But the timing of so many examples is either not defined or not proven, or subject to so many other factors that it’s difficult for the unbeliever to take it seriously as an argument. Look at Diogenes’ statements about the Parting of the Red Sea(/Sea of Reds) above.
I don’t know anything about Mueller, but , as Devil’s Advocate, I can suggest that he tended to remember times when luck broke his way, and to selectively forget the times it didn’t.
One of my roommates got his car clobbered practically coming out of the dealer’s lot. He was heartbroken. But he was able to get the whole thing fixed up because of someone he met almost immediately after. I call it chance, he attributes it entirely to his own capabilities. But if either of us had been predisposed towards miracles, we’d have called it miraculous.
First of all, that’s a naive view of history. Historians do place greater confidence in events that are independently corroborated; however, they do not automatically dismiss an ancient historical account simply because it has no specific corroboration.
And second, I was speaking specifically about spontaneous, naturalistics partings of the Red Sea (or any other large body of water). There are no accounts of such events occurring, which strongly suggests that a parting of the Red Sea would indeed be miraculous.
Once again, I would like to emphasize that I’m using this story as an illustration. For the purposes of discussion, I am treating this story as factual – the purpose being to show that the presence of a scientific explanation can be insufficient to disprove a purported miracle.
I have stated this twice earlier, Diogenes. In fact, I have stated this with a great deal of emphasis. This is now my third time to say this. Don’t make me explain it for the fourth time.
You have obviously ignored every single thing that I have said. My point is that the timing of an event can sometimes suggest a miraculous nature, independent of any scientific explanation. You deny this, but your reply does nothing to refute that. In essence, your reply simply says, “Yes, a scientific explanation is sufficient,” and makes no attempt at a rebuttal.
Ah, but in this case, you are talking about a specific, individual event. I’m not saying that every alleged miracle can indeed be proven to be miraculous, by virtue of its timing. I’m saying (and this is now my fourth time to state this) that it can suggest a miraculous nature, independent of any scientific explanation.
I strongly suspect (sigh) that I will be forced to explain this yet again, for a fifth time – and maybe beyond. Please prove me wrong.
(FTR, I don’t buy DtC’s dismissal of the Exodus event either, but that’s subject matter for another thread.)
But claiming that a mythological story is real for the purposes of argument and then saying that the timing of it is a miracle is pure sophistry. There is no way to rebut it because it’s not a logical argument. What do you want from people here?
But folks in statistics are notoriously distrustful of “specific, individual events” chosen after the fact. It’s kinda like drawing the target around your bullet hole and saying you got a bullseye.
You can say that the timing of an event can suggest miraculous nature, but I suspect it’s only going to suggest it to people already leaning that way, and to people whose philosophy leans the other way it won’t mean a thing.
It’s perfectly logical, I understand what he’s arguing. All he’s saying is that if we assume for the sake of argument miracles can happen then the fact that something has a possible natural explanation does not mean it cannot be a miracle. The miracle is the timing, the coincidence. In this case that the Red Sea just so happened to recede due to some natural event at the specific time moses et al wanted to leg it across.
It’s a purely logical point. A possible alternative natural explanation or other unlikely chain of events is not a SUFFICIENT reason for dismissing the possibility of a miracle if the timing of it is so miraculously precise. For this not to be logical you’d have to rule out any possibility of God working through natural forces to work miracles. As god is all-powerful this cannot be ruled out.
The argument that the Exodus or any other event requiring a miracle didn’t occur and therefore no miracle is needed is another matter.
No it is not tautological. I don’t believe in miracles any more than you do but it’s no more tautological than assuming anything else for the sake of an argument.
All he is saying is that Event X happening at Time Y cannot necessarily be explained by Cause Z if Z is not a sufficient explanation of Y. The Red Sea parting at precisely the time required, assuming for the sake of argument it all went down as specified, may well be a natural event but it’s one enormous coincidence that the time it happened it happened at the very hour Moses needed a miracle. Such an astronomically remote coincidence of unheard of geophysical event with burning need can as reasonably be viewed as miraculous as an insanely unlikely coincidence.
Before we knew about asteroids and everyone thought stones did not fall from the sky we could hypothesise giant falling rocks could make big craters even if at the time we did not know of the existence of the giant remnants of extinction events.
You can’t argue that it is illegitimate to assume hypothetical events when discussing theoretical possibilities even if, like me, you don’t believe in the hypothesised event.
Well at the very least, it’s pointless. Anything MIGHT be a miraculous event. It MIGHT be a miracle every time it snows. It really adds nothing to human knowledge to say that, though, and to hypothesize more and more unlikely events does not actually make those events more likely.
At best, JThunder’s argument just boils down to “you can’t prove there AREN’T any miracles,” which while technically true is aso true of vampires.
Good grief, Dio. Did you not read what tagos said? Even someone who does not believe in miracles can understand what I’m saying!
Of course, it’s much easier to stick one’s fingers in one’s ears and chant, “La, la. Miracles can’t happen. If we can find a scientific explanation – any explanation whatsoever – then it’s not a miracle. La, la.”
And NO, my argument does NOT boil down to “you can’t prove there AREN’T any miracles” tagos clearly grasped this, which is why he/she said, “Such an astronomically remote coincidence of unheard of geophysical event with burning need can as reasonably be viewed as miraculous as an insanely unlikely coincidence.”
In other words, the timing of an event – even a scientifically explainable one – can strongly suggest the occurrence of a miracle. The alternative would be to believe that some enormously improbable natural event has occurred, and scientists normally frown upon such explanations.
Additionally, I’d like to point out that it’s an article of faith to suggest that there must be some scientific explanation for any miracle. Theists are often ridiculed for believing in matters unproven, yet this type of unproven conjecture is routinely bandied about by non-believers. It is very mucn an article of faith, albeit one which is not based on any deity.
tagos already addressed your point, and did a fine job of it, too.
Additionally, if you’er going to complain about the fact that there’s no way to rebut this viewpoint, then one should also complain about the blanket, unsubstantiated statement, “Well, we know that there’s a scientific explanation. We just don’t know what it is.” That argument is every bit as impossible to rebut. It’s intellectually unreasonable to complain about one viewpoint yet warmly embrace the other.
If the Red Sea parted every few months for known reasons, then it parting for Moses might be coincidence, not a miracle. Since as far as we know it never parts, the parting would be a miracle (assuming it ever happened.) I don’t buy timing as making a miracle - with 5 billion people, million-to-one shots happen 5,000 times a day.
I’d buy a miracle that actually went against science in a significant way. I think those who say they wouldn’t are playing into the hands of the miracle believers. The issue isn’t whether or not we would accept a miracle, it is if they actually ever happened. If the events in Close Encounters had actually happened, I’d believe in UFOs. If the events in Exodus and Genesis happened I’d believe in God. They didn’t and I don’t and screw the hypotheticals.
That’s a pit peeve of mine. You read all the time pseudo-scientific “explanations” of biblical events. Moses story is particularily often “explained” this way : the plagues of Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, the Mount Sinai, and aven once some explanation that I forgot for the miraculous food Hebrews ate why wandering in the desert (I don’t know it’s english name).
That’s completely ludicrous. Providing explanations for something that you’ve zero reason to assume it occured at the first place is plain silly. Especially this kind of explanations that involve extremely unlikely events. If you’re going to believe that there really was plagues in Egypt, a parting of the red sea, a burning bush and miraculous food, then, it’s way more “economical” to assume that these were really miracles. If I were provided proofs that these events took place, the Occam Razor would lead me to believe that there was actually a god acting, rather than assuming that a random guy had a serie of the weirdest and most incredible natural occurences happening to him everywhere he went during all his life.
Stick my fingers in my ears about what? Am I sticking my fingers in my ears if I say that there’s no such thing as magic?
Let me put it another way. I will assume that the impossible is impossible until proven otherwise. Miracles are, by definition, impossible events. There is not a shred of evidence that any impossible event has ever occurred.
If we limit ourselves to only REAL historical events and phenomena instead of fictional ones, then we have never encountered anything that even suggests anything but a natural explanation.
The fatal flaw in this is that there is no such event. There is no “astronomically remote coincidence” which requires an explanation. You are inventing a hypothetical unlikely event to tautologically assert that if a miracle happened it would be a miracle.
The improbable is always a better solution than the impossible, but as it stands, you don’t even have a genuinely improbable event to point at, you are citing ancient mythology as though it were history.
This sentence makes no semantic sense. By definition a “miracle” cannot have a scientific explanation and no scientist would say that it does.
What “conjecture” are you talking about?
It’s an article faith that the impossible is impossible? I don’t think so.
One would first have to show that there is, in fact, a pheneomenon to be explained. (I.E., under condition X, I can make small primates emerge from my anal cavity.) At this point, and not before, scientific inquiry can begin. We can modify the initial condition slightly and see if that modifies the phenomenon, or makes it disappear. We can find out the limits of such phenomena. Only once we have explored the boundaries of such phenomena can we begin to formulate a cause for it. This is the nature of the scientific method.
In fact, this has been done repeatedly by James Randi and other organizations. The phenomena disappear when conditions that prevent mundane cheating are followed.
On the other hand, a strange phenomenon that was discovered some years ago that we call “electricity” has been put to grand use in today’s society. I couldn’t imagine the difficulties of trying to explain this force to the ancient Greeks would have presented. Today, we know it exists, we put it to good use in our homes and factories, and our lives are forever changed.
I have little doubt that there are other phenomena out there waiting to be discovered that will result in as large a scale of societal change as electricity once did. However, spending money trying to explain phenomena that has not even been shown to exist will not revolutionize society. All that will do is put more money in the hands of charlatans and quacks.
There is a school of thought that has chosen to define “miraculous” as the intervention of or penetration of the laws or energies of one state of matter into the affairs of a less “excited” level.
inasmuch as the only thing know for sure about the nature of time and our relationship to it is that we are misinformed, and given the stake that superstring theory has driven through the still-beating heart of Descartes, adding if we are adventurous the magnetic resonancing reverse function some guy in canada is playing with (makes you laugh, I think? will google in a moment…) it is not too far fetched to aspire someday to embrace all observed phenomena, allowing for some elegant double-blind consttructions that would be required for any sort of confidence in the data to start with…
Name one enormously improbable natural event that has been objectively observed that you think is a miracle. Only then can we even begin to discuss it. Otherwise it is nothing but speculation. Stories from George Mueller don’t count. For all we know those were the ramblings of a nice old man but are in no way verifiable. Did anyone bother to check if his stories were true? Afterall Benny Hinn claims to have resurrected folks from the dead. It doesn’t mean it’s true.
Equating these two is bound to piss off some people. :smack:
Personally, while I can see that it’s easy to be skeptical of the authenticity of the books of the bible (of which Genesis and Exodus are some of the more farfetched, from the skeptic’s point of view), I wouldn’t be nearly confident enough in saying there’s no way they did happen.
I mean, for all I know, God may have manifested himself in another burning bush, or a tortilla in Mexico, and be talking with someone right now. Do you think we could explain that one away scientifically? Maybe. Even if we couldn’t, there would still be many people that refuse to accept that it was actually a miracle, dismissing it as a fluke, a wrinkle in time, a coincidence amongst coincidences…but, whatever.
It’s easy to claim ignorance when you take a fairly agnostic view of things that aren’t entirely mundane and empirical.
I would, at least if they’re intended to be taken as written. There’s no evidence they did happen, and (especially regarding Genesis) a good deal that they didn’t. Depending on which version of the creation story in Genesis you’re referring to, of course, and the question of how humanity reproduced from there, and so on.
