Miracles
Great, implausible events.
1
1
posted by Robin at
3:22 AM
About
Half the things in the universe are worse than the median; half are better. The former are 1s; the latter are 2s.
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6 Comments:
Maybe a fake miracle would be a 1, but wouldn't a real miracle be a 2?
By
Anonymous, at 2/17/2005 11:17 PM
As long as it did something good, I guess it would. Of course, accidental death is a 1, even when it is real. And it's not even established that fake miracles exist. Not that that disqualifies them for evaluation.
http://oneortwo.blogspot.com/2004/09/accidental-death.html
By
Robin, at 2/18/2005 1:05 AM
So basically, by "miracles" here, you mean "fake miracles."
By
Anonymous, at 2/19/2005 11:48 PM
It says implausible, hoss.
I hope you're not trying to start trouble. You wouldn't want me to give badgers a 1.
By
Robin, at 2/20/2005 6:12 AM
Are we talking fake badgers or real badgers here?
By
Anonymous, at 2/20/2005 10:58 PM
There's actually some philosophical discussion of miracles. One very plausible definition of a miracle is 'something that violates a law of nature'. The trouble, though, is that one might think laws of nature can't have exceptions (or else they're not laws). So you end up having to say that miracles are conceptually impossible.
David Lewis solved the problem thus: a miracle contradicts the natural laws of worlds that are very similar to the world it occurs in. If some event in our world, just once, violated the law of gravity, it would mean that our world didn't really have a law of gravity. But since worlds very similar to ours have a real law of gravity and the event would be barred by that law, the event is a miracle.
By
Neil Sinhababu, at 2/21/2005 10:29 AM
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