I agree with you as well, miracles are real and have happened in my life and in the lives of family and friends. God is all-powerful and isn’t bound or limited by anything. Some are small and minor while others are big. In fact, I believe that God does miracles all the time even in the smallest of ways but we just don’t see them. Sometimes they are in flow with nature in that they are unnoticeable while at other times they are game changing and seem to us at least, breaking the laws of nature. I’m sure that if God made the universe and knows how it works and set all the laws in motion, I bet you He knows how to work around them without having to rip reality apart.
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The key phrases in that which had my approval are these…
And yet if you define miracles as violations of the laws of nature then God only does miracles long ago, in old stories, and in Walt Disney movies.
Kind of like what we see magicians do on a stage, right?
Exactly! The laws of nature are the frabric of reality and no God does not have to contradict Himself and tear that fabric of reality in order to answer our prayers let alone impress a few ignorant savages.
Thanks, gbob. God did, indeed do this, and the other miracles I wrote about.
On this we can agree, and happily so.
And yet he DOES work miracles “all the time”, because it in his interest and ours that we be reminded he is omnipotent, and we are limited. NOTHING is impossible with God. Thousands of things are impossible for man. Trillions of ordinary events happen every day. God does SOME miracles every day; we have no way of knowing how many. But even if only ten % of Christians experience a miracle in any given year, that would be 200,000,000 miracles a year out of say 3,650,000,000,000,000,000 non-miraculous events. Percentage-wise the amount is not high, but in real numbers it is.
Yep, because miracles are NOT a violation of the laws of nature. The laws of nature are themselves the work of God and they were designed to do His work while allowing Him to interact with His creation. While criminals would prefer a God who breaks the law just like they do, the rest of us who work within the law would naturally worship a God who also abides by the laws which He created. And we see this in all the miracles which happen everyday.
I think that’s a fair statement. However:
The Ten Commandments
Exo 20:11 - For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Said in the middle of The Ten Commandments as an echo from Genesis 1.
How else should the ancient Jews understand this as a confirmation of 6 literal days? And if they understood it that way, why shouldn’t we?
puzzled…
Because we have a more evolved epistemology.
Then everything is a miracle. So what do we call those alleged events that do violate the laws of nature? Ohhhh! There can’t be any!! But what would we call them if there were? And what would be an example?
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You’re losing me here. You seem to imply that the Hebrews were some kind of blank slate and the only knew what God told them and nothing else. Do you think they didn’t have any “cosmology” whatsoever?
I’m not saying “we have Egyptian creation myths.” That’s a huge jump.
I’m saying that the biblical story is a polemic response against Egyptian creation myths.
Ah, wikipedia.
I have a paper somewhere on my computer that I can’t find at the moment, but try this:
I look at this differently than others. When I was a manager, I had to go to all sorts of rather silly meetings. Yes, I even had to go to a meeting on how to have meetings. I told my wife that night that I could retire early now because they had just run out of ideas for more meetings. 
Anyway, one of the trainings I had to go to was on communication–alright, I was a remedial student and had to got to many of them. Communication from God consists of
1 the intent of the communicator
2. method of communication–audible words or mental concepts, pictographs?
2. the words of the communicator in that medium
3. the hearing or seeing of the receiver,
4. the understanding of the receiver
Let’s assume God does the first 3 perfectly. We are imperfect. Words, concepts and pictographs have ambiguous and multiple meanings. Learning mandarin is tough because to the westerner who doesn’t hear tones well (and Chinese mess them up a lot too) yi ge shou is a hand (with fingers), but yi shou ge is a choir. Pictographic forms make it clearer. But the sound ge, alone, in first tone can mean many things. brother, song, sever. Shou, just the sound in second tone can mean head, chief, part of shou-wei, meaning first-last, or guard. My problem was going through a mental look up chart to see if what I heard made sense or was it a new word.
My point in all this is that even if the Hebrew copied the words correctly, he still had to interpret the meaning God intended, and that is not an easy task even with a philosophy book.
Thus, I refuse to put the self-inflicted shackles on that so many willingly chose to do–the shackles that we must understand the passage as the original writer understood it. His understanding is not that important. It is God intention, and as I have said over and over, God hasn’t clarified his intention, in spite of all those who claim to absolutely know that 1. God intended Genesis 1 as a poem, 2. God intended to accommodate his message, 3. God didn’t intend to teach real history. Where this knowledge comes from is never stated–were they inspired to know this? Are they claiming that they are better buddies with God than I am and thus God told them but not me?
Thus, I don’t care too much about what the Hebrew understood it to say. I will grant that he probably understood it to be 24-hour days. Big deal. That Hebrew is no more perfect than you or I in our understanding. And some times God didn’t care about that too much either–He told Daniel to lock up the words of his prophecy and that it wasn’t for his time or understanding. Jesus spoke in parables so that they would hear and not easily understand.
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I don’t think they necessarily understood it as a solar day.
There are multiple uses of the Biblical Hebrew word for an indeterminate period of time, ‘yom’, that period determined solely by context, and only traditionally translated “day” when associated with the six creation periods delineated in Genesis 1. The context in Genesis 1 is unique in all of scripture, the very creation of the universe, space and time itself, and it happened once.
We also have Psalm 90:4, and no reason to necessarily think that the Israelites couldn’t understand the days in Exodus 20 as being analogous days.
Nope. Miracles are always unexpected. Along with being a work of God, that is a defining characteristic. I only said that they do not violate the laws of nature not that they are a result of the operation of the laws of nature. The laws of nature are simply an example of God’s use of automation. But just because you use automation to accomplish various tasks doesn’t mean you cannot act yourself when needed. But the laws of nature are not causally closed so in order to act (i.e. interact with us and the world), God doesn’t have to shut the laws of nature down.
You can call them miracles if you believe in God or you can call them statistical anomalies if you do not.
though… I read that question as… what do we call those events that allegedly violate the laws of nature? since I do not believe in events which actually violate the laws of nature.
Examples have been provided in abundance on this forum like maggy’s story.
Your answers are to decontextualized extracts of your own bias.
Your examples, like maggy’s story, are easily explicable in rational terms, no supernatural agency is required at all. As in all of material existence.
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No, they don’t have to be a blank slate, but lets assume you are standing before a burning bush or some other manifestation of God’s power and he tells you your cosmology is wrong, are you seriously going to say, "Sorry god you have to speak in terms of my cosmology and I am not going to listen to your cosmology. " REALLY? That is the response yall expect of the Hebrew?
I’m not saying “we have Egyptian creation myths.” That’s a huge jump.
Excuse me if I think you made that jump quite a short one when you said: Compare, for example, ancient local creation myths of Egypt with Genesis; they’re remarkably similar. Neither the Hebrews nor the Egyptians were stupid
Even if you were considering them to be derivative of Egyptian myths, I would consider them human-made stories, not God inspired stories, unless we believe our God was one of the Egyptian pantheon. You claim that you weren’t saying we don’t have Egyptian myths, but then you link to a paper which attempts to show the similarity of the bible and this Egyptian myth? Sorry, I only had to jump an inch to arrive at the conclusion you criticize. lol
Of the paper you link to:
→ Then the sun god Ra emerged out of primeval chaos, he came out of a blue giant lotus flower that appeared on the surface of the water.
- Ra gave light to the universe - Creation of light
- In the beginning the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep water, these waters were very similar to the primordial watery chaos Nun of the Egyptian creation myth
- A wind from God swept over the face of the waters to give light (just the same as Ra )
- Unlike the Egyptian mythology, God existed before the creation, he was not born out as Ra
Day Two - Creation of air and moisture - Ra created the air god Shu and his wife Tefnut the goddess of moisture, - Creation of the sky - God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome, And it was so. God called the dome Sky. (Rain provided ancient people evidence that a body of water existed above the sky)
Day Three - Creation of Earth and Sky - Shu and Tefnut gave birth to the sky- goddess Nut and the earth god Geb, and so the physical universe was created.
I don’t think our God came out of the Chaos, he brought order out of the chaos, and God coming out of a lotus blossom on the water? Where is the similarity there?
Of course there are two similarities, light being created first and the separation of the waters, but as discussed above, I would think that the translator’s choice of ‘dome’ is a modern eisegesis, imputing his view of what those stupid ancients thought about there being a domed sky for what they really might have thought.
First off, there is always a logic to these stories and often it is light and the sun that is started first. I don’t use this as evidence that God inspired the Hebrew account. What I do use is the fact that the whole passage can make sense in a scientific world. Consider an Australian story:
*There was a time when everything was still. All the spirits of the earth were asleep - or almost all. The great Father of All Spirits was the only one awake. Gently he awoke the Sun Mother. As she opened her eyes a warm ray of light spread out towards the sleeping earth. The Father of All Spirits said to the Sun Mother, *
"Mother, I have work for you. Go down to the Earth and awake the sleeping spirits. Give them forms." Creation Myths -- Australian Aborigine Creation Myth
I was interested in the Sun mother, a spirit going down to the earth, walking or hovering over it.
According to Ainu mythic poetry, the world was created when oil floating in the ocean rose like a flame and became the sky. What was left turned into land. Vapor gathered over the land and a god was created. From the vapor of the sky, another god was created who descended on five-colored clouds . Out of those clouds, the two gods created the sea, soil, minerals, plants, and animals. The two gods married and produced many gods including two shining gods—the Sun god and the Moon god, who rose to Heaven in order to illuminate the fog-covered dark places of the world.Ainu creation myth of deity’s descent on five-colored clouds | JAPANESE MYTHOLOGY & FOLKLORE
Quite often questions are nonsensical, meaningless, and inapplicable to a particular system of thought and so you have to change the questions in order to make any answer at all. Otherwise, your biased questions are like asking when someone stopped beating up their mother.
Exactly!
That is the difference between science and religion. Science is about what is required, demonstrable, controllable, and the same for everyone – i.e. objective. Religion is about desire, belief, personal experience, surrender, and different for different people – i.e. subjective.
My questions are perfectly rational to the rational.
And amen brother.
Rationalism defined by Wiki as: In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that “regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge” or “any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification”. More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".
I am not sure of your definition of rationalist and thus your position, given you have been here for 3 days, So I presume you reject empiricism, defined in this passage from Ayer:
“ But if empiricism is correct no proposition which has a factual content can be necessary or certain. Accordingly the empiricist must deal with the truths of logic and mathematics in one of the two following ways: he must say either that they are not necessary truths, in which case he must account for the universal conviction that they are; or he must say that they have no factual content, and then he must explain how a proposition which is empty of all factual content can be true and useful and surprising.
“if neither of these courses proves satisfactory, we shall be obliged to give way to rationalism. We shall be obliged to admit that there are some truths about the world which we can know independently of experience; that there are some properties which we can ascribe to all objects, even though we cannot conceivably observe that all objects have them. And we shall have to accept it as a mysterious inexplicable fact tht our thought has this power to reveal to us authoritatively the nature of objects which we have never observed. Or else we must accept the Kantian explanation which, apart from the epistemological difficulties which we have already touched on, only pushes the mystery a stage further back.
“It is clear that any such concession to rationalism would upset the main argument of this book. For the admission that there were some facts about the world which could be known independently of experience would be incompatible with our fundamental contention that a sentence says nothing unless it is empirically verifiable. And thus the whole force of our attack on metaphysics would be destroyed. It is vital, therefore, for us to be able to show that one or other of the empiricist accounts of the propositions of logic and mathematics is correct.” Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, (New York: Dover Publications, 1952), p 73
I throw this out to try to get some idea of your position with regard to rationalism. How does it related to sense data? How does it relate to the fact that was exquisitely expressed by a Psychologist on Curiosity Stream:
"Locked in the silence and darkness of our skulls, all our brain ever experiences of the outside world, arrives in the form of electrochemical signals rocketing along at 268 miles per hour." What is Reality with David Eagleman Curiosity Stream
Which position is what drove the 19th century idealist philosophers to proclaim that everything is mental, not physical.
So, comments?
I agree gbob 
Agree with what? There are questions I asked. It seems hard to agree with a question; one should answer questions. I asked what your view of how does your view of rationalism related to sense data? Agreeing with a question asked of them is so unsatisfying. I have never seen anyone do that before.
So you believe that everything is mental? like the 19th century idealists? I hope you realize they didn’t really believe in he external world as we understand that term.
In the passage, Ayer mentions Kant’s explanation for our epistemological difficulties. It conflicts with that of the logical positivists (which Ayer was). So with which view do you affiliate?
Please please don’t say you agree again. I will then become irrational.
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