# A Real Miracle? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 30, 2003, 7:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-real-miracle/178469 "2003-05-30T07:17:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2003, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-real-miracle/178469/41 "2003-06-05T19:03:32Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by richardc \* > \*\*I understand. But if God exists, and He decides to let those innocent millions suffer, yet heal this one person, then there must be a very good reason why He has done so. We cannot understand this reason, but that is only because we cannot see life and suffering from the viewpoint of eternity like God can. If we had an understanding of what eternity is really like, then our view of life and suffering would probably be much different. > \*\* Another skeptic signing in… Robert A. Heinlein once said, “Don’t try to peddle me nonsense by claiming to be fresh out of sense.” I’d say, less harshly, that your defense of the inscrutability of God removes him from the world of reason, and makes him indistinguishable from a chaotic, quixotic, or even malicious person. If I can’t tell why God acts, then, to me, his actions are, at best, random. If God can’t take the extra moment to tell me why he acts the way he does, then I have to question his moral intentions. One theologian gave this parable: what if someone came into your bedroom, grabbed you, and shoved you out a window? Would you be angry? But what if he was a fireman, rescuing you from your burning house? He doesn’t have time to explain, “Your house is on fire, and I need to pick you up.” He has bare seconds to _do_ it. I respond: following this model, in which the fire is hell and Christ is the fireman, we’ve had 2,000 years, during which the “fire safety manual” has not been updated. It ought to be completely within God’s power to send more prophets. But God is silent. But now, you want me to accept that God is _not_ silent, but plays favorites somehow, and, by a basis of choice that you won’t even permit me to comprehend, he saves one little girl with a nasty disease…and permits a million little girls to starve to death… No. That _cannot_ be shoe-horned into a moral system. Cannot. I am an atheist at two levels: one, I don’t believe that such a God exists at all, because I consider the definitions self-contradictory. But at another level, if such an ogre did exist, I could not possibly consider him anything other than wicked. I’m also a skeptic, and tend to doubt the story of the miraculous healing in the first place. Skeptics tend to be from Missouri: “Show Me.” Faith, alas, depends on belief in that which is not seen. So you’ve got an unbridgeable disconnect right there. As a humanist, I’m glad that one little girl was saved from a nasty disease. The world is that much a better place. Trinopus [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-real-miracle/178469.md?page=2)