10-18-89 Wednesday. The World Series has been postponed indefinitely as a result of yesterday’s earthquake in northern California. There are two things of note about the quake. First, there is confusion about the point of talk about what caused the freeway to collapse. Certain engineers have claimed that the freeways were inadequately built and maintained. Critics of the engineers say that it is too early to blame people for the losses of life and property. But this misses the point. The engineers aren’t trying to blame anyone; they’re trying to understand what happened and get a handle on it so that future catastrophes can be averted. In other words, the point of the causal citation is not to stain anyone’s moral character (to use Joel Feinberg’s term); it’s to shed light on what happened and get a handle on it. Some people can’t distinguish the two. They think that all causal citations are designed to locate a culprit. Second, the media are trying to find individual cases on which to focus attention. For example, rescue workers found a living man in the rubble of the collapsed freeway, which caused a mad rush by the media to get a story. Americans are unable to understand a situation unless it has a personal point to it—unless some identifiable person is involved and suffering. Try to discuss the geology of earthquakes and they lose interest. Try to get a meaningful discussion of public policy going and they tune out. But find a survivor and you’ve got people’s eyes and ears. It’s what journalists call a “human-interest story”.
We’ve begun discussing miracles in my Philosophy of Religion course. As philosophers, our main concern is to understand the concept of miracle; it is not at all to determine whether a particular miracle has occurred or will occur. The students seem to grasp this distinction, which is to say that they’re becoming philosophical. As I’ve pointed out many times to them (and in these pages), philosophers qua philosophers are concerned with what must and can be the case, given such-and-such. They are not concerned with what is the case. So in the case of miracles, our concern is whether, given a certain conception of what a miracle is, a miracle is compatible (logically) with there being laws of nature, free will, an omnipotent god, and so on. In other words, we want to know what the world would have to be like in order for there to be miracles, or what a miracle would have to be like in order for it to cohere with other things we believe. As always, my pedagogical goal is not to persuade the students of anything. It is to (1) raise questions for them to consider and (2) cause them to reflect on the consistency of their beliefs. Put differently, my aim is not to force acceptance or rejection of any particular belief; it is to start a process of self-reflection that may, as an incidental result, lead to abandonment or inclusion of certain beliefs. I’m interested in consistency, not truth.
If someone were to ask me whether I believe in miracles, I could not answer the question. “It depends”, I would say, “on what you mean by ‘miracle’.” This is not an evasion of the question; it is an attempt to understand the question so that it can be answered. If by “miracle” one means “an event, caused by a supreme being, that transgresses a law of nature” (as conceived by David Hume [1711-1776] and Richard Swinburne), I would answer “No”, because I believe that there are no supreme beings. But honestly, I’m much more concerned with the conceptual questions than the factual questions. I would much rather inquire into the concept of God than determine whether God exists; I would much rather investigate the concept of a law of nature than perform experiments in an attempt to discover them. That’s why I love philosophy. Philosophy is concerned with conceptual questions, not factual or evaluative questions. It is concerned with the categories through which we view the world, not the objects that we place in those categories. I am tremendously indebted to Alan White [1922-1992] for making me conscious of this approach (in his essay “Conceptual Analysis”). Even if conceptual analysis is only a small part of philosophy (I believe, to the contrary, that it’s the whole), it’s a worthwhile enterprise, one that I’m determined to pursue. It’s intrinsically valuable and rewarding.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 