Bob wrote:I was really taken aback when, 20 years ago, I heard Pierre Grimes say that Mark was a typical Greek tragedy (I think it is still online). He proved it as well as far as I am concerned. The Gospels of Luke and Matthew obviously couldn’t let that stand and so they added to the story and developed a Christology that was very close to the stories of other mythical figures. John was the one who brought the cosmic Christ, i.e. the Logos, into a Gospel. I have heard people say that John is probably closer to Paul than anyone.
I can’t remember where I read a talk about miracles. It could have been on Pageau’s site, but what interested me was the way in which CS Lewis was quoted pointing out that we have our own perspective on our planet, somewhat like fishes in an aquarium. If something happened outside of the aquarium, but affected the content of the aquarium, it could be seen as a miracle. He says that reality is a question of perspective, which is quite right. Everything is a miracle until it is explained. If there are things that we can’t explain, but affect us, isn’t that something that could be seen as a miracle? Conscious life on earth is a miracle, let alone the incarnation.
I am unsure how to understand the Gospel miracles, as I have already said. Whether they are symbolic (which they are as well) or whether they happened, is still something that isn’t clear to me. I prefer to explain them in a symbolic way, but I may be missing something.
The "aquarium" or "fish tank" analogy is included in this quote from Lewis's book, "Miracles" on the Symbolic World blog, :
"A miracle is emphatically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its results follow according to Natural law. In the forward direction (i.e. during the time which follows its occurrence) it is interlocked with all Nature just like any other event. Its peculiarity is that it is not in that way interlocked backwards, interlocked with the previous history of Nature. And this is just what some people find intolerable. The reason they find it intolerable is that they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be inter-related and consistent. I agree with them. But I think they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole. That being so, the miracle and the previous history of Nature may be interlocked after all but not in the way the Naturalist expected: rather in a much more roundabout fashion. The great complex event called Nature, and the new particular event introduced into it by the miracle, are related by their common origin in God, and doubtless, if we knew enough, most intricately related in His purpose and design, so that a Nature which had had a different history, and therefore been a different Nature, would have been invaded by different miracles or by none at all. In that way the miracle and the previous course of Nature are as well interlocked as any other two realities, but you must go back as far as their common Creator to find the interlocking. You will not find it within Nature. The same sort of thing happens with any partial system. The behaviour of fishes which are being studied in a tank makes a relatively closed system. Now suppose that the tank is shaken by a bomb in the neighbourhood of the laboratory. The behaviour of the fishes will now be no longer fully explicable by what was going on in the tank before the bomb fell: there will be a failure of backward interlocking. This does not mean that the bomb and the previous history of events within the tank are totally and finally unrelated. It does mean that to find their relation you must go back to the much larger reality which includes both the tank and the bomb — the reality of war-time England in which bombs are falling but some laboratories are still at work. You would never find it within the history of the tank. In the same way, the miracle is not naturally interlocked in the backward direction. To find how it is interlocked with the previous history of Nature you must replace both Nature and the miracle in a larger context. Everything is connected with everything else: but not all things are connected by the short and straight roads we expected."
Jonathan Pageau and J.P. Marceau take up C.S. Lewis’s argument on this video:
https://youtu.be/Su_ggDVzKLwMarceau says that Lewis was set against the naturalism of his time which was a relatively simplistic kind of materialism where nature is one big interlocked mechanical system. Lewis’ strategy to introduce miracles in that worldview was to take something closer to us, our rationality, and show that it is not something that can be fit in that interlocking system. If all that is real ultimately is the mechanical level then this will make our rationality unreal. Our intellectual concepts will have to be reduced to something mechanical. But, this would make our theories themselves unreal. Only the mechanical level would be real. This would mean that the materialist theory is not rational. So we don’t have to believe it. The argument is self defeating.
Pageau calls it a blind spot. Materialists take for granted the invisible part of their world. They take for granted their own consciousness which the materialist theories don’t explain. Pageau tries to tell them “Look up. You have patterns that you use to interpret reality. You can’t pretend as if those patterns are physical because they're not. You also can’t pretend that the patterns don’t exist because your using them to interpret reality.
Marceau goes on to say that what is much more traditional is a non-reductive kind of physicalism. He introduces a series of examples that become more and more complex and make their way up progressively to miracles.
If you look at the lowest level of physics, physicists will say that fundamental fields of probability at the bottom of physics you can see that particles just appear there. If you leave it there, its a very poor explanation of what is going on. It’s super strange. Things don’t just pop out of fields of potential. That’s a strange thing to say. But, the reason why we accept this strange emergence is because we also know the top down pattern that informs the potential. We know certain laws of physics that tell us that the probability that certain particles will manifest themselves out of potential there. We know the potential at the bottom layer of physics and the emanation of the laws on the potential explains to us why the particle appears and because we have this pattern to explain the emergence we’re OK with it.
You already have two layers of reality there. And it just keeps getting more and more complex as you go up the different layers of reality. To explain the emergence of something you always need to know the top down pattern that that informs it.
One layer that is useful is the one that happens in our brains. If you look at what happens in our brains as we’re saying words, you would see billions and billions of neurons which coordinate in perfect ways so that the right signals are sent to your muscles and your lungs and your mouth so that you say the words you intend. And this kind of coordination is so complex that the possibility of error is so high that it is amazing that we are able to say what we intend. But, once you know the top-down pattern, which is the fairly simple desire to say these words then the whole coherence makes sense. You can explain the bottom-up emergence by simultaneous knowing the top-down emanation.of your thoughts. You have two layers of reality there.
The way that non-reductive physicalists explain it is that you cannot reduce the brain as a whole to its individual constituents. If you try to do that you get the problem of all these possibilities that don’t cohere. We need to explain that there are constraints that come from my brain as a whole.
Modern cognitive sciences also includes the environment. It’s not just your brain in your body, it’s also your environment, and who knows how far this goes. It’s this old structure, this pattern, this abstract spirit so to speak, that informs, that shapes the potential that is emerging from your neurons. This is going from the cellular level to the level of mind of an individual person.
So, when you look at something from the bottom up without understanding the pattern that informs it, you can’t make sense of it. The sense actually comes from the manner in which the bottom level joins together and connects with the top-down pattern.
So if you look at a painting, all the individual specks of paint on the painting, it’s just a jumbled specks of paint until you understand it’s the painting of an apple. When you know it’s the painting of an apple, then all of a sudden all those specks of paint make sense. They find a reason to be there.
If we keep going higher we get closer and closer to miracles. The sort of top-down causality that ultimately Lewis was getting at. The way that can have causal influences on your neurons for instance the way that rationality can smoothly intermesh with the brain is the same kind of smooth interaction that God who is behind emergence altogether can have on creation. But it’s useful to go through a few layers to get that this is so.
One example is the placebo effect. You need the narrative frame to have a sense of what is going on. The top-down causality of the placebo makes sense of the emergent chemical reactions which cures the illness.
Lewis gives a useful criterion to think about what a miracle is and how to think about them. At the level of God and miracles, once we know that a certain event was a real miracle, should make all of reality more intelligible. When we talk about emergent phenomena the question is, what are they emerging for?
Pageau says inevitably they’re emerging towards different levels of unity. A multiplicity jumps into a one, and then ones at that level jump into a higher one, and so forth. They’re emerging towards an identity. They’re emerging towards name. They’re emerging towards pattern. They can also be emerging toward a narrative.
Lewis' argument is developed and critiqued further here:
https://tllp.org/managed-feed-item/natu ... -vervaeke/
