That depends on the prevailing orthodoxy. An Israelite at Sinai who said, “Heavenly trumpet? What heavenly trumpet?” would have been torn to pieces, but in the early days of Islam, it’s the people who said Muhammed is a prophet who had to fear for their lives.
I’m going to pick “a marvelous event that can be explained by natural laws”.
Maybe us scientists will never finish measuring exactly how miraculous it all is, but there are worse ways to spend time.
For the sake of this discussion, I’m just going to assume God exists because the obvious answer if he doesn’t is that they didn’t happen that way. Anyway, I think a lot of this can be explained with an analogy that I like to use in comparing the progression of human development to that of a child. The parallel isn’t perfect, as basically humanity was analagous to a small child in terms of our understanding and technology for a huge portion of our existence, but if we just look at our recorded history, it works out a bit better.
I think this is a matter of perspective. So, for example, I’ve lived in the DC area my whole life. In general, we’ll get a fairly large snow storm about every 5-10 years. We just had a fairly large one a few years ago, but other than that, as an adult I just sort of generally remember them and don’t think too much of them after that winter is over.
However, as a child huge snow storms are something completely different. If I’m young enough, I may never have seen so much before, or only seen it once before. So, even if it isn’t all that uncommon in general, it FEELS like it’s particularly special.
Moreso, it will have a greater affect on me as a kid. As an adult, it pretty much means taking some leave or some frustrating commuting or whatever. As a child, I get snow days, I go out and play in it. It’s a completely different and more life-impacting experience, so it’s going to be remembered more. And, by simply being a child, 24" of snow feels like a lot more snow to a 8yo than it does to a 8yo.
I also think that a lot of religious people will agree that a lot of the way God will tend to work is through natural events. I believe it was Einstein that said that coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. That is, he’s not going to create fire out of nowhere and rain it down on Sodom and Gomorrah, but rather, he would trigger some natural event like a volcanic eruption or comet or asteroid to destroy those cities instead. So, to a believer, they see the alignment between those events and see God’s hand, but to a non-believer, they just see a natural event.
So now compare some of the biblical and other religious events. We can’t just look at them in comparison to what we’re used to seeing, but we have to try to understand the context that these people are seeing them in. So a seemingly rare event happens to a small and young and religious people, they’re going to remember it because it is important in context in how it affected them and it ultimately did have a large affect on how they shaped. And over time it gets the natural sorts of exagerations and become part of the society’s mythology until it’s written down.
We see a lot less of this sort of stuff in more recent times because our understanding of nature and our record keeping have improved considerably, and our general perspective has completely changed. I could easily see an event like Katrina in New Orleans, if it had happened a couple thousand years ago, could easily have become something of that nature.
To some extent this already does happen. We see major disasters and stuff and some people claim it’s a judgment from God or whatever. We’re not going to feel the need to record a lot of modern events, because many of them just don’t stand out in the way they would have in times in the past. In order for them to be worth recording, the events would have to be as impressive to us as those things were.
Imagine whatever might have inspired a story like Noah’s Flood. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that there might have been a massive flood in some valley, I’ve heard some theories as such, it very well would have seemed like the whole world had flooded, and if they believe that God did it for some reason or another, they record it as such.
So now imagine what might impress us on that sort of scale. In today’s world, it pretty much would take a global level event. Maybe something like a global pandemic, a massive asteroid impact, all-out nuclear war.
I think it just shows that our knowledge and understanding have grown. I don’t think that nature of God has changed over time, just how we perceive him. Maybe a lot of these events are just natural disasters and don’t mean anything, but we used to think they did. Maybe they still mean something important but people just aren’t seeing it anymore. Or maybe they mean something different that what we thought or think.
Regardless, our relationship with God has changed, not because he has changed, but because we have. Maybe God did a lot of hand-holding in helping us to learn lessons and it seemed dramatic in much the way it would to a child, but now that we’ve learned how to think and learn for ourselves he’s doing less.
(Actually, this is the first I’ve learned of Godzilla Jesus, though I do remember the bit about being, “Called home.” Where I grew up there really weren’t any fundamentalists, except on TV.)
I think you need to qualify your hypothesis. The US was less atheist friendly even in 1990. Moreover, tales of miracles didn’t metastasize in parts of the world with little free speech during, say, the 1500-1990 era. Now most of that era didn’t have recordings either. So I’m guessing that a certain baseline literacy and firmly established (and intolerant) religious institutions helped keep a lid on reports of fantastic supernatural feats. What’s key is that believers (who admittedly may also be skeptics of a stripe) can express doubt towards certain exuberant claims.
I wonder too. I seem to recall a few thinkers from c. ~1600-1880 pitching their arguments against atheists, few of whom had their arguments in print. Yet those believers were concerned about something. Very weak cite, can’t remember others: Neil Stephenson’s fictional debate between Leibnitz and Daniel Waterhouse near the end of the Baroque Cycle.
Go back further and it’s possible to find satirists poking fun at Christianity, before the Roman State adopted that religion. In understand Lucian ~125 – 180 CE falls in that category.
Don’t need to read the rest of the thread. There’s your answer.
Occam’s Razor at its finest.
There’s no debate.
A God who was both worldly-benevolent and interventionist would have tipped us off about the germ theory of disease. In the event, holy books lack any sort of anachronistic practical knowledge.
There are other paths for the believer though. You could say that the Bible was divinely inspired, but also a product of its times: the New Testament says that it is Good News after all, not Eyewitness News. [1]
[1] At least according to modern presentation. Scholarly translations tell a more complicated tale.
Which gave us MC 900 Ft. Jesus. 