Faith and miracles isn’t what it used to be

[Kent_Clark]

@razncain

Do you make an exception to the Resurrection?

The Resurrection is a belief specific to Christianity. It’s entirely possible to believe in God and not believe that Jesus was God incarnate.

If this thread is going to turn into another “Christians are superstitious sheep” pile-on, I’m outta here.

[Razncain]

@kunilou

If this thread is going to turn into another “Christians are superstitious sheep” pile-on, I’m outta here.

This thread has been quite civil, and there is no reason to be offended unless you are looking for an exit. See # 5.

[qbadger]

@razncain

let me try again. Does a man of faith need good evidence? If he has good evidence, doesn’t the role of faith go away?

now it is such a bizarrely impossible coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of god. The arguement goes something like this:
"i refuse to prove that i exist," says god, "for proof denies faith, and without faith i am nothing."
"but," say man, "the babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Qed."
"oh dear," says god, "i hadn't though of that" and promply vanishes in a puff of logic.

-hhgttg

[Hazle_Weatherfield]

http://whydoesgodhateamputees.com/god5.htm

Seriously! Wish I were smart enough to add anything else, but I couldn’t agree more.

[Kent_Clark]

@razncain

This thread has been quite civil, and there is no reason to be offended unless you are looking for an exit. See # 5.

I agree the thread has been quite civil. If it turns into a pile-on, I’ll withdraw. Not because I’m offended, but because it would cease to be a discussion and have become a pile-on.

But back to the subject. The Bible (Luke) says that while Jesus was on the cross, “The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine and saying ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.’”

Now if there was ever a spot in Judeo-Christian tradition that called for a miracle, this was it. Jesus could have hopped down from the cross, healed his wounds, impressed the crowd, silenced his critics and gone on to keep preaching his message. Instead, he hung there and cried out “Eli, Eli (thought to mean God), why have you forsaken me?”

So, while Jesus could have worked a miracle (and getting off the cross would be child’s play compared to walking on water or feeding the multitudes) the Bible narrates that instead he had another moment of doubt before finally commending his spirit to God, and dying.

If that’s the case, why would God bother with miracles at all? Here’s my conclusion:

Maybe it’s because God wants us to come to belief using our own devices. Today, we have astronomy, which gives us a look at the vastness of the universe; physics, which helps explain how it got started; biology, which tells us the evolution of life from primordial slop to the present day; and mathematics, which helps us understand the complex formulas by which it all happened. Back in Biblical times, we almost no tools to understand anything beyond our own senses, so it was logical to believe there was nothing beyond what we could sense. Stars were little lights in the sky; there was nothing beyond the horizon; you were born, you lived, and you died.

The only way God could tell us there was more to the universe than what our senses showed us was to give us a hint through miracles. Maybe that’s why these days the only people who see miracles are those who are poorly educated. The rest of us are exposed to God in other ways, assuming we believe those ways lead us to God.

[sqweels]

@kunilou

The only way God could tell us there was more to the universe than what our senses showed us was to give us a hint through miracles.

But there doesn’t appear to be any logical consistency between the miracles of old and principles of science that were later discovered. Then as now, miracles contradict science rather than hint at its possibilities.

[Voyager]

@kunilou

I agree the thread has been quite civil. If it turns into a pile-on, I’ll withdraw. Not because I’m offended, but because it would cease to be a discussion and have become a pile-on.

But back to the subject. The Bible (Luke) says that while Jesus was on the cross, “The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine and saying ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.’”

Now if there was ever a spot in Judeo-Christian tradition that called for a miracle, this was it. Jesus could have hopped down from the cross, healed his wounds, impressed the crowd, silenced his critics and gone on to keep preaching his message. Instead, he hung there and cried out “Eli, Eli (thought to mean God), why have you forsaken me?”

So, while Jesus could have worked a miracle (and getting off the cross would be child’s play compared to walking on water or feeding the multitudes) the Bible narrates that instead he had another moment of doubt before finally commending his spirit to God, and dying.

I thought the point of the story was that Jesus had to die to save man, so getting off the cross would have screwed up the entire mission. In any case, not getting arrested would have done even better, and given him the opportunity to preach more and even write something down. Not to mention actually fulfilling the Messianic prophecy, which did not involve getting killed before doing anything for Israel in this world, despite all the retconning Christians have done.

If that’s the case, why would God bother with miracles at all? Here’s my conclusion:

Maybe it’s because God wants us to come to belief using our own devices. Today, we have astronomy, which gives us a look at the vastness of the universe; physics, which helps explain how it got started; biology, which tells us the evolution of life from primordial slop to the present day; and mathematics, which helps us understand the complex formulas by which it all happened. Back in Biblical times, we almost no tools to understand anything beyond our own senses, so it was logical to believe there was nothing beyond what we could sense. Stars were little lights in the sky; there was nothing beyond the horizon; you were born, you lived, and you died.

The only way God could tell us there was more to the universe than what our senses showed us was to give us a hint through miracles. Maybe that’s why these days the only people who see miracles are those who are poorly educated. The rest of us are exposed to God in other ways, assuming we believe those ways lead us to God.

So parlor tricks were supposed to do this? Wouldn’t the miracle of being able to see that the microscopic and microcosmic levels for a time do a lot better? The ancient world was all about things not seen - where the sun went at night, where lightning came from, where the gods lived. They had plenty of spiritualism already - a divine instruction to boil their water would have worked a lot better.

[Razncain]

@kunilou

I agree the thread has been quite civil. If it turns into a pile-on, I’ll withdraw. Not because I’m offended, but because it would cease to be a discussion and have become a pile-on.

Thanks for sticking around. I hope more believers will weigh in, and maybe some others will tell their story of how they obtained their faith.

But back to the subject. The Bible (Luke) says that while Jesus was on the cross, “The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine and saying ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.’”

Now if there was ever a spot in Judeo-Christian tradition that called for a miracle, this was it.

I can see your point, but if he had snapped his fingers to get out of all of it, this wouldn’t have been a better written script, and there wouldn’t have been the compassion, pity, and emotional groundswell that allows Christians to get all choked up for the character created. Naw, he needed to hang on the cross and go through the suffering for the effect the writers needed to get. Mel Gibson also knew exactly what he had to do for his Christ to have his billion dollar blockbuster movie. But I don’t think the crucifixion happened for a multitude of reasons of which I won’t get into now, but maybe later if the thread turns more that way.

Jesus could have hopped down from the cross, healed his wounds, impressed the crowd, silenced his critics and gone on to keep preaching his message. Instead, he hung there and cried out “Eli, Eli (thought to mean God), why have you forsaken me?”

Which as you probably know is the exact same thing thing wrote in Psalms, word for word. At this very moment, Jesus decides to go poetic on us. Does this sound like historical truth, or more like poetic license?

The only way God could tell us there was more to the universe than what our senses showed us was to give us a hint through miracles. Maybe that’s why these days the only people who see miracles are those who are poorly educated. The rest of us are exposed to God in other ways, assuming we believe those ways lead us to God.

I don’t think a God would play games by giving us hints. On an emotional level, I think the educated would very much like to think of an omni-benevolent God existing as much as the uneducated, but only if good evidence supported it. It does not. It shouldn’t be a bigger sin to be educated. To hear scripture tell it on what one must do, Jesus says if we want to know about God, we must adopt a child like mind. Paul says “it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” I think here and elsewhere it reaffirms how the believer must lower his standards of evidence in order to believe, wouldn’t you agree?

[ITR_champion]

@hotflungwok

But in the Bible people get raised from the dead. It’s been quite a long time since that’s been claimed to happen.

Actually there have been plenty of claimed resurrections in recent years. I’ve not investigated any and I don’t know if they’ve actually occurred, but they’ve certainly been reported.

Now all we have are things like the stories you pointed out. If John Traynor’s problems were being caused by the bullet in his body, and that bullet was moved by all the efforts it took to get him to Lourdes, then maybe that’s what did it. Rita Klaus got worse before she got better, and took a long time to recover from her problems, not really all that miraculous.

Huh? Rita Klaus recovered literally overnight; that’s what stands out about her story. As one of her doctors pointed out, even if her case of multiple sclerosis vanished overnight, it would have taken months of therapy before she was strong enough to walk across the room. However, she was actually walking normally within a few hours. As for Traynor, he had a huge variety of medical issues: constant seizures, paralysis, partial blindness, severed tendons, and a large hole in his skull. A bullet moving while he was on the train would not explain those away.

Really, you’re going to try and argue this? Murders are quite well know, and are not in dispute. Miracles violate laws of physics, and somehow, so many times a miracle gets properly investigated it turns out to not be so miraculous. Miracles are in dispute, rightly so.

And sometimes a murder gets investigated and turns out to be not quite so murderous. That’s not the point. The point is that a change in frequency of an event does not say anything about whether that event exists or not.

So you’re invoking the ‘god hides from skeptics’ argument? Why does god only grant miracles to certain people? Let’s say John Traynor was healed at Lourdes, what about all the other people who weren’t? I can’t imagine every single person who’s gone to Lourdes was miraculously healed, we would have heard about it. What about their suffering and death? Were they just not good enough? Showed up at the wrong time? Maybe there was a skeptic in the room? Miracles are rare, fine, but as time goes on and we get better at investigating things, the scale and frequency of ‘real’ miracles certainly seems to be going down. I wonder what a graph of ‘frequency & scale of miracle’ vs ‘increase in scientific investigation & medicine’ would look like.

When did I ever say that ‘God hides from skeptics’? As I recall, I linked to a book by a man who was a skeptic until he started investigating the question for himself. As for the old claim that wasn’t a miraculous healing of one person because there wasn’t a miraculous healing of all people, the logic is obviously flawed. No one would apply that logic to my local doctor.

A miracle is a gift from God. Only small-minded people react to a gift by becoming upset that the same gift wasn’t given to every single person on the planet. Most people react to a gift by just being glad that the gift was given.

This again? Medicine doesn’t claim it can restore limbs miraculously, so expecting it to doesn’t make any sense. God, on the other hand, supposedly can. And since modern medicine not only can’t do it, but claims that it shouldn’t be able to happen, it would be a really hard thing to ignore. But even given all the other claims of healing miracles, and god’s acknowledged ability to do so, no amputated limb has ever been miraculously regrown.

What does that have to do with anything. Saying ‘A has never done B because A has never done C’ is obviously bad logic. The question of whether A can do C is irrelevant.

So you’re admitting that even in the face of actual contrary evidence, you’d still blindly believe something you knew to be wrong? Interesting, but not surprising.

No, I’m not admitting that, and I never said anything remotely like that. I don’t know what you’re hoping to accomplish by misrepresenting what I said.

@Hazel Weatherfield

http://whydoesgodhateamputees.com/god5.htm

Seriously! Wish I were smart enough to add anything else, but I couldn’t agree more.

So are you saying that the only argument that you can bring against the existence of miracles is one that I’ve already addressed? If not, then why are you bringing this up again?

[begbert2]

@ITR_champion

A miracle is a gift from God. Only small-minded people react to a gift by becoming upset that the same gift wasn’t given to every single person on the planet. Most people react to a gift by just being glad that the gift was given.

I dunno for “small-minded” people, but us big-brained people over here think it’s pretty reasonable to ask why this supposed gift wasn’t given to everybody. It’s not like God is limited in the number of healings he can grant, so why limit them? And what is the methodology that he uses to choose who gets them? It’s clearly not need, or goodness, or faith - lots of good faithful people who need miracles don’t get them. So what is it? Whim?

(I propose that he’s actually morally opposed to doing miracles, but occasionally one slips out, like a fart. Or maybe he occasinally gets drunk and forgets his morals.)

[Kent_Clark]

@Voyager

Wouldn’t the miracle of being able to see that the microscopic and microcosmic levels for a time do a lot better?

Actually, decades before Jesus was born, the Roman writer Marcus Terrentius Varrowarned farmers to stay away from swamps because “there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.”

One could struggle to find a word to describe this flash of insight from Varro, a man who, although educated for his time, had no access to a magnifying glass, much less any knowledge of microbiology.

Seriously, if one is skeptical about miracles, is the argument that there aren’t enough of them really the best argument? If they happened all the time, there wouldn’t be much to call miraculous.

[Razncain]

@begbert2

I dunno for “small-minded” people, but us big-brained people over here think it’s pretty reasonable to ask why this supposed gift wasn’t given to everybody.

Yes, and when these gifts get further scrutiny, it doesn’t appear to be a gift at all. I wished some did have it. At this stage, I would actually settle for just ONE having such a gift that is living today. It will have to be better than Benny Hinn and the like.

[sqweels]

@kunilou

Actually, decades before Jesus was born, the Roman writer Marcus Terrentius Varrowarned farmers to stay away from swamps because “there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.”

One could struggle to find a word to describe this flash of insight from Varro, a man who, although educated for his time, had no access to a magnifying glass, much less any knowledge of microbiology.

That’s extraordinary, but did he claim it was a miracle? And if miracles are rare, why one mere decades before the greatest miracle of all? And why a Roman? Why not someone who was contributing to the Bible?

And why is that apparently the only miraculously imparted piece of scientific knowledge?

Seriously, if one is skeptical about miracles, is the argument that there aren’t enough of them really the best argument? If they happened all the time, there wouldn’t be much to call miraculous.

The probem is that there is no logical pattern to the supposed miracles that take place. God’s clearly not trying to engineer world events. And no one’s claiming that the evicence shows that some people have hit upon the correct way to be religious and thus have the ability to bring good luck upon themselves.

So if you say you believe in miracles, you’re basically saying you believe that the Almighty intervenes in human affairs, but only rarelyand randomly, and beyond saving a handful of lives each year, consists of nothing of any discernable significance.

And no, if miracles did happen more frequently, they’d still be miracles if they still couldn’t be explained by science, but with more examples to cite, it would be more convincing that they’re real.

[Hazle_Weatherfield]

Anyone care to address the amputee question?

[hotflungwok]

@ITR_champion

Huh? Rita Klaus recovered literally overnight; that’s what stands out about her story. As one of her doctors pointed out, even if her case of multiple sclerosis vanished overnight, it would have taken months of therapy before she was strong enough to walk across the room. However, she was actually walking normally within a few hours. As for Traynor, he had a huge variety of medical issues: constant seizures, paralysis, partial blindness, severed tendons, and a large hole in his skull. A bullet moving while he was on the train would not explain those away.

The article on Rita Klaus says that after she made up her mind about her spirituality and told her pastor to pray for her, her condition lasted ‘until the end of the year’ during which it got worse, and then until June of the next year before anything happened, so at least 6 months, possibly more. Why wasn’t she healed right away by her pastor’s prayers? Why wasn’t she healed before it got so much worse?

And none of this matters anyway. Things we don’t understand happen all the time. Until you can present evidence that it was god who caused the ‘miracle’, you can’t attribute it to god. The fact that you’re still doing so shows that you’re basing your belief in miracles not on reason, but on nothing more than hopeful thinking.

And sometimes a murder gets investigated and turns out to be not quite so murderous. That’s not the point. The point is that a change in frequency of an event does not say anything about whether that event exists or not.

But a change in the frequency of an event that relies on the ignorance of the viewers, coupled with a change in the amount of ignorant viewers can be telling.

When did I ever say that ‘God hides from skeptics’? As I recall, I linked to a book by a man who was a skeptic until he started investigating the question for himself. As for the old claim that wasn’t a miraculous healing of one person because there wasn’t a miraculous healing of all people, the logic is obviously flawed. No one would apply that logic to my local doctor.

Your local doctor isn’t capable of snapping his fingers and healing everyone on a whim. No one expects that of him. The god you believe in on, the other hand, can. You’re making obviously fallacious comparisons.

A miracle is a gift from God. Only small-minded people react to a gift by becoming upset that the same gift wasn’t given to every single person on the planet. Most people react to a gift by just being glad that the gift was given.

Oh well, that it clears it all up then. All you have to do now is present evidence that these miracles were in fact from god. You’ve asserted that they are, so now we just need the proof you obviously have.

What does that have to do with anything. Saying ‘A has never done B because A has never done C’ is obviously bad logic. The question of whether A can do C is irrelevant.

No, it isn’t irrelevant. The god we’re discussing is not only supposed to be able to heal people, but also loves everyone more than any human can. And yet, all we see is random people having things happen to them that can’t be explained by current medicine. For every faithful and pious person who is healed, there are 100s more that aren’t. Modern medicine can’t regrow an amputated limb. God can. Since we have never seen an amputated limb regrow, among all the other things miracles claim, the current ability of whatever is doing these miracles is no better than modern medicine. If it really was god doing these ‘miracles’, you think we would have seen a regrown amputated limb by now.

So are you saying that the only argument that you can bring against the existence of miracles is one that I’ve already addressed? If not, then why are you bringing this up again?

You didn’t address it. No one expects modern medicine to regrow amputated limbs, so your argument is obviously wrong. You’re comparing two things that aren’t equal.

[Razncain]

The one of Rita Klaus was interesting, but probably is embellished in a few places. It would be nice to interview her doctors thoroughly along with other doctors, and see if MS sometimes in the rarest occasions goes away, as sometimes cancer has been known to do, and also to see if most doctors actually consider this a miracle in the form of a supernatural one. A friend of mine related how she knows of two sisters in their eighties now, that both had cancer in their early youth, for it to never return again.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the future that medical science and all of its knowledge of DNA, genetics and the whole sha-bang might possibly be able to start having human amputees start growing limbs again. But a supernatural miracle would be a re-growing of limbs with a man of faith simply giving us a laying upon the hands presentation, or saying a few magical words, a prayer, or however they prefer to work it. I would think it would be somewhat instantaneously too, but if they needed a little time, I’m a patient man. However, in the Bible it didn’t take long for a dead man that had already started to smell of decay to be brought back to life, so the story goes. That’s how they claimed it worked a few thousand years ago, maybe the laws of nature don’t work that way anymore. Or maybe, Hume is right, that nature’s laws are in working order, and that man has simply bent the facts. We see examples of the latter all of the time. But how many have ever witnessed, e.g., gravity laws being suspended?

Believers will have to continue to settle for the watered down variety, whether they admit it or not. Good evidence will never come their way; thus, they are stuck with faith, the thing you hear so many of them stating they are struggling with.

If we were made in god’s image, why aren’t we invisible too?—annonymous

[gonzomax]

@Perciful

They just pulled a man out of the ruble yesterday in Haiti who had been there for almost a month. That is a miracle. I’m sure when he recovers he is going to be a changed man.

We have miracles but we don’t see them as miracles. When a person spontaneously heals from terminal cancer that to me is a miracle. Every time a dead person is brought back to life that is a miracle. Forget about uncorrupted corpses and just look around you.

Pure probability. if there are enough cases, you will have some that are odd. That does not make them miracles. Sometimes your body just manages to fight off cancer, even after losing for a while. That does not make it a miracle. Want a miracle, have them all cured. Then you have actually got something.

[Lumpy]

It’s strange that in the Bible miracles happen but there seem to be constraints on them. Only a certain chosen persons can do them, or they can’t be done unless certain preconditions are met. For example, the angels visiting Lot tell him that he and his family have to be out of town by a certain time because the destruction of the cities is on a schedule (?!?) It almost seems as if miracles are a cooperative project: God provides the power, but someone has to, in essence, give God the opening to allow it to happen.

[ralph124c]

It seems to me, that Jesus was not keen on miracles-several times he made remarks like" you people have no faith, unless you see signs and wonders, you won’t believe".
heck, even when his mother prompts him (at tha Cana Wedding), he (rather peevishly) remarks.“woman, my hour is not come!”
So even Jesus wished that people would embrace his message-with out the special effects.

[Kent_Clark]

All we’re doing here is proving the utter futility of trying to justify faith by using rational arguments. And speaking as someone who has at least some degree of faith, it doesn’t work that way.

@Lumpy

It’s strange that in the Bible miracles happen but there seem to be constraints on them. Only a certain chosen persons can do them, or they can’t be done unless certain preconditions are met.

The Biblical miracles are in a particular context – in the Old Testament, to help the Hebrews get to the Promised Land; in the New Testament, to demonstrate that Jesus wasn’t just another (in a string of many) false prophet with a crowd-pleasing set of teachings. And, as I’ve mentioned before, even then they were greeted by doubt and skepticism all the way.