Stephen Hawking? The dead guy? Don’t look now, but you are oh, so alone.
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No doubt. And will probably continue being actively ‘dead’ and dying for many centuries to come - for as long as humanity is around. Sorta like God, whose funeral has been celebrated in nearly every century it seems - certainly all the recent ones. No reason to think we won’t still be busy crucifying and disbelieving God in all the future centuries too. At least for as long as we’re still in charge of all our little mini kingdoms and empires.
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I believe we can test it objectively. The scriptures claim a supernatural transformation of a person’s behavior into that which is closer to that of Christ, with the signs being the fruits of the spirit. However, I do not see any evidence of that which can not be explained naturalisticly, which for example, include psychological/somatic causes. By supernatural, I mean a mechanism that is not possible by the brain, My take is that as a former believer, never have I felt the presense or comfort which was promised. And I doubt that it is true that God exsists since I see many Christians who still have failed to have fruits. That, I would say, is evidence against the prescense of Christ within a believer.
Riiiight. Anyone got any transcendent tools?
First off, I haven’t taken any offense to anything people have said in this thread, and I do very much appreciate your post.
I was just relating a general trend I have seen in some discussions which can include contradictory positions. I have come across statements from a single person where they say in one breath that God’s miracles are obvious, and in the next will claim that no miracle will be obvious because it would strip us of free will. Hey, I get it. This stuff isn’t easy, and it’s easy to get things a bit turned around on these topics. It just gets a bit frustrating at times because it’s like nailing jello to a tree.
That is a position I can understand and respect. It isn’t too far away from what I heard quite often in the church I grew up in.
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Personally, I don’t adhere to that axiom. At the same time, using the old saw, when I hear hoof beats coming towards the crest of a hill I don’t expect to see zebras. So yes, I do heavily lean towards the naturalistic explanation, but still acknowledge that there is no way to rule out the supernatural.
Attached to this point, we wouldn’t be able to explain how anything works in nature if we had to give supernatural explanations equal weight in all circumstances.
Well, it appears we are back to unmistakable miracles.
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Even tho’ it’s self evident? And there’s no basis whatsoever for ruling it in?
Okay I see where you are coming from and I appreciate your clarification. But you’re exactly right, it’s very easy to get turned around in conversations and like I said before it gets messy when you have so many different people throwing around different thoughts. But in some sense, I’m glad it’s kinda messy. Life would be a lot more boring if we were given all the info up front. I think it all keeps us humble in telling us that we don’t have all the certainty we would like to have. We all have contradictions in our beliefs. I just wanna make sure that the way I discuss my beliefs are respectful to the other person, and seeing the other with all good faith possible.
I’ll say though that I don’t think you need a miracle to believe that God exists as many people have demonstrated lol. Back to the miracles. This discussion does bring up the question of how all of us bring our assumptions to how the “spiritual” world would interact with the “material” world. I wonder if the pre-enlightenment thinking of the spiritual realm working out the laws of physics or whatnot has tainted what a better understanding of the “spiritual” world is. Like just because we have assumed the “spiritual” world to act in one way and our current understanding of the natural world limits that kind of interpretation, once again I wonder if we actually have to throw out the spiritual realm or “re-imagine” (ugh that’s a dangerous word) how the spiritual realm operates. And it’s clear that other forum users have articulated how the '“Spiritual” world could interact with the natural world by the means of natural laws. Just something to consider on both sides when both theists and non-theists assume how the spiritual realm is supposed to operate.
The same place we got logic, meaning, and moral law — none of which show up under a microscope either. Some tools are conceptual because some realities are.
A post was split to a new topic: Gary M’s sour grapes about all things religious
Is a private orgasm an orgasm? Is a private concert music?
Whether or not something is private has no bearing on its reality.
Evidence. There will be evidence of both. Especially at the same time and place.
One problem with the so called miracles is that we do not usually have an understanding of the mechanisms that caused the miracle. It might be that God made an exception to the ‘normal’ laws of nature (assuming God is and acts), or it might be that everything happened within the ‘normal’ laws of nature and physics but for some reason (‘finger’ of God?), what happened followed a very rare path, with exceptionally unlikely consequences. Is the ‘miracle’ something ‘less’ if the mechanisms do not break the laws of physics?
For believers, one aspect of ‘miracles’ is that they seem to happen as an answer to a need, at the ‘correct’ moment. A man has an advanced cancer, doctors tell it is so large and advanced that they cannot do much, then a bunch of pastors and others pray healing and suddenly, the cancer disappears. There is no way to exclude an extremely rare spontanous healing but the timing is just correct and well, what is the probability that a large cancer growth (even surrounding the heart) disappears suddenly, just when (or soon after) pastors laid their hands on him and prayed healing?
Any spontaneous superrapid healing would be a great miracle.
Another problem with ‘miracles’ is that they are rare. During the last decade, several believers I know or knew have either died because of cancer or still struggle with it. We have prayed for such people but only some have healed. We are thankful for every friend who healed but cannot tell if many would have healed even without prayers.
All of us will die one day (unless Jesus returns soon) and when that day comes, something will kill us, no matter how much we pray.
When the rare ‘spontaneous’ healings or something as unlikely happen after prayers, how we deal with it and interpret it reveals our worldview. A believer thanks because s/he believes there is God that can answer to prayers. An atheists may think that rare ‘spontaneous’ healings happen and the person that healed or who experienced something as unlikely was just lucky. The reaction of the atheist is a rational consequence of the basic assumptions (there is no God, etc.) but does it lead to the truth? That is a matter of opinion.
And most of us consider miracles (in the colloquial sense) rare events that go beyond the natural — super-natural. I think most of us do default to natural explanations. But in special cases involving a lot of prayer I think Christians are justified in believing certain things are miracles. I realize many would go beyond this in cases with a purely natural explanation and use it as evidence for God. I think it is evidence for God, for them. I can’t get in their head and say God did or did not definitely act there in some special way. It may also be a way of expressing gratitude in a lot of cases.
I also get all or nothing vibes from that.
“If the Bible has errors we can’t know what’s true.”
“If we let supernatural explanations creep into
Science we can’t know anything.”
They are remarkably similar in their fear-driven cartesian rhetoric. Uncertainty is scary we might want certainty, but as the atheists here are fond of telling me, how we want the world to be has no bearing on how the world is.
And unapologetically so. Creation ex nihilo and metaphysical arguments lead to certain inescapable conclusions. One being that God cannot intervene in nature. God is already upholding, sustaining and running nature. Miracles (colloquially) are God going beyond His own natural order. It is a mechanistic and deist model of God that views the universe as out there running on its own and God over her sometimes coming in to change things. For me, metaphysics shows that every aspect of reality is a miracle at every given instant and it’s couldn’t be otherwise. That is the role of a prime mover. In my view, looking for “nature defying” miracles to prove God and not finding them is like looking through a million snowflakes and not finding a seven-sided one and claiming snowflakes don’t exist because of that.
Read my response above to @T_aquaticus . In my view, creation ex nihilo leads to the inescapable conclusion that everything is a miracle and can’t be other. God creates from nothing and upholds the universe at every instant. So everything is a miracle but there are cases where God can go beyond the natural prefer of things—I suppose using or jump starting natural processes or through inexplicable supernatural means. I don’t worry about the how.
I agree. But I just think atheists would just explain it as a lot of events transpire so some really rare ones happen all the time in our universe. And for this man who had spontaneous and rapid healing, there are a million cases where they do not believe this occurred. Our beliefs coming in are going to influence how we allow ourselves to intellectualize this.
Agreed and though we can certainly default to natural explanations, but simply because we can provide one does not necessitate that is how it happened in this case. The event is rare, and involves a lot of prayer, which as much trouble as I have with it, comes straight from the mouth of Jesus.
I understand Jesus could use accommodated language and even grew up with the worldview and cosmology of his time, but as Christians we cannot be in the habit of correcting our Lord and Savior— God in the flesh— on spiritual matters. Jesus > than a desire for certainty that limits reality to a scientific box.
Vinnie
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Not all opinion is equal.
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That’s why I give him, and all believers, all good will.
I agree. One thing that separates opinions is how we can justify our opinion. If we have no justification except ‘I say so’, that opinion does not and should not gain as much support as an opinion that has some justification.
There seems to be a limit of supernatural miracles to healing.
Obviously any examples I might give are subject to belief, but:
An inch of milk lasting for twenty or so cups of tea, then giving out after the last one.
A printer jam yet there were enough to go round more than I asked it to print.
Neither of those can be accounted for Naturally.
Richard
Riiiiight. Yes they can.
Good luck with that, but if you are going to claim pilot error I will take offence. You cannot dismiss Christians as being delusional or lacking a grasp of reality, or imagining things.
Richard