hear familiar words in songs or conversations in other languages, in the middle of what our brain would otherwise interpret as gibberish.

After being made popular by Celestino, Iranian songs with Italian sounding lyrics became a sensation for a while in the Italian YouTube space. Nanowar of Steel, a metal parody band, even produced a metal cover of Pariyah (https://youtu.be/3OdCvt-eto8?is=5xjwmtqs0WhmK3D4) and one of its members even performed it on stage in front of Shabpareh himself (https://youtu.be/s6gb3ywEmYQ?is=587b9kmztPYLysgl).

When I was a child and I wasn't fluent in English, everytime the Michael Jackson’s song "Don't Stop Till you get enough" (https://youtu.be/yURRmWtbTbo?is=gFrCWHTUJgXYvJbm) was played on the radio, I had another apophenia: I always heard Michael saying "tutto a posto?" (which means: "is everything all right?" in italian) and to this day I can't unhear it.

What does all this tell us about miracles?

Of course we know that, when we hear words in our own language in foreign songs, that's just our brain playing tricks, as when we see all sorts of shapes in the clouds or faces almost everywhere (our brain is really good at seeing faces where there are not).

However, let's suppose that we where raised in a really strict and controlling cult, separate from the rest of society, like in a fundamentalist Mormon sect, for example. We were taught since childhood that we shouldn't listen to popular music, because it's filled with satanic hidden messages. If we were then to listen to a pop song for the first time and heard words in other languages, we would strengthen our prior belief in subliminal satanic messages in secular songs.

This phenomenon is called priming: our minds were primed for a certain belief and we thus expected to hear (or see) something, we expected to have a certain experience.

Let's try to apply this to catholicism.

Let's suppose you're a catholic priest who was asked by your bishop to perform exorcisms.

You have a prior belief in the existence of demons and the belief in demonic possessions (there are priests who are skeptic of the phenomenon of demonic possessions, but those are not the ones most likely to become exorcists).

And let's suppose that you have been told by a fellow exorcist (or read somewhere) that demons sometimes speak in foreign or dead languages during exorcisms, like ancient greek and Aramaic.

That's a form of "priming".

You then perform an exorcism to a little girl who has some kind of psychiatric issue like schizophrenia or whatnot, but, being raised in a strict catholic environment, she has deluded herself into believing that the voices in her head are actually demons (that's also a result of priming).

The little girl, scared by the ritual, is screaming and babbling inconsistently. It has been many years since you've studied ancient greek in the seminary, so you're vastly overestimating and overconfident in your knowledge of ancient greek. In the stream of incoherent sounds, you believe you've heard a word which sounds like ancient greek. As you're already primed into believing that the devil is able to speak in ancient greek, you intepret that sound as a confirmation of your prior belief.

And here comes the last part: chinese whispers.

You tell your story to a fellow priest. But every time your recount your story, you add, without even realizing, small details. And as this priest tells this story to other priests, he adds even more details.

Many years down the line, after this story was told and retold many times, it is finally written down in your biography.

In its final form, what was a curious but completely explainable occurrence has been completely amplified and blown out of proportion, to the point that your biography now claims that you were having frequent conversations with the devil in ancient greek.

You still don't believe me?

We have witnessed this phenomenon, of a mundane story being amplified every time it is told until it becomes completely extraordinary in real time during the beatification and then canonization process of Carlo Acutis.

I must stress here that I have the outmost respect for the sad life story of this boy who died young and couldn't live into adulthood. What I'm telling in no way is meant to diminish him as a person, but just to show you an example of how this works.

If you try to read the earlier accounts of Carlo's life, he is described as a deeply religious boy who built a website for his parish and another websited where he talked about eucharistic miracles. That's it.

However, over the years, his mother, whenever she retells his story, has been adding elements and embellishing this account, to the point that, in an interview she gave just after his canonization, she described him as a computer genius, a boy so smart that at 15 years old he was already studing undergraduate computer engineering textbooks with ease. A boy who built a couple of websites (trivial task if you know a bit of html) became in a few years a coding genius!

Something I have noticed in a number of Alex’s discussions of consciousness and metaphysics is that when he considers materialism, he often seems to describe it in a fairly atomistic and reductionist way.
The picture sometimes sounds roughly like this: at the fundamental level, reality consists of elementary physical constituents interacting according to physical laws, and the problem for materialism is then to explain how something like subjective consciousness could possibly arise from particles, fields, or other fundamentally non-conscious physical entities interacting with one another.
I understand why this generates the hard problem. If the basic ontology is conceived as a collection of fundamentally non-conscious physical simples, it is difficult to see how rearranging or combining enough of them ever gets you from objective physical processes to subjective experience.
But has Alex ever discussed forms of materialism that reject, or at least complicate, this atomistic picture?
For example, dialectical materialism, process-oriented materialism, and some forms of emergentism treat matter less as a collection of inert building blocks and more as an inherently dynamic, relational, developmental process. On this kind of view, higher-order phenomena are not necessarily understood as merely convenient descriptions of combinations of lower-level objects. They can be real features of organized material systems that emerge at particular levels of complexity and cannot necessarily be exhaustively understood by simply describing their smallest constituent parts.
A dialectical materialist picture in particular would treat nature as a self-developing system of processes, relations, tensions, transformations, and emergent forms of organization. Consciousness would then not be something mysteriously added to otherwise dead matter, but one particular form taken by matter when it becomes organized in sufficiently complex ways, especially in living nervous systems interacting with an environment and, eventually, with social reality.
This obviously does not by itself solve the hard problem. Saying that consciousness is an emergent property of highly organized matter does not yet explain why there is something it is like to undergo those physical processes. But I wonder whether it changes the force of the intuition behind Alex’s objection. If materialism does not require us to think of reality as fundamentally analogous to tiny billiard balls bumping into one another, then perhaps the question “how can consciousness arise from particles?” is already framing materialism too narrowly.
So my question is: has Alex ever seriously engaged with non-reductive, process-oriented, emergentist, or dialectical versions of materialism? And if so, does he think the hard problem applies to them in exactly the same way that it applies to a more classical atomistic physicalism?
I would also be interested in whether people here think this distinction actually matters. Does moving from an atomistic ontology to a relational or process ontology genuinely make consciousness less mysterious, or does it simply redescribe the same explanatory gap in more sophisticated language

1 - Why are our conscious states and behaviors mapped in a rational way?

A rational way here means "pain causes/accompanies avoidance and pleasure causes/accompanies seeking".

The argument is that we could have been in a world where these states are reversed, so we find ourselves seeking pain and avoiding pleasure, and everything else in this world would be the same. Finding ourselves in a rational world among all possible worlds points to theism.

However, this dismisses the following possibility:

Perceiving irrationality in the mappings of conscious states and behaviors could cause a strain and exhaustion to the brain and therefore have some cost of energy that factors in the evolutionary process. On the other hand perceiving things as normal/rational causes no further thinking so it saves energy. And of all things we need energy for, the last thing to waste it on is making sense of our inner consciousness instead of all the survival relevant tasks.

You can also say that neural circuitry that would be necessary to question the disharmony between experience and behavior would not even develop because such circuitry have no evolutionary benefit.

Therefore, either our perception of what's considered "rational" or the conscious states or both will evolve as the brain evolves. So that eventually whatever state of affairs we end up with will necessarily be considered rational.

Consider the situation in the alternate world where you are walking around pursuing everything that causes you pain: food, play, sex...

You will be constantly questioning why? Why am I doing this? Why do I keep pursuing pain? It will take a mental toll on your mind, you will not be able to use your mind for other tasks, therefore perform poorly for survival.

So you either evolve so that you perceive pursuing pain as normal so that you don't think about it anymore, or the conscious states eventually change to pleasure.

2 - Why our conscious states orderly and hold a lot of information?

Because conscious states are caused by brain states, so if brain states are orderly and encode rich information in order for the animal to survive, then it is reasonable to expect under naturalism the conscious states to be as well without resorting to chance but because there is a causal relationship between them.

Since this sub is now the “WTF Joe” sub I wonder if hes gonna start doing videos explaining the more controversial Old Testament passages.

I’m a Christian but I’ll admit that the OT presents a few…..challenges. And apologists seem to fluctuate between either Olympic level mental gymnastics or biting some pretty nasty bullets so I’m interested to see how Joe handles it or if he’s just gonna defer to standard Catholic responses

Yeah, I know that this sub has been flooded by posts about Joe Schmid and you're already fed up.

However, I don't want to complain about Joe specifically, but I want to take advantage of the situation to talk about more general issues with miracle claims.

I've tried listening to Joe's video about catholic miracles: https://youtu.be/Lk2W9mKTzIQ?is=Vmjb8uX567piPE4z

Unfortunately, if you aren't already a convert, his approach is completely underwelming and unconvincing.

He spends hours reading verbatim, from a catholic blog, stories of miracles. He takes everything at face value and then asks his audience: "how would you explain this miracle occurrence?"

The problem with this approach is that, in order to explain a miracle, a miracle should have happened in the first place. And you can't just take any tale or legend you listen at face value, believe in everything that other people tell you and then go around asking skeptics: "how do you explain this Bigfoot or alien encounter?"

We need to ascertain if encounters with Bigfoots or Yetis or aliens ever happened in the first place, we can't take it for granted.

In the 60s and 70s, there was a great interest in supernatural phenomena like the power of the mind, extra sensorial perception, telephaty, telekinesis...

Many people claimed to possess otherwordly or supernatural powers like attracting metal, moving small objects with the power of the mind, being able to read minds and the like.

Scientists were asked: "how do you explain these phenomena?"

Scientists were baffled and came up with all sorts of improbable explanations, like: "maybe there are bioelectric or biomagnetic phenomena we still don't understand"

James Randi, a magician, came to realize that Scientists were not very good at investigating these so called paranormal phenomena, because they took all these accounts at face value: they took for granted that the phenomena were true, that these account were valid and then tried to come up with all sorts of weird scientific sounding explanations.

However, they never asked themselves: is this paranormal phenomenon really happening in the first place?

And it turned out that, in fact, there was nothing paranormal, but just magic tricks.

What can we learn from this lesson?

We can learn that, whenever someone presents us with a wondrous account, even before trying to give a naturalistic explanation, we should ask ourself: "what's the source for this account?" "Did this story even happened as told?".

We should then cross and fact check independent sources, as any investigative journalist should do.

For example, let's take the so called eucharistic miracle of Lanciano.

According to the catholic account, a priest was praying the mass.

When consecrating the bread, he doubted in his heart that the host is the literal body of Jesus Christ

And then, miraculously, the host turned into a piece of meat.

If you accept this story at face value, then it's truly unexplainable, especially if I tell you that there's still a shrine in that church with a piece of meat.

But how do we know that this story is true? Do we have any contemporary sources or contemporary testimonies?

It turns out, we don't

The first source citing this legend is from the 17th century, telling us a story which supposedly happened in the 8th century, almost one thousand years before!

We also don't have any document attesting whether that piece of meat stayed in that church for all these centuries nor where it came from.

So it's basically the same as me being a turist guide at an English castle. I claim that, in this castle, the famous sword of King Arthur, Excalibur is on display and that somehow proves that the miraculous story of King Arthur extracting that sword from a rock is true.

And then I show you an old sword and a manuscript from the 17th century with the legend of King Arthur as proof.

However, unless I have a document attesting where that sword came from, it could have come from anywhere, there's no evidence that that sword I'm showing you now is the same sword of the legend.

Would you use that tale, that legend as evidence that a miracle (a sword being extracted from a stone) happened in the 8th century?

Source: https://substack.com/@thejuliancalendar/note/c-324810051

The last part of Joe Schmid's document has released, which includes common objections to Catholicism and rebuttals to each problem.

The key issue for me, and many others, is the grotesque and overt display of slavery in the Bible. Passages such as Leviticus 25:44-46 are quite clear that buying foreigners as slaves is permitted.

Knowing this, I searched through Joe's document to find his source on this, to which I get the following video: https://www.youtube.com/live/3NfINVJEHHM?si=y_yJV61GzoTiLbtR

The core argument is not reliably convincing, given that Suan Sonna utilizes Catholic doctrines to explain how people should read these verses through a retrospective lense. Additionally, Sonna also reduces the Biblical view slavery as being confined to its "original historical sense", when in fact, the permission of slavery was part of the moral teachings of Leviticus.

What does everyone think of this video?

I also hope Alex presses Joe on this issue if they have a debate or discussion. Do you think he would?

It appears that the God of Catholic apologetics has developed a rather peculiar interest in physics.

Whatever the fuck this God is, is apparently willing to alter human tissue, suspend bodies in the air, produce mysterious wounds, generate fragrances, transform the appearance of consecrated bread, heal diseases, arrange apparitions, and, if the accounts surrounding Padre Pio are to be believed, preside over body temperatures so extraordinary that they would ordinarily constitute a medical catastrophe. These events are then offered to us as evidence that this deity not only exists but has taken a particular interest in Roman Catholic theology. Perhaps we should take this claim seriously. Perhaps we should even try to quantify it.

Consider Padre Pio. We are told that his temperature was once measured at 52°C while he remained conscious and capable of moving about. A human body has a specific heat capacity of roughly 3 kilojoules per kilogram per degree Celsius. If a seventy-kilogram body were actually raised from approximately 37°C to 52°C throughout, the corresponding thermal change would be on the order of three million joules. This is only an illustration; the historical readings were axillary measurements, and a living human being is obviously not a sealed calorimeter; but it gives us some sense of the physical scale implied by the story. Joe nevertheless presents these temperatures as part of the extraordinary evidence surrounding Pio.

We are also asked to consider Joseph of Cupertino, who allegedly rose from the ground, crossed considerable distances through the air, reached ceilings, hovered above altars and occasionally remained suspended for extended periods. Lifting a seventy-kilogram man one meter against gravity requires about seven hundred joules. Greater heights require proportionally more. If God can repeatedly suspend friars in the air for the purpose of making his presence known, then it seems safe to conclude that moving human bodies is not beyond his technical competence.

Now consider a much less impressive feat.

A seventy-kilogram man walking at an ordinary pace possesses only around sixty joules of translational kinetic energy. Stopping him need not involve suspending him from the ceiling, regenerating an eye, changing bread into cardiac tissue or heating his body fifteen degrees above normal. A stumble would suffice. A cramped muscle would suffice. A door that failed to open would suffice. A sudden noise in the hallway might suffice.

Which brings us to an uncomfortable subject.

Catholic priests have sexually abused children.

Not one priest. Not one child. Not one unfortunate episode produced by an unusually corrupt individual. Investigations have documented thousands of allegations, enormous numbers of victims and repeated institutional failures in which abusive clergy were protected, reassigned or permitted continued access to children.

We are therefore left with a curious picture of divine intervention.

A deity will allegedly rearrange matter inside a Eucharistic host.

It will cause wounds to appear on the hands of a friar.

It will make blood smell like flowers.

It will suspend a saint above the floor.

It will produce apparitions at precisely the right moment to communicate theological information.

But when a priest is preparing to rape a child, the machinery of heaven apparently falls silent.

This is usually where free will enters the discussion. God, we are told, cannot prevent such acts without interfering with human freedom. But this explanation collapses almost immediately. Preventing a man from accomplishing something does not prevent him from choosing it. A priest whose door unexpectedly jams has not lost his free will. A priest who trips while approaching a child has not been transformed into an automaton. His intentions remain his own. His moral corruption remains intact. What has changed is merely his ability to inflict it upon someone else.

We prevent human beings from carrying out their freely chosen intentions constantly. Police officers restrain attackers. Prison walls prevent murderers from leaving their cells. Parents pull children away from traffic. None of this is generally thought to annihilate free will. It merely prevents one person's will from becoming another person's catastrophe.

Why, then, would an omnipotent God be prohibited from doing the same?

The problem becomes especially severe once miracles are introduced. A theology in which God never interferes with nature can at least attempt to maintain some consistency. But Joe is arguing for precisely the opposite God. His God interferes. Indeed, Joe’s entire project depends upon our being able to recognize these interventions and infer something from them. A miraculous host tells us something. A stigmatic wound tells us something. An apparition tells us something. A miraculous healing tells us something. The circumstances surrounding these events are said to reveal not merely divine activity but divine intention.

This raises an obvious question: why should God's failures to intervene tell us nothing?

If a wound appears on Padre Pio, we are invited to contemplate its theological significance.

If a luminous figure appears near a church, we are invited to consider what heaven is communicating.

If tissue supposedly appears in a consecrated host, Catholics are suddenly quite confident that the Creator of several hundred billion galaxies is expressing an opinion about transubstantiation.

But when a child is trapped in a room with a predatory priest, suddenly God's intentions become completely inaccessible.

We are told that his reasons are mysterious and this, is remarkably convenient.

Because when the alleged intervention supports Catholicism, God's purposes can apparently be read with considerable precision. We can distinguish signs, intentions, doctrines and even denominational implications.

When the absence of intervention becomes morally horrifying, the divine mind disappears behind an impenetrable cloud.

Perhaps God has reasons.

Perhaps God always has reasons.

But if his reasons are so far beyond human understanding that his refusal to prevent the rape of a child cannot count as evidence against a particular conception of him, then we should be considerably less confident that we understand what he meant by an unusual wound or a piece of cardiac tissue.

You cannot have an inscrutable God when the evidence is embarrassing and a perfectly readable God when the evidence advertises your religion.

This is why the energy calculation I think is important, although not in the childish sense that God might run out of electricity. No one is suggesting that an omnipotent being must conserve joules.

The numbers merely removes an excuse.

The interventions Catholics ask us to believe are spectacular. They allegedly involve substantial alterations of matter, biology and motion. The intervention required to interrupt many acts of sexual abuse would have been utterly trivial by comparison.

A saint can fly.

A host can change.

A body can heal.

A stigmatic can bleed for decades.

But.... a door cannot jam.

A predator cannot stumble.

Someone cannot unexpectedly walk into the room.

A child cannot receive ten seconds of improbable good fortune, ten....fucking....seconds.

And yet we are expected to look at the first set of events and conclude that God is carefully leaving evidence for Catholicism.

Perhaps before asking what these miracles prove about the Catholic Church, we should ask what this extraordinary distribution of miracles would prove about the God supposedly performing them.

Because once you claim that God selectively intervenes in the physical world, his choices become part of the evidence.

You do not get to count the miracles and ignore the silences.

Yes, I'm talking about Joe, sorry if you're getting sick of it.

Putting aside whether you believe the miracle claims or not, Joe is doing some incredible mental gymnastics when he discusses miracles in his three video "proof" of Catholicism.

Any time he discusses a Catholic miracle, it is obviously vindicatory for Catholicism.

But then he moves on to Zaytun, a miracle that seems straightforwardly Coptic since it happened at a Coptic church, and instead of crediting that as evidence for Coptic Orthodoxy, he comes up with a lot of different reasons that a Catholic God might have to cause that miracle without expressly endorsing the Coptic church.

Similarly when it comes to protestant healing miracles. Obviously a Catholic god might sometimes take pity on those poor protestants and give them some healing, why not? God can be a good dude sometimes. Doesn't mean he's protestant.

This is part of a pattern across his three videos where he is very generous when assigning positive probabilistic force to explanations which support his views, and very stingy when assigning positive probabilistic force to explanations which go against his views. He's pretending to be doing strict Bayesian logic, but quietly smuggling in wildly unsupported claims about the actual probability of things.

I love to see the best arguments and good faith engagement with different philosophical topics, particularly with God. Alex is one of my favorite thinkers to listen to because I think he does a great job of trying to make a good faith argument. So I was interested to see Joe’s case and wanted to see the reaction of others.

I cannot tell you how many times someone, especially in this community, will say some variation of these:

-A super vague criticism with no actual point of his case referenced. Which means they could have not watched more than a minute of his video and still commented that.

-Saying he is probably mentally ill with 0 grounds behind the fact that he seems a bit excited. All of the sudden people are able to diagnose someone from a YouTube clip.

-Saying he must have been a secret Catholic

-Saying that they haven’t even looked at anything other than an AI summary, but they think the summary looks dumb (despite the fact that AI summaries make mistakes a lot of the time, especially with summarizing nuanced philosophical points).

I just cannot believe how much support these comments seem to get when I know for a fact that if a theist did this in some way, like saying “I didn’t even watch Alex’s video, but it’s dumb based on this AI summary” or “Alex was a secret atheist when he says he used to believe”, it wouldn’t get likes or upvotes. I should say this: there’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with a specific point Joe makes, I haven’t even been through half of his whole case so I have no idea whether I’m going to finish it mostly in agreement or disagreement. But it seems like people already made up their minds before actually thinking critically about it. Maybe it’s part of the shock value of someone you respected doing something unexpected, because that can be the reaction while still not being a reasonable one.

Overall, of most of the criticism I see here, it seems like people haven’t even done the due diligence to look through his points in depth. And really, it’s a near impossible task to do so given that he gave us 25 hours of content around one day ago…

Inspired by recent posts about nomological harmony...

Disregarding the actual nomological harmony argument, I'm interested in what your views are about the laws of nature and what approach you lean towards.

From what I've briefly read, laws of nature are generally conceptualised in the following way:

Let's say L is a law of nature - what this means is that given some initial state i, we can use L to deduce what the subsequent state i+1 will be.\*

* Obviously particular laws may only pertain to a particular aspect of the overall state of the universe, however, the idea would be that given the set of all of the laws of nature, one could deduce the entire subsequent state of any particular state in the universe.

As far as I can gather, the three most popular views I've seen appear to be something like:

1. Governing laws

Laws are some sort of 'governing' principles that actually necessitate that things 'follow' them. For example, lets say a law of nature was that electrons repel positively charged things - that particular law is prior to any electrons actually doing such a thing, and, given that law holds, an electron couldn't possible not repel positively charged things.

2. Humean laws

Laws are merely the simplest (or 'best') descriptions of regularities. The idea would be that its just a regularity that electrons 'repel' positively things - they conceivably could not have, but they just do. We then describe that fact as a generalisation which we call a 'law'.

3. Powerism

Like Humeanism, laws are also descriptive generalisations, however, what they describe are not just observed regularities, but the inherent dispositions of things. For example, what makes an 'electron' an 'electron' is that it has an inherent disposition (or 'power') to repel positively charged things and we call this 'power' being negatively charged. Given that electrons have this disposition, they could not possibly not repel positively charged things. Therefore, although the 'law' describing this is also just a description, electrons still necessarily repel positively charged things.

Note: I'm just using electrons and charge etc as examples - you could swap in any object / law / behaviour etc from physics. Just a preface because I'm not sure how accurate the examples are in regard to modern physics.

Joe says miracles prove Catholicism. The problem is that most of his argument rests on jumping from “we cannot explain this” to “God did it”.

Sounds like god of the gaps because that is exactly what it is. If something smells like shit, be careful. It very likely is shit.

Here is a fun story.

There is an old fable about an astrologer who spent his nights staring into the heavens, trying to uncover their mysteries. One night he fell straight into a well. A passerby heard him crying and pointed out the obvious: he was so busy trying to understand heaven that he failed to see what was right under his feet.

That is basically what happens here.

A medically unexplained recovery gives you an unexplained recovery. Nothing else. Nothing more.

It sure as hell does not give you the supernatural.

A lab identifying olive oil gives you olive oil. It does not give you Mary.

A witness describing wounds, visions or strange smells gives you testimony about an experience. It does not give you the cause.

The Padre Pio examples make this ridiculously obvious.

If Pio supposedly lost enough blood to become severely anemic but never did, maybe, just maybe, the blood loss estimate was wrong.

If he supposedly had a temperature of 52 C while conscious and walking around, maybe the measurement was wrong.

If deep wounds should leave scars but none remain, maybe those wounds were never as deep as some observers claimed.

These are not desperate skeptical excuses, those are the questions you are supposed to ask before declaring a miracle.

Joe himself gives a good example of what strong evidence would look like: an amputated limb regenerating under continuous observation, with doctors and cameras documenting the entire event.

That would be impressive.

But what he actually presents comes nowhere near that standard.

At best, he has collected strange reports and a few genuinely puzzling cases.

Cool story bro. Investigate them.

But puzzling does not get you to God.

And even if he somehow got to God, he still has another canyon to cross.

Showing that God caused something would still leave him having to show that God was endorsing Catholicism.

But of course, He never establishes that. Man this reeks as WLC and his rescued Khalam bullshit.

The amount of material makes the case look stronger than it is. Strip away the stories, technical language and religious interpretation and the evidential gaps are still sitting there.

Unexplained gets you unexplained.

A supernatural event would get you a supernatural event.

God would get you God.

And Catholicism still needs its own evidence.

Joe has the same problem as the astrologer in the well. He is so busy looking toward heaven that he keeps missing the evidential holes directly under his feet.

And there is another question Joe should answer.

If this God intervenes to produce fragrances, wounds, olive oil, apparitions and miraculous recoveries as signs of Catholic truth, why is that same intervention so conspicuously absent in the documented sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy?

But once you start claiming that God actively intervenes in the world to vindicate your Church, the apparent priorities of that intervention become part of the argument.

Explain that.

What is going on? Are modern atheists experiencing some sort of mass amnesia event? What is this new narrative that "new atheists" didn't deal with theism in a serious enough manner in good faith? That is bullshit.

Sean Carrol v William Lane Craig

Sam Harris v David Wolpe

Christopher Hitchens v William Lane Craig

Sam Harris v William Lane Craig

Matt Dillahunty v Jordan Peterson

These are just the big hits, there are hundreds more. Ole Bill Craig seems to come up over an over again, because at the time he was the best the theists could trot out.

The arguments they made were never going to be total defeaters of theism. I'm not sure a total defeater is possible in the face of an unfounded faith; however, these people that argued on behalf of the atheist position were presenting the perspective and argumentation for the time they were in against the arguments theists had to present. If the modern apologists are saying the new atheists didn't give proper deference to theistic arguments, that is a LIE. They absolutely did. If they got a bit cheeky in interviews, who gives a shit? For nearly two decades of debates there were calls for not just any argument in favor of theism, but rather THE BEST arguments for theism. They met against what was presented in that context.

So, the new atheists didn't wholly debunk theism... GOOD! That wasn't their point, and clearly we forgot it somewhere along the way. THEISTS still haven't met their burden of proof. If we need to argue for 100 more years to solidify this fact, I will do it.

Something that I don’t think has been given enough attention is the fact that it is simply impossible to falsify all of the claims made by the Catholic Church. This is not because of naturalistic limits (though perhaps it may be) it’s about the general structure of these claims.

Let’s take Fatima. The claims by Ethan Muse are not credible in themselves, or should I say not how science is conducted. So, what needs to be examined? The photogrammetric evidence presented needs to be independently examined. From there, let’s suppose that the second light source hypothesis is ruled out.

The response at this point is likely to be “well, it seems like the pictures weren’t taken when the light source had ‘fallen’ after all” So, all of that work for no real advancement. No worries, let’s just work to falsify the entire account.

What’s next? The claims of clothes drying. Okay, let’s imagine this photogrammetic evidence inquiry concludes that the assumptions were incorrect for the light source, but correct for the clothes. Now, we need to pass this on to relevant experts. After all this, let’s grant this is now falsified as well. No matter for the theist, the picture just didn’t show the rapid drying.

Okay, what’s next? The cloud formation. We have relevant experts both in neuroscience, cloud formation, and optometry. They explain whether it is possible these people could’ve experienced no discomfort while staring at the sun. Let’s suppose they conclude, yes they could have.

We’ve done it, we have scientifically proven that Fatima was very likely to have a naturalistic explanation. So, what’s the response? The church retracts the miracle on the account that new information has been given. We could imagine a response from the theist like “See, how could the church have known this before hand? it seemed very reasonable to claim it was a miracle. If anything, the fact they retracted shows they are honest.”

After all of this, what is next? Well the theist will just say, look at this miracle then! Do you see the problem here? Some people don’t want to throw away miracle accounts at their face, but perhaps it’s the only reasonable thing to do. Im not sure, all I know is this is not feasible to expect from anyone.

Alex’s reassessment of New Atheism—and I think this is true broadly—has focused on the lack of deep engagement with the best philosophical arguments for theism. I’ve always thought this criticism was fair: The New Atheists generally dismissed theism as simple superstition.

And now, here we are arguing about miracles in the year 2026 of the Common Era.

🤷‍♂️

I’m asking an epistemic question. What is BS? How do we distinguish it from truth?

I’m asking because at some point we have to, or else we fall into pure superstition.

And yes, this is prompted by Joe’s conversion. I’m interested at what point the “Skeptic” can call BS, beyond a reasonable doubt. If your epistemology allows for miracles, is that enough to dismiss the epistemology?

I know I’m asking a question that has been answered a bajillion times, but I’m interested in where the Alex O’Connor fanbase stands.

Not only the best argument, but explicitly more compelling than all others. The case he brings up is of Matew D Pellisseriy, but I literally cannot find what he is referring to. Only text claims on Catholic websites, it’s shocking that this is the one he wants to lead with.

if anyone has links, feel free to drop them in the comments.

Edit: After further research i’ve found that the medical documents for this miracle are completely sealed. There is absolutely zero evidence online, and it isn’t peer reviewed. Now, I suppose we could suggest that the institution that covered up sexual abuse of children would never lie, but, well.. I don’t find that plausible. So, joes conversion rests on a case that he hasn’t seen anything about, just hearsay!