The question of God, and if God, then God's miracles tends to come up in any assembly of skeptics. This newsletter is determinedly neutral on the question, as is the Skeptical Inquirer, published by the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, NY. The Center provides a separate quarterly journal, Free Inquiry, for philosophical unbelievers and agnostics, and maintains the Council for Secular Humanism as an organization for freethinkers.
An earlier issue of this newsletter, (June 1996, p. 6) supplied evidence that about a third of skeptics maintain a belief in the divine. Many other skeptics are satisfied that reasoned inquiry can show any belief in the supernatural as untenable. In consequence not all skeptical publications feel a need to divide religion from scientific skepticism. The Skeptic published by the Skeptics Society in Altadena, CA, tends to support unbelief. Similarly, The Skeptic from Manchester, England, seems to view religion as merely one more form of irrationality. The issue, however, is more complicated than rejecting superstition. It is fairly easy to show that the literal claims of the Christian fundamentalists can not hold water. Many miracles can be debunked by careful observation. Holy elephant gods drinking real milk, or paintings of the Virgin Mary shedding tears have been found deceptive. God is not some sort of superman miracle worker.
The important question is whether God exists as prime mover or creator of the universe, as an abstract principle of reality. Both, the knowledge of science and the knowledge of god rest in principle on human experience. The great difference is, that scientific experience is public and must be verifiable by all. Our experience of the divine is private, the visions and convictions of the believing individual. Yet, who is to say that St. Paul's vision of the Christ, or Martin Luther's experience of a storm are not every bit as real as the most conclusive experiment.
Even for boiled in oil skeptics some questions remain very difficult to answer. To think of the nature of the possible answer, even that can defy reason. Here is an example: why is mathematics true, why does nature work according to rules which may have been imagined by a human mind before they are found to apply to some real world phenomenon? Mathematics has been described as a human invention, as a logical game or language, which does not exists in nature. Yet, the universe revolves according to the rules of the calculus while the dice follow those of statistics. It seems unavoidable that whatever we posit as God, he too must adhere to mathematical logic.
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