Acts of God? Miracles and scientific explanation

History and Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 483-494

  Førland, Tor Egil ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OSLO   (Norway)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149496259     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2008.00471.x     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. David Gary Shaw, "Modernity between Us and Them: The Place of Religion within History," History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006), 1-9, quotation from 3.
2. For such definitions, see Jon Butler, "Theory and God in Gotham," History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006), 47-61, esp. 52;
3. and Rodney Stark, "Reconceptualizing Religion, Magic, and Science," Review of Religious Research 43 (2001), 101-120, esp. 108-111.
4. Quoted in Finn Erhard Johannessen, To vann og ett under: Revsjøenes historie [Two lakes and a wonder: The history of the Fox Lakes] (Lillehammer, no publisher, 1988), 16, my translation.
5. Personal communication from Johannessen.
6. Aviezer Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 185-191.
7. R. M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981), 10.
8. David Hume, "Of Miracles" [1748], Appendix 2 in Robert J. Fogelin, A Defense of Hume on Miracles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 68-87, quotation from 72;
9. cf. John Earman, Hume 's Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8.
10. Bums, The Great Debate on Miracles;
11. Earman, Hume's Abject Failure;
12. Fogelin, A Defense of Hume on Miracles.
13. Aviezer Tucker, "Miracles, Historical Testimonies, and Probabilities," History and Theory 44 (2005), 373-390.
14. Brad S. Gregory, "The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion," History and Theory, Theme Issue 45 (2006), 132-149, quotation from 138, footnote 12.
15. Front-page articles in the newspapers Aftenposten and Dagbladet (July 25, 2007).
16. In mid September 2007 the course had a weekend gathering during which "we seek contact with angels and learn how we can attempt to create heavenly miracles in our own existence." This quotation is from the course's website, http://www.astarte-education.com/, accessed August 2, 2007 (my translation). Originally the website had stated with no qualifications that contact with angels would be established and miracles made, but the text was watered down after a high-profile journal editor and finance mogul accused the princess of fraud. "Misleading advertising" that promises gains that cannot be achieved is illegal in Norway.
17. See Aftenposten (August 2, 2007).
18. Rodney Stark, "Secularization, R.I.P. - Rest in Peace," Sociology of Religion 60 (1999), 249-273, esp. 265.
19. Gregory, "The Other Confessional History," 146, 148.
20. Reported in Aflenposten (March 1, 2007), 6.
21. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), 215.
22. C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Description (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 19-20;
23. Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004).
24. Ottar Dahl, Grunntrekk i historieforskningens metodelære [Main lines in the methodology of historical research], 2nd edition [1st edition 1964] (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1976), 100, cf. 79 and 111, italics in original, my translation.
25. C. Behan McCullagh, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective (London: Routledge, 2004), 52.
26. Johannessen, To vann og et under, 30, translation and italics mine.
27. Margaret Gilbert, On Social Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 163-164, 199-214.
28. Gerald M. Edelman, "The Embodiment of Mind," Daedalus 135 (2006), 23-32, quotation from 30-31.
29. Jaegwon Kim, '"Downward Causation' in Emergence and Non-Reductive Physicalism," in Emergence or Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism, ed. Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Flohr, and Jaegwon Kim (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), 119-138, quotation from 128-129.
30. For an example of theologians' resistance to let go of God in their explanatory vocabulary, as well as of historians' insistence that he should be excluded, see Jens Amp Seip, "Kirkelig historie-teori og kirkelig historieforskning," [Confessional theory of history and confessional historiography] Historisk Tidsskrift 33 (1944), 372-398.
31. Gregory, "The Other Confessional History," 137, 138.
32. Stark, "Reconceptualizing Religion, Magic, and Science."
33. Gregory, "The Other Confessional History," 136.
34. Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System," in idem, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87-125, quotation from 112.