Witchcraft :Is it true?

Faith & Science Conversation
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The passages where the Bible and Jesus say that God answers prayers are quite numerous.
James 1:5, 1 Kings 3:5, Job 22:27, Jeremiah 29:12, Job 33:26, Psalm 91:15, Psalm 145:18, Psalm 65:2, Jeremiah 36:7, Zechariah 13:9, Matthew 7:11, John 14:13, John 14:14, John 15:16, John 16:23

And are there limits on these requests?

Matthew 17:20 And He said to them, “Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it shall move; and nothing shall be impossible to you.

Doesn’t sound like much restrictions on that to me.

BUT…

I don’t believe that God EVER broke or contradicted the laws of nature by which He made the world to work. That doesn’t make any sense to me. He made the laws of nature for a reason, and I don’t think He is going to break them, especially not just to impress a bunch of ignorant savages who don’t understand the laws of nature in the first place.

You believe there was magic in the past and not now, while I don’t believe there was ever any magic to begin with. I just believe there is an irreducibly subjective aspect to reality which is somewhat effected by what we want and believe, which is not the same thing at all. In other words we experience reality differently. Back then people saw supernatural events caused by God, animating spirits, disease causing demons, and works of magic everywhere. Today most of us see miracles of God and science which are somewhat confined to the context of a vast universe governed by laws of nature, and magic only in magic shows by very clever magicians for entertainment only. But the only thing which has changed is us and how we understand the world.

So can faith move mountains?
Yes, exactly the same today as ever.
By magic and supernatural powers? I don’t think so.
By unexplained events and coincidences not precluded by the laws of nature? Yep.

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Raising from the dead?
Perhaps you would care to offer a definition of “miracle”? Certainly the two I am certain I was involved in defied all known “laws” of nature and / or Physics.

Richard

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What shall we say when rare and unusual events of the past become routine everyday events in modern times, like the resuscitation of people who drown or whose hearts have stopped? Those of Biblical times might have called it raising from the dead, but we call it a miracle of modern medicine.

And what of the resurrection? 1 Corinthians 15. A bodily resurrection to a spiritual body.

Supernatural as in magic? back then maybe but not in modern times.
Supernatural as in spiritual? Yes, that is as real today as it ever was.

Sure! A miracle is an unexpected good event which the theist might attribute to the intervention of God but the atheist is likely to attribute to mere coincidence and the fluctuation of probabilities.

The laws of nature are a systematization of what is testable and repeatable under controlled conditions. So claims of any defiance of nature are regularly debunked under such conditions. Doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with what I call miracles.

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Sounds like a magic show to me! A trick well known enough that many people could do it. The miracle in there was the unexpected part, when Aaron’s serpent swallowed up the others.

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As I have not described what happened I think you are being brash to say the least.

I am sorry but "explaining " miracles is an incomplete science. And some of them defy any sort of human logic or understanding, even now.

Scepticism is fine up to a point, but, if we are going to believe in a “God” we can surely allow Him a few perks?

Richard

PS if the timescale of Lazarus is at all accurate Medical knowledge, even now could not duplicate it.

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Doesnt the definition of the miracle surpasses every logical thinking and the laws of nature?

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It surpasses natural law, but it’s not illogical that the Creator of the universe can interrupt the processes that he set in motion.

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When Aaron threw his wooden staff to the ground and it turned into a snake, are you saying that he used sleight of hand to make it look like it turned into a snake? When God asked Aaron and Moses to perform miracles, was God asking them to use sleight of hand?

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Nope, I don’t think any witchcraft is real. I can show you a video by Derren Brown, where he shows that suggestion is a power thing.

As you can see in the first 10 minutes of the video, a suggestion of a haunting caused some atheists and skeptics to see ghosts or ghostlike images.

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I have avoided answering this question because I do not want to promote the use of black magic, but based on the answers I have been reading, I felt it important. During the Middle Ages, anyone with a supernatural ability was killed, even those whom the spirit of truth spoke and worked through - like Jean d’Arc. The medieval rulers were at risk with them around, because they would contradict their edicts, so like Jean, they burnt at the stake for their heresy.

Much of this stigmatism remains today, in that many believe anyone with supernatural abilities is evil, like all mediums are bad. If you want a Christian view of the supernatural, I would suggest reading Communications with the Spirit World of God by Johannes Greber . This is the story of a Catholic priest who was confronted with the spirit of truth who spoke to him through a young boy. He struggled with the doctrines of the church against the facts that spirit of truth taught him.

I personally know four women whom the earthly powers would have burned at the stake as witches 200 years ago.

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I certainly think the others were using some kind of sleight of hand. In the case of Aaron and Moses it could have been God doing whatever sleight of hand was required. But I certainly do not think that God violated all the laws of nature He created in order to turn wood into snake flesh just to perform a stupid magic trick. It is absurd and over the top, like swatting a mosquito with a nuclear bomb.

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I don’t think so. It is a matter of definitions. If it was something that could be repeated under controlled conditions then it would be science not a miracle.

It is not a science at all. That is a contradiction in terms.

So? If it is repeatable then science just makes up a law and calls that an explanation. Otherwise it just calls it a statistical anomaly.

Skepticism is a valuable tool, but eventually it is likely to lead to a skepticism of skepticism itself.

Incorrect… It has been done. Coma, temporary heart failure, and neurotoxin induced states which are difficult to distinguish from death means that people have been taken for dead only to have them revive at a considerably later time. You have to remember we are talking about a period of history with nothing like modern medicine and so pronouncements of death in those times are not the same as pronouncements of death in modern times. Also the inaccuracies in numerical reports of the Bible are notorious and so are hardly trustworthy.

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The Bible seems pretty clear that miracles happened. That God does break the natural laws at times to reveal his power. Lazarus was dead. That was the point of a resurrection. That’s the whole point of the resurrection we look forward to.

Also, take Mary. It says the Holy Spirit. Matthew 1:18. Also mentions Shadows and a rag healing people from the apostles, and the crippled being able to walk. Not by cures or technology but by nothing more than a hand touch.

Jesus was even grabbed by a woman and he said he felt power leave him.

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By sleight of hand, I am referring to stuff like palming a card and making it suddenly appear. So are you saying that Aaron had a snake hidden up his sleeve, and God helped him pull off the sleight of hand?

Those seem to be contradictory things. Is there a law in nature that allows a wooden branch to suddenly turn into a snake?

When I read that Biblical passage, it reads like an example of God suspending the laws of nature and making a staff turn into a snake. This idea doesn’t seem to be in violation of Christian theology, and I am not here to mock the idea. I just found it interesting that a Christian would suggest that God has never performed miracles that suspend the laws of nature.

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That is not the only way the trick is done. Look it up. One way involves cold and making the snake freeze in reaction to a possible predator. Obviously we don’t know how the trick was done by any of them. And we don’t know where Moses got the rod he was carrying. Most often what people call miracles are the result of series of unexplained coincidences and we cannot say that God did not have a hand in setting them all up. My point is that when your goal is simply to amaze people, you don’t need to be able to alter the laws of nature – magicians certainly don’t, so why should God do that?

I don’t know where you are seeing a contradiction. Are we lost in double negatives somewhere? Obviously wood does not turn into snakes. It takes billions of years to make a snake, and God already did that so it seems stupid to start from scratch just for magic trick.

Of course it does for so many reasons. Don’t magic tricks usually involve that sort of illusion? And why would those telling of these events, who had no awareness of any laws of nature, tell the story otherwise?

But I wasn’t raised Christian. I am a scientist who read the Bible with science as my interpretive filter and saw some value in the book and Christianity. If I thought there was a conflict I would simply shelve the book with Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.

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Well, if a talking snake and a talking donkey won’t do it, I don’t know what will. Be careful of what you wish for.

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Since we are talking about the serpents do you guys feel that the different hebrew words used makes any difference?

In the majority of the Torah it’s a word similar to this one, Nachash. But in the story of Moses, Aaron, and the sorcerers the word is a different one. It’s letanninim. It’s used similarly to the ones used in genesis 1 which means great sea monster as in Levithan. The sea serpent that glides.

https://biblehub.com/hebrew/nachash_5175.htm
https://biblehub.com/hebrew/letanninim_8577.htm
https://biblehub.com/hebrew/hattanninim_8577.htm

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C S Lewis’ note on our attitude to demons seems well balanced:

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”

–Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters.”

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Well that depends on whether you read it like a comic book or not. I had no reason to take these as seriously proposing that there are animals who could talk. The snake is well known to represent the angel Lucifer. The other story has a number of confusing aspect not just the donkey. For example, why is God angry with Balaam? Another odd thing is that Balaam is not at all surprised by the donkey speaking. Why is that? It suggests to me that Balaam is a rather odd person who often hears unusual things speaking to him. In any case, it seems that the point of all this was to make absolutely sure that Balaam would do nothing on his own but only what God told him exactly.

Another curiosity for me is how different translations of the Bible change the text in odd ways. The original Hebrew is simply that God opened the mouth of the donkey. But some take in on themselves to translate this as God giving the power of speech to the donkey. It seems some people want the Bible to be about talking animals like a comic book. But I see no reason to see this any differently than the many times different people have conversations with all kinds of animals and inanimate objects who have no power of speech outside what people imagine them to say.

You see this as a reason to treat the book as a fantasy and I think that simply reflects looking for an excuse to do so. For me it all sound very real, where there are all kinds of people in the world including those talking to animals and things (and even hearing them talking back). It is part of the subjective aspect of reality I have spoken of before, where people simply experience things differently. You might choose to call them schizophrenic but I believe a mental health professional would only pronounce such a diagnosis if this way of perceiving the world actually interfered with their ability to live their lives.

P.S. If you think this means I am saying these things are not real or only in people’s head, then you haven’t grasped the meaning of my claim that there is an irreducibly subjective aspect to reality. This basically means that reality isn’t 100% the same for everyone. To be sure there is some overlap in what we call objective, but I deny that one is necessarily right and the others wrong. One person can insist that others are schizophrenic and just imagining things while another can insist that these things are really happening and I can say that nothing is wrong with either of them but they are simply experiencing reality in different ways. And science can only see the overlapping parts. Naturalists may choose to equate this with the only reality, but I do not.

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I suspect this is how people ”heard” Gods voice. They were hearing voices in their head, not necessarily schizophrenic but most likely their own.

This may be interesting and intriguing but why consider it the voice of “God”?

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