Linguistic Miracle summarised
Reply #1 - January 26, 2014, 11:13 PM
Stage 1 of the argument in a bit more detail:
Defining the word miracle
1. miracle = violation of laws of nature, but that definition sucks because its "incoherent"
2. it is incoherent because we wouldnt know if we have a genuine miracle or merely a lack of knowledge of natural law. Philosopher Bilynsky agrees that Hume's definition is "incoherent" (Using a Bilynsky quote to prove it)
3. The Islamic definition of miracle can be inferred from the story of Moses turning the staff into a snake.
4. The islamic definition of miracle is much more "coherent".
Now a miracle is "an event outside the productive capacity of nature"
problems
1. the original definition of miracle is not "incoherent". it is perfectly coherent. Are they telling us they don't understand what it means? It is incomprehensible?
2. The problem that they identify is not a problem of coherency. It is a problem of detection. It is true that confirming a miracle would be difficult, but that doesn't make the definition incoherent.
The problem of identification is a property that is shared by all things that don't exist. All imaginary things are very difficult to detect. This is not actually a definitional problem at all, and we don't get to just redefine the word just because a miracle is hard to detect. A 'ghost' is still "an apparition of a dead person" even if actual ghosts are proving hard to find.
3. Bilynskyj does not agree that the 'violation of natural law' definition of miracle is incoherent. Bylinskyj is talking about the concept of a miracle being incoherent, not the definition, and even then, only incoherent under a certain understanding of natural law, an understanding that Bilynskyj rejects.
4. The Bilynskyj quote (in Hamza's essay) isn't even a Bilynskyj quote. It is a plagiarised parapharsing of Bilynskyj, written by William Lane Craig. The 32 page citation to this non existent one line Bilynskyj quote is also copied and pasted from Craig.
5. Even if the problem of detection were a relevant problem, the new definition has the exact same problem. What method do we have for determining if some event is within or beyond "the productive capacity of nature"? At least, with the standard definition of 'miracle', we could refer to scientific laws of nature. but now we don't even have a hypothetical chance of confirming a genuine miracle.
6. The new definition of miracle is not 'the islamic one'. So that would be lying about the words of Allah. Naughty naughty.
7. Even if you somehow considered it reasonable to infer form the story of Moses and the magic staffsnake this new definition of miracle, that would still only make it the biblical definition. No Islamic input required.
8. This new definition is in fact again plagiarised from William Lane Craig (Sometimes Craig is referenced. Sometimes the definition is claimed to come from Islamic scholars, or the quran)
9. Even after we have massaged the definition of miracle into the the dog chewed shape it is already in, we still haven't finished. We have to add a few the more words into our definition (to make it correlate with the way the definition is actually being applied in the argument).
Previously we had arrived at the definition of "an event outside the productive capacity of nature",
But now, our definition is 'an event outside the productive capacity of the nature of the event)'
10. now we have added those words, it makes grammatical sense for us to equivocate with a different definition of the word 'nature', and hopefully nobody will notice.
The word 'nature' amongst others, has these two possible definitions:
1. the phenomena of the physical world collectively
2. the basic or inherent features, character, or qualities of something.
It is rather obvious that Craig's definition (or even if we did want to pretend it is 'the Islamic one') is referring to 'nature itself'. i.e, the new definition of miracle we were asked to accept was using the first definition of 'nature', but the linguistic miracle argument is forced to use the second which emerges from the sleeve of the linguistic miracle proponent.
So the tortoise has misunderstood what he plagiarised and lied about and didn't have any justification for proposing in the first place, and then modified it until it is even worse that the original 'violation of natural definition. That is, 'even worse' with regards to the problem of actually knowing whether you have a miracle - a problem that was incorrectly identified, and irrelevent anyway.
11. If we are pretending that the problem of detecting a miracle means we get to change it's definition, and if we are pretending that this (non) problem only applies to the original definition, rather than to both; there is still no reason for us to care about the issue raised. If there is is a genuine problem here (and there isn't), it is only a problem for events which at the very least 'appear' to violate natural law.
We are told that we might consider something to be a miracle for it to turn out later to be explainable by science and natural law.
In other words our 'violation of natural law' definition is too generous. Because of inherent limitations in our knowledge of natural law, It oversubscribes miracles. There is a risk of 'false positives' when identifying miracles..
However do not have to worry about whether we have a 'false positive' result, because we don't even have a positive result at all. Does the quran appear to violate natural law? result: Negative. No law of nature is violated by any combination or permutation of Arabic words. All logical combinations and permutations are possible. The quran is one of the logically possible combinations and permutations of Arabic words, and just for shits and giggles, i can and have proven this with a computer program.
We can afford to be generous and use an overly generous definition; still no miracle.
12. The actual definition used by the time we get around to talking about the quran gets modified further. By then, we have to ignore the 'productive capacity' part of the definition. So by then, we are merely referring to something that is 'outside the nature of some event', and by 'nature' we mean simply the basic character.
What does it mean to be outside 'the basic character' of something?
It would be out of character for one of these dawah monkeys to ever say anything intelligent, but I wouldn't call it a miracle. Unusual, sure.
and 'im not sure I can be bothered to go into the rest of the argument right now.
Everything above concerns the definition of a single word, and I'm sure i have missed a couple of problems too. Untangling the mess of this argument is not plain sailing.
Topic: Linguistic Miracle summarised (and debunked)