The Scientific Meaning Of Impossibility Statements

"Unless a man can quantify or measure what he’s talking about, he’s not talking about anything."

- Lord Kelvin

Through the years, at dozens of lectures that I've given, I've invariably been asked whether this or that event or entity is "impossible". Are 3-eyed aliens possible or impossible? Are miracles impossible? Is an asteroid strike that kills everything on Earth possible or impossible? Is reversing global warming impossible? Is nuclear fusion possible or  impossible? The list seemingly goes on and on.

What I've had to make clear to all these inquirers is that there are such things as "impossibility statements" in science and they have far more generality and validity than possibility statements. But one must understand what this means.

One of the most famous and oft-cited impossibility statements in all of physics is the Clausius statement associated with the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This statement reads:

"It is impossible to construct a cyclical machine that produces no other effect than to transfer heat continuously from one body to another at higher temperature."

This is a statement of impossibility because it violates the well observed property of heat transfer whereby the temperature gradient is always such that heat flows from hotter to colder bodies, not the converse. Hence, it is preposterous that one can continuously pump heat from a colder body- say from a large block of ice - to a hot metal container.

Or consider the principle behind a refrigerator, the reverse of the heat engine, i.e.. 


 The engine absorbs heat Q₁ from the low temperature (T₁) or cold reservoir and expels heat Q₂ to the hot (T₂)  reservoir.  In practice heat will flow from colder  to hotter body only if work is done on the system.

 If this were the slightest bit invalid, all our machines, computers, etc. would cease to function in nanoseconds. The slightest heat built up from the working components would be enough to shut down the overall function once a critical temperature was reached. This is the next aspect, that impossibility statements are predicated on real world observations....not from claims made in ancient books or out of the mouths of ignorant people who opine on matters they don't understand. Say like the biology of the SARS- Cov-2 virus.

Another impossibility statement is:

"It is impossible to construct a machine that works with 100% efficiency"

In other words, the way our universe is constituted - given its laws as manifest - one cannot make or engineer a machine that is capable of operating continuously with no loss of energy. It simply can't happen.

Now, in science, the applicable terms that usually replace "impossibility" are what we call "laws of permission" and "laws of denial". The first detail all the actions that are allowed based on the laws of physics; the latter detail all the actions disallowed.

The laws of denial are predicated on such foundational physical laws as: the laws of conservation of mass-energy, momentum and electric charge. All these assure us that NO action can take place in a closed system in which the total energy, momentum and electric charge are not conserved.

I cannot take a 2 oz. bite out of an 8 oz. apple and come back and find it weighs 10 oz.! I cannot put 8 gal. of gas into my tank, and know my car only gets a max. of 20 miles/gallon - drive one hundred miles and find 7 gallons of gas left! I cannot bring out a loaf of bread and one fish and magically multiply them to become five hundred loaves and one thousand fish! I can't do that because it violates a basic law of mass-energy conservation. Nor do I find such violations anywhere in the natural world, or in the cosmos (as far as large scale plasma and astrophysical processes go)

I can't put an electric charge of 5 Coulombs on a polythene surface, then come back two minutes later and find 10 Coulombs - assuming the system was closed to external influences.  Thus, certain things really are impossible! There is no getting round it, and it's definitely scientific! What is blatantly unscientific and unsupported, is to claim certain events are not only possible but probable - but they violate specific physical laws or principles.

Thus, "perpetual motion machines"  (e.g. a pendulum that never ceases its oscillations) are also denied  or "impossible".  They not only violate conservation of energy, but also specific laws of thermodynamics, e.g. the 2nd or entropy law. Closed systems such as dead biological ones (no longer open to radiant energy or changes in chemical potential- since no food is taken in) also cannot be "brought back to life"- because this would violate the same law as perpetual motion machines. What stands for the latter, also applies to any proposed claims for the former. They are all impossible, full stop.

There are also detailed biologic - genetic laws that prescribe what can and can't develop - and in conjunction with physical laws, detail what can be allowed. Thus, given planet Earth's properties of gravity, mass, density etc., NO flying elephants can ever develop since there is NO basis in the genome for the species to acquire the ability of flight via "wings" on a planet with g = 9.8 m/sec/sec.. (Apart from the fact that enormous wings would be required to support a 2 ton creature!) Neither is there any capacity in the chicken genome to acquire lips. Both of these may sound like plausible or cute examples, but they fall flat (like perpetual motion machines) when closely scrutinized. Of course, one must have adequate scientific background to do this, and education! Hence, neither flying elephants nor chickens with lips "could happen". They are foreclosed by the laws of denial.

Meanwhile, an intelligent race of green aliens with immense brain in proportion to body and bulbous eyes with nictating membranes - MIGHT be so. To assert such aliens (or any advanced aliens) are "impossible" is to make a claim for total knowledge of every last solar system in the universe. This is foolhardy since, first, the claimant has not been to all those places so cannot know - at the very least he's constrained to say "I don't know" -nothing more, and second we know from spectroscopic analysis that the same chemical elements we find in Earth labs also exist on other worlds. Thus, the same chemical compounds we have on Earth exist there, and hence there is no reason a priori the same physico-chemical laws that incepted evolution here, can't do it there.

Now, one might aver that “I don’t personally believe green aliens or any aliens are possible”,  but that’s a rationally self-contained and subjective statement of one’s personal beliefs – not an objective claim. Unless one has actual scientific evidence, he is not allowed to make any statements of impossibility on the issue of advanced green aliens with large craniums. If he does, he is merely talking beyond his mental frame or jurisdiction with no basis or validity.

Now, this is not to say that a specific statement of denial cannot be made in respect to aliens existing in a specific place! But that specific statement is contingent on specific information known about X, Y or Z planet. Hence, once one lists the composition of the atmosphere being considered, the planet's surface gravity, its temperature ranges, and whether any magnetosphere ( to protect against high energy particles, etc.) he may at least offer a limited statement of denial contingent on THOSE conditions. But he's not permitted to make a general statement applicable to ALL conditions and planets in the universe!

All events in the cosmos also obey Lorentz invariance, meaning that NO object, energy or mass or information can propagate faster than the speed of light (c = 300,000 km/s). A particle or rocket ship can approach this limiting velocity, but can't exceed it. (Einstein's basic equation for mass in special relativity shows that if a particle were to travel at light speed, its inertia would be infinite- another way of asserting it's impossible).

What about miracles?  

In his essay collection Unweaving the Rainbow biologist Richard Dawkins, Britain's most prominent atheist, chose to examine the Fatima miracle of 1917, where 70,000 people "reportedly saw the sun move", to apply Hume's principle: As Dawkins observed:

"On the one hand, we are asked to believe in a mass hallucination, a trick of the light, or mass lie involving 70,000 people," Dawkins writes. "This is admittedly improbable. But it is LESS improbable than the alternative: that the sun really did move...If the sun had moved in truth, but the event was seen only by the people of Fatima, an even greater miracle would have been perpetrated: an illusion of NON-movement had to be staged for all the millions of witnesses not in Fatima."

The dual –tandem improbability associated with this is less than getting a royal flush in poker 6.5 million times in succession. It is actually less than the proverbial monkey on a typewriter re-typing Hamlet in its entirety, and with no errors.

As another example of applying the Hume principle, consider the claim of the miracle of "Jesus “walking on water”.  Clearly, it is impossible because the "law of gravity" - which dictates all objects on Earth fall toward its center unless supported - would be violated. 

Prof. Hugh Schonfeld (The Passover Plot) has a simple explanation for this: a mistranslation of the Hebrew word “al” which can mean “by” or “on” from the relevant biblical passage. So, when a scribe supposedly wrote “walking by the water” it was translated to “walking on the water”. Now let us apply the Hume test: Is the Schonfeld claim of mistranslation MORE or LESS miraculous than a man actually violating the law of gravity and walking on water? 

It doesn’t require a lot of thought or effort to see that the mistranslation of a passage of the New Testament is LESS miraculous (or if you prefer, less improbable) than that a man actually, literally walked on water.  Thus, applying Hume's principle, one opts for the less dramatic explanation, and the more conservative in terms of preserving natural principles.

Now, what about the "miracles of the loaves and fishes".  Again, same principles apply.  If one claims, therefore, that a "miracle" occurred such that thousands of loaves and fishes were produced from only a few (a clear violation of the law of conservation of mass-energy) he needs to show how or where there are ANY single exemptions in the cosmos. No one I know has ever, EVER proven any!

Indeed, if we did not expect these (physical) laws to hold everywhere and at all times then anything could happen! One minute this keyboard could be here on my desk, and the next it could rise up and vanish! This is the sort of haphazard universe one gets when physical laws are treated frivolously and with total disdain for their inherent predictability and repeatability. It is also a common treatment I have found from people who have never taken even a basic high school physics course.

Physical laws may be suitably modified or extended, however, should there be sufficient observational and empirical data to warrant it. This is exactly what was done to Newton's law of gravitation by Albert Einstein. This has resulted in a new law of gravitation which applies to the entire universe (i.e. taking into account its shape or curvature) instead of just a small region like the solar system

Once one understands what constitutes "impossibility" in terms of the laws of permission and denial then one can argue on the basis of what is impossible or not. When one doesn't understand these limits - or perhaps isn't even familiar with physical laws on the whole, then "anything goes" and worse, anything can be believed- even that a man survived three days in a whale's stomach despite the presence of hydrochloric acid, that would have reduced him to bones and less in that time,  according to our chemical laws.  

Is a thing or claim possible or impossible?  Always examine its behavior or the underlying claim in terms of known physical laws, then apply a dollop of reason as well. 

"But what about unknown physical laws that might be at work?"

Well, we simply patiently await their elucidation and articulation, preferably in quantitative form (see Lord Kelvin's apt statement at the top)

What we don't do is jump ahead to claim a law that hasn't yet been proven or demonstrated.

Why "Miracles" Are A Load Of Malarkey

Carlo, the math -accountant monkey in Barbados. Is he a "miracle"? Hardly! Just well trained with an abacus!



In a would be age of reason and enlightenment it is incredible how many still believe in "miracles" in the most advanced technological nation on Earth. I can understand it a bit better in Barbados, where the local Cable & Wireless Earth station dish is still the biggest scientific advancement in decades - and a monkey on the East coast is supposedly able to do accounting with an abacus for sales of breadfruit. I can't understand it in a nation that's sent men to the Moon, landed specialized craft on the planet Mars and has even flown another craft past Pluto.

The miracle meme is being pushed even harder (despite 80 percent of Americans already believing in them) as we behold a headline article "Do You Believe In Miracles?" in one of the Sunday magazines. The actual article account focuses on one Annabel Beam -  the subject of a new movie (just in time for Easter) entitled "Miracles from Heaven".  Annabel had evidently suffered "from two painful, life threatening digestive diseases requiring a regimen of 10 drugs daily". (One was defined as 'pseudo-obstruction motility disorder'- suggesting the young girl's organs were a bit out of alignment.)

Anyway, "miraculously", the girl fell from a tree one day and lo and behold, instead of suffering serious injury she miraculously recovered - and never again asked for her medications. Her folks and friends immediately concluded it was a "miracle from heaven" but it more likely was just that the fall suddenly re-aligned her displaced digestive organs as they should have been.

Which do you accept?  If you believe it was a genuine miracle, implying some kind of "divine" or supernatural intervention, then you commit the fallacy of ignotum per ignotius. That means using the least well understood explanation to account for a not well understood event.  

Basically, the issue is not about faith or humility, or belief or the lack thereof. It is, rather, whether the concept of "miracle" has validity in the physical world. A serious claim has been made about the nature of the universe and how it is alleged to behave. This claim implies that physical laws can be repealed haphazardly. It further implies that all scientific predictions rest on a wholly uncertain foundation, and that they cannot be trusted to yield reliable information from one era to the next, or one day to the next. (Since at any time, a supernatural intrusion can neutralize the law.)If accepted, the premise of variable physical laws introduces a horrendous set of consequences. For example, it allows for the possibility that all cars on the planet work on gasoline today, but may require water tomorrow. Or, one minute my word processor may be here on the table and the next it may rise up and dissipate into atoms. Or this year I may be able to predict lunar and solar eclipses - or asteroid close approaches - but not next year!

This is not an attempt to be facetious, or to necessarily ridicule religious beliefs. I am illustrating the sort of haphazard universe that results when physical laws are treated frivolously and with disdain for their predictability and repeatability. Hundreds of years of painstaking effort and research have gone into the discovery of these laws. Precisely for this reason it is incumbent on the miracle claimer to shoulder the burden of proof, or at least provide substantial evidence in proportion to the claim made.
Basically when all is said and done, the optimal test for a bona fide miracle remains that provided by philosopher David Hume:

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

In his essay collection Unweaving the Rainbow, biologist Richard Dawkins, Britain's most prominent atheist, chose the Fatima miracle of 1917, where 70,000 people reportedly saw the Sun move back and  forth, to apply Hume's principle: As Dawkins observed:

"On the one hand, we are asked to believe in a mass hallucination, a trick of the light, or mass lie involving 70,000 people. This is admittedly improbable. But it is LESS improbable than the alternative: that the sun really did move...If the sun had moved in truth, but the event was seen only by the people of Fatima, an even greater miracle would have been perpetrated: an illusion of NON-movement had to be staged for all the millions of witnesses not in Fatima."

In other words, the aim of the Hume miracle test is - given two equally improbable choices- one always elects the LESS improbable one as the most likely description. For example, consider the claim of Jesus “walking on water”. Prof. Hugh Schonfeld (The Passover Plot) offers a much simpler and more sensible explanation: a mistranslation of the Hebrew word “al” which can mean “by” or “on”. So, when a scribe really wrote “walking by the water” it was translated as “walking on the water”.

Now let us apply the Hume miracle test. Is the Schonfeld claim of mistranslation MORE or LESS miraculous (i.e. improbable) than a man actually violating the law of gravity and walking on water? It doesn’t require a lot of thought or effort to see that the mistranslation of a passage of the New Testament is LESS miraculous (or if you prefer, less improbable) than that a man actually, literally walked on water.

Again, going back to the Annabel Beam case, it makes more sense to accept that her digestive organs were suddenly aligned properly in her fall, than that there was any supernatural intervention.

In the PARADE piece, spiritual guru and author of "A Course In Miracles", Marianne Williamson insists that "people are evolving beyond a purely rationalistic world view to a more holistic perspective" and part of this is due to "quantum physics".  But while, quantum mechanics does support a nonlocal cosmos, as I showed in my recent book, Beyond Atheism, Beyond God, that doesn't meant it supports miracles.

Much of the over extension is predicated on physicist David Bohm's development of the quantum potential, in a number of his papers (published in Foundations Of Physics) and in his books, especially 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order'.   Bohm is also the author of one of the most trenchant textbooks, Quantum Theory (Dover, 1951) Below the quantum potential is depicted by Bohm for a pair of Gaussian slits:




















Bohm is also credited with first pointing out (op. cit., p. 169), the very precise analogy of quantum processes to thought. In particular, the quantum "wave packet collapse" (e.g. to a single eigenstate, from a superposition of eigenstates) is exactly analogous to the phenomenon of trying to pinpoint what one is thinking about at the instant he is doing such thinking. More often than not, when one does this, as Bohm notes: "uncontrollable and unpredictable changes" are introduced into the thought process or train.

Recall as I noted from earlier blogs (See: 'A Material Model of Consciousness', Parts I-III), that Bohm also provided a putative basis for a "quantum mind" which he referred to as the Holomovement. This was done by positing a hyper-dimensional reality (e.g. 5- dimensional) in which mind was enfolded as part of an "implicate order".  A lot of this was based on his postulate of "hidden variables".

While all this looks fascinating, even Bohm admitted the plausible acceptance of his conjecture rested on the outcome of a particular experiment. The experiment he proposed was actually designed by Rapisarda and Gozzini and became known as the "Gozzini experiment". It was originally to be conducted near Pisa, Italy ca. 1995. Alas, up to now - so far as I know- it hasn't been carried out. But if it had, and real de Broglie waves had been detected then this would be at least an indirect basis for Bohm's claims, as well as a feather in the hat for the claim of "quantum mind". Without it, we have no valid basis to assert such a claim, and can only adopt Bohm's vision as "inspiration".

So long as this vast gulf exists, there is no plausible basis for invoking quantum mechanics (QM)  as a handmaiden to either the world view promoted by Williamson, or Deepak Chopra or author Michael Talbot (The Holographic Universe) among others. If there isn't one can't press QM into service to support miracles either.

One of the most compelling reasons to consider miracles as rubbish was revealed in the same article, based on research by Kate Fowler of Duke University Divinity School. She found that "religious people are convinced God makes targeted or random choices on whom he will heal or save at any given time over another".

Which is pure poppycock.  If really believed it means a person who survives an airplane crash, where all others have perished,  can claim some special divine dispensation. Based on what? She read her Bible or said her rosary more times than the others? Or, noting Aurora victim Bonnie Kate Pourciau - who claimed "God was holding us in His hands" as the Aurora massacre unfolded-  was one of the chosen few spared- while a six year old (Veronica Moser) had to lose her life. Because ...what? She didn't say her prayers before bedtime? Give me a break! But when gullible people embrace special instances of LUCK as divine intervention, this is what you get: bare bollocks.

In the end, belief in miracles is a waste of mental capital, as bad as investment in crank scientific theories like the "Reciprocal system" (which also carries supernatural overtones in some of its presentations), and the "natural cycles" alternative to anthropogenic  global warming. Contrary to Williamson's argument that we can "either believe in an  age of miracles or violence" I say we have a third: we can believe and promote an age of genuine reason, and that must include critical thinking!

See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/07/god-was-holding-you-in-his-hands-dont.html

Is the Vatican Gaming Sainthood To Enhance the Piety of the Faithful?

Way back in the old days, ca. 1953-54 when I attended Catholic grammar school in Milwaukee, we were informed over and over about the qualities that made a saint. The good nuns introduced us to Saint Perpetua, for example, who was tossed into prison with her nursing infant because she refused to recant her newfound Christian faith. Subsequently, despite pleas from her father, she was horrifically butchered along with Felicity, her servant.  Then there was Saint Sebastian (after whom the school I attended was named) who suffered an ignominious martyrdom with his detractors unloading their quivers of arrows into him. The nuns also introduced us to Padre Pio (Saint Pio) who was capable of performing bilocation (being in two places at once). Then there was St. Gerard Majella who demonstrated levitation on several occasions - documented by witnesses.

In other words, in the old days the dutiful Catholic kid learned that Sainthood didn't come on the cheap nor was canonization "streamlined" to get the faithful from departing from the Church. (Of course, back in those days broad concepts of spirituality hadn't yet come into the mainstream and people more or less remained with their religion of birth. No more, as people learn to think independently and break off onto spiritual paths of their own - or no spiritual paths at all.)

Contrast this with today, when hordes of pilgrims have already gathered in Saint Peter's Square and in front of big screens erected across Rome for the canonizations of John Paul II and John XXIII. The crowds, along with a global audience, will watch as two popes are jointly proclaimed saints for the first time in the 2,000-year history of the church.

But the question that arises for us familiar with Church history is whether the bar is being excessively lowered for sainthood? Is there really proof that these two popes deserve to be canonized, or is it being done for ulterior motives? Say to enthrall the faithful and keeping them under the Vatican's tent.   What incites these questions are the circumstances as well as the popes themselves.

The path to sainthood for John Paul II, for example,  was the fastest in modern history, raising eyebrows among traditionalists for packing a painstaking process that can sometimes take centuries into nine incredibly short years.  It also has raised serious eyebrows for those aware of how John Paul II covered up the sexual abuse cases, in terms of inhibiting the apprehension of the perpetrators as well as the enablers. (J.P. II  actively and knowingly moved around pedophile padres to avoid their prosecution in numerous jurisdictions, especially in the States. All this is well documented and well known, except perhaps by the speed canonizers who seem not to care how this looks.)

Beyond that, though that ought to be enough to halt the canonization nonsense, Arthur C. Clarke once referred to John Paul II as "the world's most dangerous man".  Why? Because of his active opposition to birth control, setting the stage for mass destitution across the third world, especially Africa - where he wouldn't even condone the use of condoms despite an AIDS-HIV epidemic. Indeed, this was the same disgusting hypocrite who preached that  a Catholic contracting AIDS was a lesser evil than using condoms.

In the case of John XXIII, Francis took what sticklers decry as an even more radical move. He took the unusual step of dispensing with the Vatican’s modern requirement for two vetted and verified miracles to become a saint, elevating him based on a single 1966 case of a nun allegedly cured of gastrointestinal hemorrhaging after appeals to the man known across Italy as “the Good Pope.”  But, of course, no proper medical documentation was forthcoming so we've no remote idea if this was valid or mere hearsay.


Why is Francis so hyped up about creating more saints and how is he able to do it? Vatican experts point to his right to “equipollent canonization” — a papal prerogative to fast-track saints by requiring fewer proven miracles.   But to the critical thinking onlooker it looks more like a bag of tricks designed to rev up the faithful in 'down times'.  The latter would clearly mark the present era  when the Church is losing more people than ever before - especially among the young - in the more developed nations.  So why not pump out more saints to garner attention and perhaps more piety from the faithful?  The effect in any case has been that Francis has invoked the doctrine more times than any other pontiff since Leo XIII, who served from 1878 to 1903. In three cases, Francis elevated saints without a single confirmed miracle under their virtuous belts.


Why not? Perhaps because - as a former scientist (chemist)- Francis is more aware than any of his predecessors of the "miracle test" of philosopher David Hume.  Hume provided perhaps the best benchmark for what might supposedly be called a "miracle"

 "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."


Consider the miracle claim of  Jesus “walking on water”. Prof. Hugh Schonfeld has a simple explanation for this:  a mistranslation of the Hebrew word “al” which can mean “by” or “on”. So, when a scribe really wrote “walking by the water” it was translated to “walking on the water”.

Applying the Hume test, one is led to ask:  Is the Schonfeld claim of mistranslation MORE or LESS miraculous than a man actually violating the law of gravity and walking on water?  It doesn’t require a lot of thought or effort to see that the mistranslation of a passage of the New Testament is LESS miraculous (or if you prefer, less improbable) than that a man actually, literally walked on water. Francis then could have applied the same standards to John Paul II's claimed miracles - especially the first where it was far more plausible that Sister Simon-Pierre enjoyed a partial, somewhat improbable recovery from her condition, than that J.P. II effected a nonlocal "cure" from the grave. But let us hasten to emphasize that Francis' recognition of the severe constraints on modern day miracles does not merit invoking equipollent canonization to generate saints a dime a dozen.

According to Rev. Peter Gumpel, a senior Vatican figure and church historian:

“I know the Holy Father well enough to know that he believes in miracles, as we all do, but the question is simply and purely, should we require the confirmation of miracles for saints?”

Well, in conformance with previous standards, yes. Else the process and the spiritual form has receded into insignificance. Any human can then be thought of as a 'saint' if he or she is a reasonably good person. Special canonization by a pope is merely window dressing. The other aspect to this is whether the knowledgeable faithful would really put John Paul II in the same class as St. Perpetua or St. Sebastian.

Incredibly, a certain enclave in the Church is completely in favor of tossing out all historical sainthood standards and  lowering the bar. They insist that such a move could "open the door to more and faster-made saints, who tend to serve as public relations dynamos for the faith" in their countries of origin — a fact seen as a huge bonus as the Vatican casts its eye on fast growth in Africa and Asia.  In other words, when all is said and done it comes down to public relations, nothing more. The Church is merely invested in publicly projecting a more superstitious image to garner more primitive minds, in primitive lands.


Left unsaid is that such lowering of the bar could also pave the way to the quicker elevation of potential "blockbuster saints"  such as Mother Teresa. Much better not to inform people that the good Mother simply kept people in a state of dependency in Calcutta but never really addressed their physical needs. Also, keep hidden the unsavory backing of S&L slime ball Charles Keating. "No we don't wanna go there! We want our saints with no questionable ties!"

Sounding a more rational warning note is John Thavis, author of “The Vatican Diaries":

"Francis has caused some apprehension among the Vatican saint-makers, who see the pope waving his hand and saying we don’t need to follow these rules as much. They are saying, ‘We need to be very careful about how we do this.’ ”


Indeed, because it could backfire and result in even more people leaving the Church - having been able to see through the PR stunts. And if a religion requires PR stunts to survive then how much credibility  does it really have? If popes can manufacture saints at will to pump up piety, perhaps the doctrine of "infallibility" is also just a huge historical PR maneuver.

Perhaps the best analogy yet to what Francis is doing  - in terms of mass-saint making - was expressed by Rev. Marc Lindeijer, a senior church official in Rome who compiles ­cases and serves as an advocate for prospective saints. He compared elevating saints without vetted miracles to "allowing everyone  who plays baseball to be a major league baseball player.”


“I believe in quality rather than quantity,” Lindeijer said.

He later added, “Even if you are the president of the United States or Bill Gates, you can’t buy a miracle. Miracles are a great protection of justice, a sign of approval from God.”

Other observers say Francis, like many before him, is simply cherry-picking favorites, fast-tracking select candidates to save them from a Vatican bureaucracy with a backlog of thousands. In many ways, Francis is indeed  just continuing the legacy of John Paul II, who changed the rules in 1983 to require fewer proven miracles and ended up proclaiming 482 saints — more than in the previous 600 years combined. Maybe JP II figured that by jiggering the rules back then he'd stand a better chance himself of making the cut when the time came. Helped along in this, Benedict XVI, a fellow conservative and longtime confidant of John Paul II, championed his cause by dropping the traditional five-year waiting period to begin the process of sainthood. Neat!


But one of the saddest observations emerging amidst all the hype this week has been that despite John Paul II turning a blind eye to widespread reports of sexual abuse within the church, the "pressure to canonize him was so great that it would have been next to impossible for Francis to avoid it."   So the "pressure to canonize" trumps moral or ethical rectitude?  If that doesn't define the meaning of blasphemous I don't know what does. But in any case, it's at least a morally dubious expedient: clean the guy's history and neglect by elevating him to "sainthood." Then once the reprobate attains saint status, accountability no longer matters. He's ascended to such a rarefied realm that normal moral (and historical)  responsibility becomes passé and the faithful's piety has been jazzed up too. Heck, it's a win-win.

In the end, the whole farce of mass sainthood merely shows us the sterility of religions and how public relations has come to more and more replace whatever residue of spirituality they once had. This is especially the case with the Roman Catholic Church, and is also one reason why it may never be united with any other Christian sects. (The belief that Catholics can directly pray to saints to intercede with God on their behalf remains a fundamental division between them and many Protestants.)

Another danger not yet on the radar of the easy saint makers is that if more saints are created without vetted miracles,  the glow of the faith could fade for millions of Catholics who turn to saints in times of need. One would then behold a religion that had some degree of consistent canon and standards turn into one more cult, in this case a saint worshipping cult.
 
All of which confirms the wisdom of scientific Materialism and the benefits of atheism!
 

Miracles and Applying the Hume Test : Hint - Accept the Improbable Over the Impossible!

For the ardent supernaturalist, Philosopher David Hume’s test for accepting miracles often proves a “bridge too far.” According to Hume:

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish."

As one example of its application, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in his book Unweaving the Rainbow, chose the Fatima miracle of 1917, where 70,000 people reportedly saw the sun move. As Dawkins observed:

On the one hand, we are asked to believe in a mass hallucination, a trick of the light, or mass lie involving 70,000 people. This is admittedly improbable. But it is LESS improbable than the alternative: that the sun really did move...If the sun had moved in truth, but the event was seen only by the people of Fatima, an even greater miracle would have been perpetrated: an illusion of NON-movement had to be staged for all the millions of witnesses not in Fatima."

As an additional example, consider the miracle claim of Jesus “walking on water”. Prof. Hugh Schonfeld has a simple explanation for this: a mistranslation of the Hebrew word “al” which can mean “by” or “on”. So, when some scribe originally wrote: “walking by the water” it was later mistranslated as “walking on the water”, on account of the ambiguous meaning of the word 'al'.

Applying the Hume test: Is the Schonfeld claim of mistranslation MORE or LESS miraculous than a man actually violating the law of gravity and walking on water? It doesn’t require a lot of thought or effort to see that the supposed mistranslation of a passage of the New Testament is LESS miraculous (or if you prefer, less improbable) than that a man actually, literally walked on water.

I bring this up to show that ascertaining whether a “miracle” occurred in such and such an event is not that difficult provided one adheres to a consistent principle. This came to the forefront recently in an encounter with a person (on the All Experts Atheist-Agnostic forum) who continually pressed me with assorted questions to accept that his odd citations of events, including: a baby found alive 11 days after an earthquake in Haiti, and another person surviving a plane crash, constituted “miracles”. As I pointed out to him or her:

Note the secular definition of "miracle" is:

“A claimed or perceived pathological event that overturns one or more laws of nature or physical principles.”

So any miracle report must be based on this,

Observe that none of your cited examples, or "incidents" do so, because none of them are technically in violation of a scientific law. A baby emerging from the rubble of an earthquake after a day or two (I've never seen any reports for 10 days - but I'd be interested to hear the exact event and source) may be improbable but it isn't scientifically impossible. Neither is surviving a plane crash when everyone else dies. The survivor may merely have had the good luck to be seated in the best place on the plane to survive!

So, no, none of the cited examples is truly an "extraordinary event" - say that overturns a law of nature- they are merely rare events, with improbable (but not impossible) outcomes,

Not satisfied with this, the respondent went on to cite an actual case of a Haitian infant surviving 11 days after the quake, and two incidents involving survivors of air crashes. S/he then asked: “Can you scientifically prove that a human can survive after falling from thousands of feet height. Also, scientists are convinced that they have understood less than 5% of physical laws governing the universe and the rest is still dark with concepts such as dark energy, dark matter and so on. How can we say with confidence that certain events/things are against physical laws which assumes that we have fully understood complete set of physical laws governing the universe which is wrong..

To which I replied the infant surviving 11 days after a quake still didn't qualify it for "sainthood" (given unknown plausible mitigating natural circumstances, i.e. hidden air flows, dripping water pipes, etc.) and I cited Milton Rothman’s ‘A Physicist’s Guide to Skepticism’ – Chapter Five, 'Laws of Permission and Laws of Denial'. Here, Rothman does an excellent job of laying out – based on existing physical laws (from which one need not extraordinarily extrapolate)- what constitutes impossible events and what does not. Also, merely because something “hasn’t happened yet” doesn’t mean it will or must at any future time. Once the basic laws are locked into place, and they are, those options are out. Above all, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence at the time, not hypotheticals or unconfirmed reports, anecdotes.

I pointed out that all impossibility statements actually have far more generality and validity than possibility statements. But one must understand what this means. In science the actual, technical terms are "laws of permission" and "laws of denial". The first details all the actions that are allowed based on the existing laws of physics; the latter details all the actions disallowed.

According to Rothman (p. 129):

"The function of the laws of permission is to predict how objects will move through space or how a system will change with time under known forces. These laws are known with great precision. We can calculate with exquisite exactitude how a single charged particle will move in a known electromagnetic field. We know just how a pendulum will oscillate in a known gravitational field."

It also means that given a person falling freely with the acceleration of g = 9.8 m/s^2, and over some distance (height h) what the time will take him to fall, and the impacting resultant force when he lands. Also the extent to which that will break bones.

But one had to also note his cautionary point (p. 130) that: "it is usually impossible to make precise predictions of exactly what will happen in any real situation". This isn't because the laws are "wrong" but because extraneous, or previously unaccounted for random factors can enter including greater air resistance, say from an unforeseen updraft, or variable winds, or whatever.

Hence, a human body constructed as it is from fragile skeletal structure and organs that can rupture cannot normally fall freely thousands of feet and survive. That is, unless unusual mitigating circumstances are present, say that somehow the fall braked or the person lands on a massive hay stack or whatever.

I then went on to point out that the existence of dark energy doesn't mean a physical law has been violated, or that one emerged which we didn't already know. Hence, can't be placed in the same category as exceptional human events, or claimed "miracles". Dark energy is indeed an extrapolation of Einstein's general relativity law.

Still unsatisfied with my answers, the person provided more links to astounding cases of survivors purportedly dropping “from thousands of feet” up and living, while also dragging in other issues, such as when askling:

“Can't we assume that event which has a remote probability of occurring, say 1 in 100 million chances as miracle. How could a random big bang (disorderly event) lead to a orderly universe. Why are not there many meteorites, asteroid attacking our earth everyday if the universe evolved by chance? So many miracles I see everyday, how could I see with my eyes, how internal organs built in my body, external world and many things. I am surprised you don't consider any of these as miracles!”

My reply, of course, didn’t diverge as I disclaimed the further examples, noted that even in the source skepticism was expressed, i.e. in the Chinese case, “further investigation after the fall of communism has cast doubt on the official story”. In the other case, the survivor suffered a fractured skull, a broken leg and collarbone and third-degree burns covering much of her body so she didn't end up unscathed. The point was that neither example trumped the use of the Hume test – to accept an improbable natural event over a supernatural “miracle”. I then rebutted the other arguments or issues raised:

- I did not "assume" objects cannot travel faster than light, only pointed out the existing evidence - including Einstein's special relativity - shows they do not. Many scientists being "hopeful" ( you don't say who) doesn't mean diddly. Hopeful doesn't cut it in terms of hard evidence. Show me the compelling data (and also if it's independently confirmed), then I might accept it.

- Assuming Weinberg did say what you claimed (you again give no source) that doesn't mean he's in favor of miracles. Obviously, on account of ever iimproving methods, technology 'gaps' can exist in assorted scientific domains, but that doesn't mean "anything goes". I will still be fairly sure (99.999999%) that my car won't stop working one day on gasoline and will use water instead.

- No, we can't "answer everything by science" (yet) but that doesn't mean such answers are perpetually foreclosed. It means we patiently allow the scientific process in any given area to play out before we try to trump it by balderdash or unsubstantiated nonsense.

- NO, we can't assume an event which has a "remote probability of occurring, say 1 in 100 million" is a "miracle". As per my previous extensive response. We adopt the HUME Miracle criterion and take an improbable natural cause before any supernatural one. If the supernaturalist doesn't like that, too bad. He needs then to come up with a coherent supernatural "theory" to account for what occurred. Naturalists- Materialists are under no obligation to do so.

- WHO says we have an "orderly" universe?

In cosmological terms, the whole concept of "order" has been relegated to a minor and tiny niche of the extant cosmos. For example, the recent balloon-borne Boomerang and MAXIMA UV measurements to do with Type Ia supernovae, have disclosed a cosmic content:

7% - ordinary visible matter

93% - dark component, of which:

- 70% is DARK (vacuum) energy and

- 23% is dark matter

In effect, 93% of the universe can’t even be assessed for “order” since it isn’t visible. In the case of dark matter, one can only discern its presence indirectly by the visible effects on neighboring matter. In the case of dark energy, the underlying physical basis isn’t even known – though we know the result is an increase in the acceleration of the universe (arising from a cosmic repulsion attributed to dark energy.

The actual "orderly" systems to which you refer (gravitationally bound clusters, galaxies etc.) are really only a tiny percent (0.001) of the 7% ordinary matter total, the rest is undifferentiated plasma. Also these systems' formation can be accounted for by ordinary physical processes, i.e. aggregation under the influence of electrostatic fores (binding dust particles together initially) then the larger scale action of gravity to accrete larger mass into orbiting dynamic systems.

- Many meteorites DO "attack" our Earth every day - up to 10 million kg worth. But most are so tiny they burn up in our atmosphere owing to friction with the atmosphere. Also, Earth hasn't been immune from large meteroid or asteroid strikes. Such as asteroid DA 14 2012, which made a close pass to Earth on Feb. 15 this year. On the same date, an 11 ton (2.2. x 10^ 4 kg) meteoroid exploded over the Russian Urals - caught on video, causing much damage.

-The point is that these major hits -strikes are rare,

-first, because our planet is usually not in the path of any large asteroids or meteroids, and second, because the ones most likely to clobber us are the smaller sort (such as the meteroid that struck Russia) but they only occur once ever hundred years.

Again, there's absolutely no reason to reach for extravagant or unusual explanations.

As per the "internal organs" of humans, only a person that doesn't grasp evolution would accord them any special significance.

In this sense, if you are open minded enough it would help to get Francis Crick’s book: ‘The Astonishing Hypothesis’, (Touchstone Books, 1995) in which he goes into exceptional detail to explain how natural selection forged the eye and the human vision system (Chapter 3, ‘Seeing’ ; Chapter 4, ‘The Psychology of Vision’; Chapter 10, ‘The Primate Visual System – Initial Stages’, Chapter 11, ‘The Visual Cortex of Primates’)

In the end, "miracles" only exist to those who don't fuilly understand the extent to which the natural world and its assorted objects, including people, can already be explained.

Will the persistent questioner finally appreciate and accept that? Highly unlikely, but we will see!

Pope John Paul II: Ersatz Sainthood, Anyone?

I had high hopes that Pope Francis, hailing from a scientific (chemistry)background, wouldn't fall for the folly of "sainthood". Let's be clear that this is all supernatural mumbo -jumbo and no one - be he pontiff, king or potentate, has any business deifying any mere mortal with this patently absurd term. Least of all, Pope John Paul II.  Yet, Francis appears to have succumbed to the cries and swoons of the "faithful" to give them this guy as a new saint.

According to the UK Guardian in a report this morning:

"The Vatican said the Argentinian pontiff had decided that the late pope John XXIII, who opened the landmark Second Vatican Council in 1962, should also be canonised, despite no second miracle having been approved in his case."

Note that the standard path to sainthood has always required two "miracles" - but in the case of John Paul II, even the first one attributed to him looks suspect. The original claim involves one Sister Marie Simon -Pierre (a nun of the Congregation of the Little Sisters) from Parkinson's Disease. The claim is that Sr. Simon-Pierre awakened one morning, 2 months after John Paul's death, to discover all her symptoms were gone. She insisted she'd prayed to the dead Pope and he "answered my prayers".

Maybe, but maybe not! While she does remain symptom-free there are loads more possible explanations for her recovery than that some dead pontiff performed or enabled a "miracle". The most plausible is that she never had Parkinson's disease in the first place. The only objective clinical diagnosis, in fact, rests on the pathology and identification of the accumulation of alpha-synuclein protein forming inclusions called Lewy bodies.

Since this identification requires autopsy, it means that at the very least the beatification phase ought not have progressed until Sr. Simon-Pierre's death. (In which case, canonization is postponed even longer.) Then, careful examination ought to reveal the abatement or diminution of the Lewy bodies. In addition, such examination would confirm she had Parkinson's rather than some other condition.

According to one AP report from two years ago: "Vatican-sponsored doctors simply determined that her cure had no known scientific explanation". But under pressure from the Vatican, how hard did they really look? Nice try, but it won't wash! What we need is the actual examination of the nun's brain for the presence of diminished Lewy Bodies (see image in link). That would confirm: a) she did have Parkinson's and b) that the primary source (Lewy bodies) had retreated. Then, the Vatican's medical experts or others could search the archives for any similar cases. If they exist, then what happened to the nun is not a miracle, merely an unusual and improbable happenstance.

Ironically, in the real world the actual plausible cure for Parkinson's rests with stem-call research which the Church foursquare opposes on the grounds that it uses and destroys human embryos. (In fact, the embryos are already allocated for destruction and most of them resulted from natural abortions or miscarriages).

Back to the Guardian report:

"No dates were given, but the ceremonies are expected to take place by the end of the year. There is some speculation that John Paul's could be scheduled for 22 October, his feast day and the anniversary of the liturgical inauguration of his 27-year-long papacy in 1978. Equally, however, 8 December – the feast of the immaculate conception – has been suggested as a fitting date.


The rapid process by which Karol Wojtyła has been propelled towards sainthood will be welcomed by many of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, who regard him as a towering figure who hastened the collapse of communism, encouraged inter-faith dialogue and brought charisma to the church."


The Guardian also aptly pointed out:

"But it is likely to be met with anger among his critics, including those who cite his record in handling the clerical sex abuse scandal. Some of them believe he should never be made a saint, let alone less than a decade after his death."

More disturbing is the evidence that J.P. II  actively and knowingly moved around pedophile padres to avoid their prosecution in numerous jurisdictions. When he died, that stratagem was passed on to "Pope Rat" aka Joseph Ratzinger. So how does such an action make this guy a "saint"? Maybe Francis needs to look again at the trove of documents which - if anything - don't support assigning any such label.

Arthur C. Clarke once referred to John Paul II as "the world's most dangerous man".  Why? Because of his active opposition to birth control, setting the stage for mass suffering across the third world, especially Africa - where he wouldn't even condone the use of condoms despite an AIDS-HIV epidemic. Indeed, this was the same disgusting hypocrite who preached that Catholics contracting AIDS was a lesser evil than using condoms.

AIDS! A disease of horrific and debilitating suffering! How is this guy remotely considered a "saint" as opposed to devil in disguise? Consider the implications just for this policy in Africa where nearly a fifth of the population of the continent are Catholics and where over 22 million people are living with HIV.

Apart from all these considerations, philosopher David Hume provided perhaps the best benchmark for what might supposedly be called a "miracle"

 "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

Consider the miracle claim of  Jesus “walking on water”. Prof. Hugh Schonfeld has a simple explanation for this:  a mistranslation of the Hebrew word “al” which can mean “by” or “on”. So, when a scribe really wrote “walking by the water” it was translated to “walking on the water”.

Applying the Hume test, one is led to ask:  Is the Schonfeld claim of mistranslation MORE or LESS miraculous than a man actually violating the law of gravity and walking on water?  It doesn’t require a lot of thought or effort to see that the mistranslation of a passage of the New Testament is LESS miraculous (or if you prefer, less improbable) than that a man actually, literally walked on water.

The same standards can be applied to Pope John Paul II's claimed miracles - especially the first - since no second miracle was found, so the Church has evidently violated its own standards and definitions for "sainthood". In the case of the first, it is far more plausible that Sr. Simon-Pierre enjoyed a partial, somewhat improbable recovery from her condition, than that J.P. II effected a nonlocal "cure" from the grave.

The Church's faithful also firmly believe that J.P. II did more than anyone to "bring down communism"  - but this is more ineffable bollocks and codswallop. The actual person most responsible (and it wasn't Ronnie Ray-gun) was Mikhail Gorbachev! See the book 'The Untold History of the United States' or hell - just investigate the downfall of the former Soviet Union on your own. Don't take my word for it!

But in the end, the 1.2 billion R.C. faithful will believe what they want. And hey, if it takes the flock's collective mind off the sexual travesties committed by padres the past 50 years (including on my brother John, btw) then so much the better!