Abduction and the no-miracles argument

The Cheshire cat,
famous invisible cat

In an earlier post in this blog, I explained with an example the mode of reasoning based on abduction. Although not as strong as deduction and induction, abduction reaches high degrees of confidence in fields such as history, art criticism and others, less scientific than mathematics or natural science.

In another post published in March 2016, I described the fallacy of the invisible cat, which confuses a sufficient condition with a necessary condition for something to happen. This situation occurs when there are several possible causes that may have given rise to the same phenomenon.

In some cases, if we apply abduction to a situation where the fallacy of the invisible cat could occur, a conclusion can be reached. Think of the example I proposed to describe this fallacy:

What does science say about miracles?

Victor Hugo

In his work Quatrevingt-Treize, a title usually translated as “Ninety-three” (it refers to 1793, the year of the Reign of Terror and the Vendée), Victor Hugo introduces a character named Cimourdain, a former priest who has lost his faith because of science:

Science had demolished his faith; the dogma had vanished in him... He knew everything about science and he knew nothing about life.

Apart from the fact that the second sentence is quite debatable (no one can know everything about science), the first raises the confrontation between science and faith, which began with the Enlightenment and reached its maximum philosophical effect in the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo‘s time. He is probably projecting his prejudices into a historical anachronism.

The celebration of Christmas

Earth lighting in the winter solstice

The time of the winter solstice was the occasion for major celebrations by nearly all ancient peoples. It represents the time when the sun, after losing height for six months, begins again to recover its upward movement. The ancients had always the fear that some year the sun could fail to recover, and would continue down until disappearing forever, a catastrophe for humanity.

In the Roman Empire, the Saturnalia played that role, for Saturn was the god of agriculture and the recovery of the sun was a sine qua non for the success of the next harvest. Also, just by that time the sun entered the sign of Capricorn in the zodiac, which was astrologically linked with the planet Saturn. The festival, which began on December 17, lasted for several days, until the 23rd. During these days, banquets were held, gifts were distributed, and masters served their slaves.

One of the traditional deities of ancient Indo-European peoples, Mitra, had a varied fate, according to the particular people we are talking about. Thus, in Vedic India he was one of the chief gods, along with Varuna and the other asuras, but came to play a secondary role, almost demonic, when in Hindu India prevailed the devas, another group of gods including Siva and Vishnu.

Ikiru, or the power of abduction

A scene from Ikiru

Ikiru (To Live) is a great movie by Akira Kurosawa, one of the best two Japanese filmmakers of the mid-twentieth century (the other one is Yasihiro Ozu). Perhaps not as well known as Seven Samurai or Dersu Uzala, this film has many followers and its argument lends itself to curious considerations.

The protagonist, Kanji Watanabe, has been working for 30 years in the bureaucracy of the City of Tokyo. As the narrator says at the beginning of the film, in these 30 years he has not lived. Or in the words of Toyo, his young employee, he has behaved like a mummy. Then he learns that he suffers from stomach cancer and has less than a year to live. As I mentioned in another post in this blog, by 1952, the year the movie was released, a cancer diagnosis was equivalent to a death sentence. Watanabe discovers the value of life and tries to start living.After trying without success to drown his sorrow in pleasure, he decides to start a crusade for the sanitation of some land and the building of a playground. Although it costs him a huge effort, because the bureaucracy makes a tooth and nail resistance, he finally succeeds. The last fifty minutes of the film are devoted to Watanabe’s funeral, with several flashbacks showing his fight against the bureaucracy.