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<\/a><\/div>\nOver in the comment thread of last week\u2019s post on standards of proof for miracles<\/a>, P. Coyle and Iota have been hashing out the classic argument that a truly unambiguous miracle would be a blow against our free will, forcing us to believe in God. \u00a0I want to walk through and discuss their positions, since this is a common Christian contention (and because it\u2019s going to set me up perfectly<\/em>\u00a0for a Harry Potter<\/em>\u00a0fanfiction reference in today\u2019s Sunday\u2019s Good Book<\/a> post). \u00a0Everyone\u2019s comments have been trimmed for length; I\u2019ve tried to keep the messages clear, but it\u2019s worth going back to the original comment thread<\/a>.<\/p>\n P. Coyle framed the problem through the analogous case of a juror whose beliefs are compelled by evidence:<\/p>\n Suppose you are on a jury. You have been presented with evidence that has convinced you, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant is guilty. Having been so convinced, could you, as an act of free will, \u201cchoose to believe\u201d that the defendant is NOT guilty? My contention is that you could not. Yes, you could use your free will to vote to acquit the accused, even though you believe he is guilty, but you would be using your free will to choose how to act, not to choose what to believe\u2026<\/p>\n Thus, I still remain completely unconvinced by your previous argument that God, if he existed, could not demonstrate his existence to us beyond a reasonable doubt without interfering with our free will. To reiterate, by analogy you seem to be saying that a prosecutor who presents a jury with sufficient evidence to demonstrate the guilt of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt is interfering with the jury\u2019s free will.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Iota agreed that a prosecutor presenting evidence beyond a reasonable doubt would \u2018force\u2019 a juror to believe in the\u00a0defendant\u2019s\u00a0guilt but\u00a0countered by saying that God has a qualitatively different power to compel belief:<\/p>\n What I could choose to do [in the jury example] would be to either say that because I find the evidence compelling I WON\u2019T be convinced of any alternative (upgrading my \u201cmoral certainty\u201d to \u201cabsolute certainty\u201d) or to say \u201cOf course, I COULD be wrong\u2026\u201d (even if I think that chance is 0,000001%)\u2026<\/p>\n A prosecutor similarly could not \u201cprove\u201d that Mr. Smith is innocent of a crime. He could prove that, given there are no advances in forensics and no evidence was misinterpreted, Mr. Smith did not kill Ms. Newman in the way the prosecution states she had been killed.<\/p>\n What the prosecution could not do (and here they significantly differ from God) is wipe away all those extra conditions above. And those extra conditions are important. If none of them remained, I could not make the choice I wrote of above (between upgrading my \u201cmoral certainty\u201d to \u201cabsolute certainty\u201d or not) \u2013 it simply would be upgraded, without any choice on my part. And that upgrade, I think, is the essence of \u201chaving faith\u201d as I understand it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Personally, I think Iota is\u00a0overestimating\u00a0the power even an omniscient god would have to prove it\u2019s existence to us. \u00a0Ebonmuse of Daylight Atheism had an excellent post this week on the difficulty of distinguishing between between gods<\/a>, sufficiently advanced aliens, etc. \u00a0No god could muster proof of abilities that are beyond our capacity to comprehend; I can see someone bilocate, but I can\u2019t observe an ability to be all-loving. \u00a0Ebonmuse correctly concluded that any sufficiently powerful being, whether or not it was God, would be able to compel ritual worship and belief in existence.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/div>\n