For purposes of this thread, a believer is a person willing to assert the existence of a God, god, or other supernatural forces–Yahweh, Vishnu, Kal-El, or whatever.
Persons feeling the need to say Xtianity sux! or Religion is stoopid! are invited to go up the hall and to the left, where **Great Debates **awaits.
I am also interested in hearing what believers in miracles define as a miracle.
I’d say the whole world is a miracle. Matter existing, the laws of physics being just right for evolution of sentient life, said life managing to make it so far without being utterly destroyed by a stray pulse of radiation [I forget what the exact term is]. Music, friendship, cats- it’s an amazing world out there.
Okay, that’s a bit of a flippant answer, but right now my brain isn’t in Deep Discussion Mode. I’m going to have to come back when I’m feeling less scatter-brained.
Remember that this must be true for you to be in a position to make this claim - it is impossible for a universe to exist where Malleus Prime notices that the laws of physics aren’t just right for evolution of sentient life - if such a universe existed, there would be no Malleus Prime to make the observation.
Yes.
A few are the whole breaking-laws-of-nature stuff, but the majority are more like getting another saving throw or more subtle things.
Miracles happen all the time, however for the non-believer it is hidden and they will usually only see a human explanation.
A miracle is a supernatural act of God as a act of mercy towards man.
I was watching a religious program on TV last Sunday, and they were talking about how ordinary people can be a conduit for other people’s miracles today. The preacher said he studied each miracle in the Bible and discovered that each had two common elements: (1) a person’s need; and (2) another acting to meet that need, essentially as a conduit of god.
As “proof” that miracles can happen today, through ordinary people, the preacher and his cohort were on stage talking about it when his friend said her ministry needs money. The preacher seemed surprised, pulled some cash out of his pocket, and gave it to her. She was overwhelmed with the unexpected generosity.
They both emphasized that they had not planned to do that in advance; it just came up naturally. What a miracle!
I told my wife it was a good thing she said she needed some cash instead of a cure for her colon cancer.
Imho, it depends how you define it.
To me, the odds of one human being being spontaneously kind to another (particularly a stranger) is so low that if it does happen, that would be a miracle. In fact, in the US, we have bystander laws that make it a crime to not help a person in distress.
For example, the film “The Pursuit of Happyness” is full of these little miracles.
I have seen many miraculous things, and I know that there are those who would discount or have reasonable explanations for each of the following experiences. You can call them what you want. I’ll call them miracles. I have three that come to mind.
Nothing happened to me on that fishing trip.
When I was older, I found out that that kid was serving time in prison for murder. About a year or two after the time we were there, he abducted, molested, and killed a little boy.
We were going around the circle praying, and it was my turn to pray. Literally in the middle of my prayer, I distinctly heard someone whisper in my ear that the girl had been healed. I stopped my prayer and turned around, but there was nobody there. I told my friends what I had just heard and then just said, “Thank you, Lord”.
The next day, the doctor confirmed that the lump was gone, and the subsequent blood test showed absolutely no trace of cancer.
They were driving in the left lane and there was a snow plow in the right lane, and the snow plow lost control due to ice and snow. The blade of the plow punctured her door, and the driver swung to the right, over-corrected, and came back for a second hit, which ended up tearing up both doors on the passenger side.
Nobody in the car was hurt.
Later, when the car was being inspected by the body shop mechanic, he told my son-in-law that it was the first time he had seen anything like it. Apparently, there is some sort of metal rib that runs the length of the door. In his experience, whenever a car is hit in the door, that rib tends to break, and usually comes through the door and injures the person seated next to the door. This was the first time he had ever seen the rib just shift around. The ribs on both the front and rear door did this, rather than coming through and injuring my daughter and granddaughter.
So, yeah … I believe in miracles.
Yes, and the point you are trying to make is…? I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.
Whether or not the world is a deliberate creation or a million-to-one random chance, the observed result is the same on your end. Just because it’s unlikely, doesn’t mean someone tweaked the numbers.
(at least, that’s how I understand his rebutal)
It’s called the Anthropic Principle. The point I believe he was making, was that if there are an infinity of universes, and eventually one spawns sapient life, and you happen to be one of those beings, who is now appreciating it all, well… It should come as no surprise to find yourself in a universe where everything is ‘just right’ to enable all the ‘miracles’ you see around you. Otherwise no one would be around to appreciate a universe where everything is almost right, but never spawned life.
Still, it’s amazing there’s anything at all that exists, rather than nothing.
BobArggh - those stories blow my mind! If I was your mom, though, and my gut was telling me “no, no, no” - maybe faith did save you, but still…
Right, that’s what I was trying to say. I think.
I agree with **Kanicbird’**s definition that “a miracle is a supernatural act of God as a act of mercy towards man.”
Bearflag70’s common elements (a person’s need and another acting as a conduit of God to meet that need) are indeed present for many Biblical miracles. However, other Biblical miracles occur to demonstrate God’s power to the skeptical (the igniting of the offering on the wet altar for Elijah) or to empower someone for ministry (burning bush to Moses, light & voice blinding Saul of Tarsus). In these cases I’m not sure the two common elements are necessarily present.
C.S. Lewis provides another possible definition—something like this: *We call it a miracle when God does quickly what He routinely does more slowly through what we call “natural” means. *Thus:
It is a miracle if Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding. It is “natural” that plants and soil and sunlight and water and time result in grapes that can be smashed and fermented to make wine.
It is a miracle if Jesus heals a sick child. It is “natural” if her living body has an immune system that can combat the infection.
It is a miracle if Jesus breaks apart a few loaves and fish and feeds 5000. It is “natural” for wheat seeds to grow and produce new wheat and for fish to breed and produce more fish.
Lewis maintains, of course, that what we call “natural” is also miraculous.
Like **Bobarrgh, **I’ve experienced the miraculous in my life and the lives of others. These miracles are nothing I could prove to someone who is convinced there is no God. Yet, to one with eyes to see, ears to hear and a heart to believe, they are undeniable affirmations of God’s love, faithfulness, compassion, power and authority. I expect I’d experience more if I were more faithful in prayer and more ready to ask.
I don’t totally agree with this, but I can see it. If ‘spontaneously’ in this sense, means for *no *good reason, at all, then I do agree with it.
Many times, people will let some bum be torn apart by a dog, and do nothing. Other times, somebody will fight the government, dogs, a hundred Klansmen, 50 Black Panthers, and jump into a burning building to save 1 baby. I don’t understand it, but, since there are conflicting actions, in similar, but not exact events, I attribute the help being given to some unknown variable, rather than a miracle. (I am calling a miracle a ‘known’ variable) Now. OTOH, all of the people that I am friends with, I know, generally, how they will act. If they both help me if I’m dying, I will call that their nature. However, A will lend me money, or give it to me. B will not give, neither lend it to me. If B calls me up, and slips me a few hundred tomorrow, that will be a miracle. If A does it, that will be because he is a friend, and is going through something that reminded him of our mutual history, and his psyche was stimulated to strengthen the bond that we have. Point being, I have witnessed some amazing acts of human kindness, but, even knowing that they were amazing, I still know that they weren’t miracles; but, the opposite is true also. I have seen minor things happen, but they were miracles. The non-glurge kind of stuff.
hh
I had ear surgery as a teen. I was born without earcanals and eardrums. The surgery was to make a canal and a drum on my ear. This surgery is very mixed in the end results. (some people throw away their hearing aids, some people just downgrade from a bone conductor ha to a BTE )
I distinctly remember coming into my room from the recovery room, and being able to HEAR. Things were a lot louder now. Then when I went back for my first audi follow up, it turned out that the hearing had also improved in my non operated on ear!
Even my ENT had no clue how that happened (and he was the best pediatric ENT in the world)
I believe in Miracles. I am a miracle. I should be taking the big dirt nap many times over but God is kind and Merciful to me.
A miracle to me means a great event taken as a sign of divine intervention. There are also what I call God shots. These are the small day to day type miracles. Some people refer to them as coincidences but I call them God instances. They happen to me all the time.
I saw one recently when a baby was pulled from the rubble in Haiti after a week and was fine.
As for myself I have almost drowned, been held hostage at gun point and escaped only by keeping my head and waiting for the right moment to run. I have walked away from many totaled vehicles without a scratch, been electrocuted by 100,000 volts twice at work, then there was all the stupid things I did drunk and should have died but didn’t. I asked God for help and was able to overcome addiction. That was a huge miracle. I was pretty far gone. He took away that obsession.
One thing all these miracles have done for me is left me with a grateful heart and grace. Grace is an unmerited gift.
Because…?
I don’t think there ever were miracles, in the sense of something breaking the laws of nature. There’s a Jewish tradition that God sets things up so that miracles can be explained by the laws of nature (using an east wind to split the Sea of Reeds, that sort of thing), so as to give humans the choice of believing that a miracle didn’t happen. Also, I think God is a better programmer than to have to hack the universe to get things to happen the right way. Natural-law-breaking miracles are a hack on an orderly universe.
I define miracles as any intervention by God or any other divine being with humanity or our world. As such I believe in miracles. I view the entirety of creation as one major miracle and the incarnation of God as Jesus Christ as another, and I believe that Jesus performed a series of miracles as described in the Gospels.
On the question of whether miracles occur today, I take the position offered by Father Brown in one of the famous mystery stories: I believe in miracles as I believe in man-eating tigers, without expecting to see one on every street corner. So I have opinions about which experience are genuine, but fully acknowledging that I may be wrong. In a case like the body of Saint Bernadette, which did not decay after death and is still visible to visitors at the Convent of St. Gilard, the evidence seems obvious enough to merit belief. I’d say the same for some of the well-known miraculous events such as Fatima and Medjugorje, as well as a few of the miraculous healings that have been carefully investigated. I’ve met a few people who claim to have encountered the miraculous. I’ve told in other threads about an incident that my pastor told me about, wherein he met a four-year-old girl who correctly predicted certain events. I cautiously accepted things like that, since I find this man quite reliable. As for ordinary people who claim that they were healed or that a certain, seemingly ordinary event was a sign from God, I don’t accept readily. They may be correct, but I try to remain aware of St. Teresa’s warning that it’s easy to obsess over miraculous interventions, and it can be prideful to desire them. Not that I look down on people who say things like that, but if I were forced to make a ruling on those cases I would have to rule against them.
If you’re interested in the topic, try reading The Miracle Detective, by Randy Sullivan. He was a journalist for Rolling Stone who read in his local paper about a vision of the Virgin Mary appearing in a trailer home owned by Mexican immigrants. Deciding to write a full length mockery of Catholic visionaries, he traveled across the world, interviewed visionaries, spoke with scientific and medical experts, looked into historical cases of miraculous phenomena, and eventually ended up converting to Catholicism.