I dunno, Polycarp, it’s one thing if you want to say what you consider miracles to be, but I still think you’re reaching if you’re arguing that Aquinas would have agreed with you. You might call your example of the parting of the Red Sea a “miracle of the second rank” in which “God does something that nature can do, but not in that sequence and connexion”: winds can blow, but without divine intervention they don’t “part” seas*. This is still distinct from Cyrus allowing the Jews to return; no doubt Aquinas would agree that was thanks to the God’s grace or providence, but it’s still not a “miracle” in any sense he seems to be using the term. It also seems distinct from a coincidental natural event–suppose, for example, that the hiding place of someone fleeing the troops of a persecuting army is about to be revealed by the light of the full moon, but just as the troops are about to spot him, a cloud passes by and the bad guys can’t see the refugee. You would term that a “miracle”, and I’m sure Aquinas would call it an act of divine providence, but I can’t see how it qualifies as a “miracle” in any sense he uses the term. This is assuming that the night was already partly cloudy–a cloud which springs up from nowhere on an otherwise clear night would seem to me to be a “miracle of the third rank”.
*Actually, according the footnote, Aquinas gave “the making of a way through the sea by division of the waters” as an example of a miracle of the first rank, “something is done by God that nature can never do.”
Regarding the OP, let me see if I can illustrate with a parable.
A man was ready to retire and decided to build his dream home, the house he expected to live in for the rest of his life. So he finds a good design, hires a contractor and waits. A few months later, the house is ready and he moves in. Soon after though, he finds that the lights don’t work properly – turn on the kitchen light and it turns off the bedroom light, bulbs in the dining room burn out far too frequently, and other little annoyances. So he calls the contractor and a few days later the electician who did the original wiring arrives to check things out. After a few minutes of changing wires around and replacing parts, everything seems to be in order and the electrician leaves. But that evening, our homeowner finds that eve though the lights come on when they’re supposed to, they’re all dimmer than they should be. So he calls the contractor again and the electrician comes back the next day. This time he replaces another part and everything works. At last our fellow is satisfied with his house.
Now the question for you is: when your brother is ready to retire and build his dream house, would you recommend this electrician to him?
Personally, I’m a pretty easy-going fellow, so I’d make allowances for the electrician. After all, people make mistakes and parts don’t always work to spec. But on he other hand, requiring two service calls to fix something that should have been done right from the start is a little excessive. So while I might not actually get angry, I would certainly never recommend him to anyone else either.
You present us with a situation very much like this, only it took 20 years or more for the technician to show up for that first service call and he still got it wrong even then. Now truly, our fellow in this example was fortunate, because most blind people never even get a first service call, let alone two. But even at that, could you really recommend this technician to your loved ones, let alone call him a miracle worker?
And what’s with the laying on of hands part? Jeannie could have done the job from a mile away with just a blink and Samantha Stevens could do it with a twitch of her nose but this guy has to actually touch the fellow. Or is that part just showmanship?
If you’d like another data point, note that Jesus performs a double healing elsewhere. As he approaches Jericho, Jesus heals a blind man (Luke 18:35-43). The same thing happens again when he leaves Jericho (Mark 12:46-52). In Matthew 20:29-34, he heals the man again, only this time there are two of them.
-blink-
Maybe Jesus better heal my eyes, because I’m seeing double.
Well, Grumpy, I’m sure there was more than one blind man in first century Palestine. There are other such “doublet” stories, which may be the result of false recall on the part of the evangelists as to when and where they happened or the accounts of two different events. E.g., in two Gospels, the Feeding of the Five Thousand (who were Jews) is followed a few chapters later by the Feeding of the Four Thousand (who were Gentiles).
No. I don’t think it is a fair stance for Polycarp to take his own interpretation of Christian beliefs and argue it for Christianity. He could call it his own god, but not the Christian god, because there are orthodox Christian doctrines.
It’s pretty hard to determine whether this is the case with most Christians today. AFAIK, this is not the case with Catholics, who make up a big chunk of Christians.
How so? If there is no evidence for the supernatural, how could one assert its existence?
Just because an event can be described and even recorded does not mean it can be explained, or replicated at will by those doing the describing.
If someone can turn water into wine, this might be because they are a space alien with access to advanced matter transmutation technology based on some technique for rearranging the subatomic particles of the water into new combinations. We could not only document such an ability, there is a good chance we could eventually learn to replicate it, just as 19th century scientists could not only document pitchblende’s then inexplicable ability to fog film, they could eventually learn to understand the mechanisms of radioactivity and to manipulate things to generate radiation at will.
On the other hand, if someone can turn water into wine because they are God, we might be able to document this ability without ever being able to explain it or do it ourselves. While one can imagine God acting to perform “miracles” through natural processes (parting a sea by arranging for some unusual combination of wind and tide), one can also imagine God performing miracles by directly altering reality by a simple act of will. Thus, at one instant, there is water. At the next instant–no matter how small an instant you measure, a millisecond or a Planck interval–there is wine, with no intervening states. If God was willing to hang out in a laboratory and do this miracle every time we asked him to, we could document this ability, even record it, but we could never explain it beyond “Well, he’s God”, nor hope to replicate it ourselves.
That all objectively measurable phenomena we have thus far encountered have been susceptible to materialist explanation does not mean that, logically speaking, we could not possibly encounter some empirically measurable phenomenon for which we can not come up with some causal mechanism. Since no one has walked into a lab and demonstrated turning water into wine, and since I don’t think the account in the Gospel of John is sufficient to establish that such a thing actually happened, I’m not saying I believe in supernatural phenomena. But this is because I’ve seen no convincing evidence for such (and because there does seem to be a convincing scientific framework for explaining the world without supernaturalism), not because I think such things are logically impossible or a contradiction in terms.
Personally, I would hate to think that God could ignore the laws of the universe just for the benefit of a few humans on an unremarkable planet in the backwater of a mediocre galaxy. It would cheapen the reality of the universe, sort of like a “Deus Ex Machina” ending in a Star Trek episode.
In other words, there can be no proof of anything supernatural. Since we can’t disprove the existence of aliens and telemetric water-to-wine transubstantiation devices, there is no reason to believe that someone changing water into wine is anything other than advanced technology employing natural laws of physics to a very specific end.
I should have been more clear when I talked about describing, documenting and quantifying an event. I meant “description” in the sense that you are explaining the process by which the event occurs, not just that the event itself is recounted, as in a story.
But the point I was trying to make is that asking for “proof of supernatural phenomena” is asking for the impossible. Any evidence in support of supernatural claims is insufficient because there is always the possibility of aliens with superior technology or shadow-governments doing secret experiments with mind-control that only tinfoil hats can protect you from. For any event, it is impossible to disprove the existence of an explanation that matches up with natural laws of physics either already-known or to-be-discovered-in-the-future.
This pretty much renders the term “supernatural” completely meaningless. The traditional meaning of the word “miracle” may be irrelevant in the modern world. That’s why I (and Polycarp, I think, but he’ll correct me if I’m wrong I hope) believe that questions like the OP’s are slightly misguided. For the record, I don’t believe in a material distinction between changing water into wine “because you’re God” and doing it because you’re the guy who invented Star Trek replicators in the 23rd Century (or whenever it’s supposed to be).
Well, in science, there is never “proof”, there is only “evidence”. Outside of geometry or similar purely logical realms, all we have is evidence, never proof. Turning water into wine is evidence of supernatural powers. If someone is able to come up with some sort of recording of the event which shows more detail about it–“Whenever he transmutes the water into wine, we detect a neutron flux”–this may be evidence against a supernatural explanation. (By “supernatural” I mean something we can never provide an explanation for or manage to reproduce.) If someone else is able to come along and replicate the transmutation, and demonstrate how to construct a matter transmuter, this would also be evidence against a supernatural explanation.
Nothing is ever “proven” in a scientific sense, but sometimes the preponderance of evidence is so overwhelming that it’s unreasonable to continue questioning the matter in the absence of any further evidence. Earth is about four and a half billion years old. It would be pointless to construct new “theories” which attempt to account for all the observations and experiments in geology and astronomy and the physics of radioisotopes and so on being consistent with an age of 6,000 years or 100 trillion years, and it would be silly at this point to spend effort seeking new evidence showing that the age of Earth is really some radically different figure from four and a half billion years.
According to the title, that’s what this thread is supposed to be about–“convincing evidence”.
Close enough for government work, Cuauhtemoc (hey, I spelled it right without looking!!). I’d nuance some of what you said, but you’re pretty close to on target.
Hmmm…given clay and sunlight, your typical Vinis vitifera arbor and selected yeasts will jointly make water into wine. Do grapevines and yeasts have supernatural powers, Buck?
The Sun undergoes thermonuclear fusion reactions at its core. These reactions produce energy; at the same time, the entropy of the Sun increases–the Sun is “running down”. The energy produced by the Sun does not come from nowhere; there is a loss of mass when hydrogen atoms are fused to produce helium atoms; the missing mass is converted to energy in accordance with the terms of the equation E=mc[sup]2[/sup]. Some of this energy finds its way to the surface of the Sun as photons of visible light, which cross space–at the speed of light in a vacuum, faster than which nothing can travel–and eventually impinge on the leaves of grapevines. The grapevines use the energy from the Sun to turn water and carbon dioxide into sugar. Yeasts in turn can extract the energy from the sugar in the grapes, producing (among other things) alcohol. Humans can metabolize the alcohol, extracting its energy to power their own metabolic processes (and also causing a mild, temporary derangement of their own neurological functions which many humans find pleasurable). In all these chemical reactions all the organisms involved–the grapevines, the yeasts, and the humans–are bound by the laws of thermodynamics; the total entropy always increases, and there are always losses of energy to unusuable forms (e.g., heat) at each transformation.
In other words, no, grapevines and yeasts do not have supernatural powers.
Is God bound by the speed of light limitation? (Arthur Clarke once suggested that might explain a lot of things.) When God created the universe, did he have to get its energy and matter from somewhere else? Is God bound by the laws of thermodynamics? Is he running down; or does he decrease his own entropy at the expense of some other system?
