Skip to main content

beggars, crusts of bread, and miracles

There are two preambles to the acceptance of miracles: either is sufficient.

The first is the conviction that God is provident.  If God is, then it would be fitting for God to have something to say, and communicating is generally a free action, and God's freedom would be demonstrated by supernatural intervention.  In other words, we at least hope for God to show us that He is speaking to us, miracles are God's way of initiating communication.

The second is the recognition my existence is good, but that this goodness consists precisely in my searching for meaning.  "My" hear ends up including all of "us."  And "meaning" ends up being all encompassing.  So we are naturally searching for God.  We are, as Giussani says, beggars.  Miracles are crusts of bread given by God to coax us to (the thought of Panera as a prelude to heaven just popped in my mind) become His companions.  Compañeros.  Refusing in principle to accept this invitation until God has performed a miracle that cannot be doubted is like a beggar who declines bread because he has not done a spectral analysis of each molecule.

Comments

Leo White said…
delete "hear"
1:49 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....
Post a Comment
Read more