Deism ... and Miracles

This post may be seen as a companion-post to an older post ('Science! and Miralces ... and Skepticism!'), which was about the incoherence (and self-mockery) of a certain sort of "scientific" opposition -- which is to say, an expression of scientism -- to the posibility of miracles. But here, the target is not modern atheistic scientism, but its older brother, the early-modern "Age of Reason" Deism.

Doug Benscoter has a small post on the distinction between 'deism' and 'theism' (Random Thought in the Theist/Deist Distinction); the content of this post is a comment I made there.

Ilíon: It seems to me that to say that "[t]he theist believes in miracles, whereas the deist rejects them" is to say that the deist believes or asserts God to be incapable of effecting miracles. And, it seems to me ultimately to mean that the deist believes or asserts "nature" to be superior to God.

Doug Benscoter: Or, as in the case of Spinoza, God and Nature are understood as synonymous (pantheism). The creation event (creatio ex nihilo) is already the greatest miracle of all, which is why I've never understood the deist's insistence that miracles are beyond God's purview or power.

Ilíon: As someone who writes computer programs ... and plays computer games ... the Deist position on miracles strikes me as analogous to someone asserting that I, as the author of a computer program, cannot write into the rules of the program a “back door” giving me an ability to modify the program’s data as it executes.

But, even that analogy is weaker than I mean … it’s just that I don’t expect most people to understand the analogy I really mean. But I’ll attempt to explain.

In my first job out of college, a long, long time ago, I coded in mainframe assembler (mostly maintaining code written ages prior) for a couple of small mainframe computers; one so ancient it didn’t even have harddrives. On the front of the ancient computer were a couple of panels of indicator lights with toggle switches beneath them.

These switches allowed one to set bits (and thus bytes) relevant to the computer’s memory, the lights indicating whether a particular bit was on or off. One panel was to set an address indicating a memory location, the other was to see - or change - the content of that memory location.

So, if a program was chugging along on the computer and encountered a fatal error condition everything stopped, and computer operator either purged the computer, and executed something else, or contacted me so that I might try to get around the problem at the moment and understand it so that I could resolve it for the future.

Now, as I said, one set of toggle switches allowed one to change the content of memory locations - I could change not only the data which at that moment had been being operated upon, but the actual loaded executable code of the program itself!

Now, of course, to make an extensive change on the fly like that would have taken more time and effort than simply to pull up the source code, make the appropriate changes and recompile, and then have the operator restart the execution from the beginning.

Mostly, what I did was change some data in the specific record then being processed, or changed the loaded executable code to have it skip over some problematic section of code/logic.

But, the point is, I *could in principle* have completely rewritten the program’s currently loaded executable on the fly.

It seems to me that the Deist denial of the posibility of miracles is analogous to asserting to me, "No, you can't!" (in principle completely rewrite, on the fly, the offending data or logic of the program).

Now, that's just an analogy, and while an analogy may illustrate a point, it is not an argument.

For argument, we turn to Mr Benscoter's observation: "The creation event (creatio ex nihilo) is already the greatest miracle of all, which is why I've never understood the deist's insistence that miracles are beyond God's purview or power." Understanding of which observation, of itself, is all we need in order to see that the Deist insistence on the impossibility miracles (or, at any rate, the popular understanding that there is such an insistence) is incoherent, and thus irrational.

Or, as Crude observes in a different form and context, with respect to Deism, once one has acknowledged the creation, and thus has acknowledged that there is a Creator, then one has no rational ground for asserting that The Creator *cannot* perform what people (even pagans) have always termed 'miracles.'

This is not to say that all, or even most, claims of miracles follow from a correct understanding of what occurred and why.