Your standard would appear to make the answer “no” by definition. Anything can be explained by hallucination, impaired perception, “special effect”, or so forth, if you’re willing to accept very tenuous explanations. It could be that I’m merely hallucinating a thread started by Furious_Marmot at this moment, and that no such thread actually exists. But that’s not the way I think about things. Similarly with the question of whether something “violates natural law”. Some people tell me that visitations by Christ or the Virgin Mary violate natural law, or that miraculous healings violate natural law, yet I’m never quite clear about which natural law they’re supposed to be violating.
But by standard understanding of the term miracle, I’ll give an answer. I have felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. I have not ever witnessed a miraculous healing, holy vision, multiplication of food, transfiguration, or any other physical manifestation of the miraculous, though I do believe that such things happen. As for people who claim that a miracle occurred in something entirely worldly, such as narrowly surviving a car wreck, my attitude is “maybe, maybe not”. I’m certainly not so small-minded as to insist that such things can’t happen or to trot out the hoary ‘why did God help you but not help everyone else?’ line. However, I do think some people have a tendency to rush to judgment on that sort of thing, and I try to guard against it, so I generally lean against seeing miraculous intervention there.
maybe because the miracle was intended to be viewed by people only within a certain radius?
Besides, who said anything about “the Sun”? Take a lawyerly or empirical investigator type attitude here - you got thousands of people talking about a really weird UFO type manifestation. Most of them somehow connect it to the Sun, but that could be their interpretation of it. The undisputable fact is not that the Sun did or didn’t move (it probably didn’t, we live in a heliocentric system anyway), but rather that thousands of people saw something in the sky that modern atmospheric science cannot in any way satisfactorily explain.
Incidentally, notice that the majority of miracle claims are usually limited to even smaller radius. E.g. the miracles claimed by kanicbird would be visible within a radius of maybe 100 meters by just a few people at best.
Another good approach would be to ask “what empirical evidence would be sufficient to convince you otherwise?” If you were to witness a Fatima-style event tomorrow along with the majority of people in your town, would you accept that? If instead of the town an entire hemisphere were to see something like that, would you accept it then? I think it is safe to expect that a very large number of people would not accept it as a supernatural event even if pretty much everybody were to see it (with a significant minority amongst them immediately concluding that the manifestation is due to evil Jews testing some all-powerful geo-scalar-hallucinatory-spaghetti-monster weapons).
Which is all perfectly fine, but it does help to be honest with yourself. If you are unwilling to accept ANY evidence for such things, say so. If you are willing to accept SOME sort of evidence but not this one, pray tell what would that be?
Immaterial, since what they think they viewed did not actually, physically happen. The sun did not move. Period. If it had we would know it. Since the sun did not move (and it is irrefutable that the sun did not move), then there was no miracle. What we have is the rather mundane phenomenon of hass hysteria and suggestion.
I’m saying the sun did not move. The activity that was alleged to have been seen, did not occur. The sun moving would be a testable, verifiable event without necessity for witnesses. The sun moving would have massive geological effects, and other people would notice. Whatever those people thought they saw, the one thing we know for sure is that they didn’t see the sun dancing, because the sun did not dance.
I disagree. But I’m willing to be shown where I err.
My reasoning is: According to this paper, the acceleration of water (tides) due to lunar effect is 1.68 x 10[sup]-6[/sup] m/sec[sup]2[/sup]
First of all, this is a small force. Secondly, the effect from the sun is less than half that: 0.76 x 10[sup]-6[/sup] m/sec[sup]2[/sup]
For comparison, the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 x 10[sup]0[/sup] m/sec[sup]2[/sup], about ten million times stronger. In other words, the Earth’s pull on you due to gravity is about ten million times stronger than the Sun’s.
So – where am I wrong here? What am I missing, or what are you relying on to say that the Sun’s “dancing” would have massive geological effects?
If the sun actually had moved, it would have been observed everywhere. For the effect to have been observed only by one group of people it has to be illusion.
What you’re missing is that for the appearance of the sun to be “dancing,” the earth itself would have to be dancing.
If the contention is that the sun itself was literally dancing, then it woulld have greatly affected the planets in closer orbit, probably slinging Mercury out of its orbit.
Hell, it would probably sling the earth out of its orbit, but I don’t know the math. I do know that comparing it to the moon makes no sense since the earth is not in orbit around the moon, thus cannot have its orbit affected by the movements of the moon.
So the bottom line is, if you don’t get yourself into really nasty situations under the impression you are doing God’s will, you won’t need God to get you out of them via miracles, unlike all the people whom God did not extricate through miracles and who are not around to give negative testimony.
This demonstrates a link between the Christian God and the Gods of Greek mythology, who were always getting drunk and quarreling and putting humans in the middle of messes, then extricating them (or not) based on capricious whim(sy). Though in kanicbird’s theology, you have a choice on whether or not you want to wind up menaced by Haitian gangs, whereas Zeus and his buddies might have tossed you into that situation regardless of whether you believed in them. I think I like the “opt-out” system better.
*I believe in miracles
Where’re you from, you supernatural thing
I believe in miracles
Since you came along, you supernatural thing
Where did you come from, angel
How did you know I’d be the one
Did you know you’re everything I prayed for? *
Actually, I’d wonder - you’d think if the sun ripped a few million miles to the left and then came back within minutes that the orbits wouldn’t be that effected, en total. There might be some jiggle, but nothing permanent.
Though from description in the wiki, the thing that was reportedly dancing clearly wasn’t the sun at all.
Or imagine swinging a yo yo around in a circle. As long as you’re moving, the yo-yo stays up fine, and you’re not really exerting that much force (actually, I guess you’d have to imagine doing this in zero gravity). now suddenly swing the other way, then up then down, then go back to swinging it the way you were before. The yo-yo is not just going to remain unaffected in its normal orbit while you’re yanking the string around, it’s going to follow your arm motions and pull way out of its orbit.
Comparing the sun moving to the moon hypthetically moving doesn’t work, because the moon would be the yo-yo in that scenario.
yeah, I agree, tho. A group of people were possibly led to a conclusion because they were open to the suggestion of something special happening just for them. Something was supposed to happen. Something may have happened. Then, their expectations were confirmed by each other reinforcing that something SPECIAL really did happen. Thus making them special. In miraculous hindsight, it’s easy for them to all confirm this amazing event.
You either move the sun, or you don’t. If you move the sun, it’s going to be shining in a different place for everyone, laws of physics or not. So either you make an illusion of the sun moving for fatima, or you make an illision of it not moving for everyone else. And in all politeness, if he’s going to have to make an illusion anyway God’d be a moron to chose the course of action that involves a larger illusion and moving the sun to boot.
I’m not convinced - gravity isn’t a string with a fixed length and tensile strength that would force the planets to be jerked away immideately. It’s more like an infinitely stretchy rubber band - there would be relatively little immediate effect on the large, massive, distant, high-inertia planets’ flight paths.
Of course, I could be wrong - but I’d want to see some math or a simulation or something, not just a say-so. Or of course you could hook up a heat-resistent tow cable to your craft and do a practical test…
This is where you are in error, supernaturally you can have both, miracles do not follow logic, nor do they have to follow any rules. God is not bound by the limits of the human mind. He can make it rain on one person and be fog for the other standing right next to each other and arrange things that each person doesn’t know what is going on with the other. In scriptures the apostles were talking to people in one language (Galilean) and each person heard it in their own native language. In your logic it was either Galilean or not, God says otherwise.