Do you believe in miracles? I’m not talking about an underdog hockey team winning an upset victory. I mean do you believe, for example, that someone can tell a crippled person, “Get up and walk,” and the result is that the person can just get up and walk after years of being wheelchair bound? Or that someone can run a marathon (26.2 miles) in 3 seconds instead of 3 hours?
Is it just that you have not witnessed these events yourself? So, the reason why you don’t believe that someone can just put his hands on a dead person and have their rise from the dead is because you didn’t see this for yourself? And you didn’t verify that they were truly dead prior to their rising from death? If that’s the case, why do you believe that George Washington existed as a human being? Just because you read about it? Clearly you have also read about Jesus walking on water.
I admit, I am playing devil’s advocate, even though I don’t think the devil exists. I don’t believe in miracles. But I want to know why you don’t believe in miracles. Or do you? If you do believe in miracles, how do you decide which miracles actually happened and which are fake?
Isn’t the term miracle an unnecessary term? Can’t we just talk about what is known and what isn’t known? What our best science tells us is true versus unsupported claims? Before humans learned to fly airplanes, a human being flying from New York to Los Angeles would have been impossible. But then once airplanes were invented this became possible. The laws of physics didn’t change but human knowledge and the possibility of “human flight” did change.
Agree or disagree?
I believe in the mind-body connection. I don’t believe it can defy the basic laws of nature, but I think it can seem to do so at times.
What you’re referring to with regard to airplanes is sometimes known as Clarke’s Law, propounded most famously by Arthur C. Clarke. “Sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic.” The operative term being ‘appear’. And even the earliest humans knew flight was possible, because birds, bats, insects.
In the literal sense, I don’t think miracles exist. But I still gasp when I watch the end of Carl Dreyer’s film Ordet. Ever seen it?
With faith, all things are possible, but faith is such a rare thing. And those who want to believe in literal miracles often possess surprisingly little of it.
godspell said
I believe in the mind-body connection. I don’t believe it can defy the basic laws of nature, but I think it can seem to do so at times.What you’re referring to with regard to airplanes is sometimes known as Clarke’s Law, propounded most famously by Arthur C. Clarke. “Sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic.” The operative term being ‘appear’. And even the earliest humans knew flight was possible, because birds, bats, insects.
In the literal sense, I don’t think miracles exist. But I still gasp when I watch the end of Carl Dreyer’s film Ordet. Ever seen it?
With faith, all things are possible, but faith is such a rare thing. And those who want to believe in literal miracles often possess surprisingly little of it.
I have not seen “Ordet.” I might have to check that one out.
Out of the 100 billion human beings who have lived and died on this Earth, none of them rose from the dead.
But how do I know? It’s not like I have been keeping careful watch of the world’s cemetery’s for all of human existence. Perhaps human resurrection is a common occurrence, but some how these miracle events never make it into the nightly news. Perhaps the nightly news editors on demonic, not wanting us to know?
You can see where I’m going with this, right?
I think so, but pretty sure that’s not what anyone means by resurrection. More like a parody of the original idea. The constant is a fascination with death.
People like to tell stories about UNcommon occurrences. In many cases, nonexistent ones. What’s the point of having an imagination if you never use it?
I love this topic because I am easily fooled by magic tricks and such. So I have to decide what is important. Can that guy really catch a bullet with his teeth? Perhaps he really can. How does that affect me? Should I listen to what he has to say? Is he an expert on anything other than catching bullets with his teeth?
Some people seem to think special powers mean a person has some added authority. LeBron James, for example, is one of my favorite athletes. I cheered when he wore the “I can’t breathe T-shirt.” I jeered when he said people should not interfere on the side of Hong Kong in their protests against China.
If you can heal the lame, by all means do so. I will gladly hold your beer while you do it!
Why do you believe anything? Probably because it makes better sense of the world. Miracles can do this, if there’s enough evidence and if you’re not too committed philosophically to their impossibility. Generally, this requires that you take seriously the hypothesis that God exists, has reasons to not interact regularly in the world, but does have reason to interact occasionally for special reasons. Then, when evaluating any given miracle claim, you assess how plausible it is that God would choose to do that kind of thing, and look carefully at the evidence. In that sense, it can be similar to archaeology and forensics where it is inferred that persons both exist and interfered at the site.
Hi BlakeGiunta –
Welcome to the blog community. I think you’ll find a very wide range of views represented here around the supernatural, with the statistics skewing towards the skeptical (not the pejorative connotation but the epistemological one).
How would you frame your thoughts for those who:
– Do take the idea of the God you describe seriously, and
– Do not commit themselves to the idea that miracles are impossible
Yet still find the evidence for either to be lacking, and therefore the probability of both to be low?
Cheers!
I’m glad you made it clear about the hockey thing. How about the ’69 Mets? You have to admit, that was spooky.
The whole point of a true miracle is that you can’t explain it. But there could be a rational explanation nobody knows about yet. Science will never have all the answers, because there’s just too much information, and our understanding of natural processes will always be incomplete and changing over time. I think if we don’t know all the rules, we can’t know if they’re being broken.
I think it’s not necessary to answer that question. I think it’s a waste of time. There will always be this vast unknown, but in saying “It’s a miracle” we’re pretending to understand what we really don’t. Rationalizing the irrational. I respect the unknown. I recognize its existence. And that’s all I can say. We have always had a tendency, as a species, to provide answers, as a way of insulating ourselves against the unknown. We would rather say “It’s an evil spirit” or “It’s Bigfoot” than “I have no idea what’s out there making that noise in the woods.”
The world is not simple enough to be understood in its entirety. Let’s not pretend otherwise, by giving an answer to a question that makes no sense to even ask, at least until we’ve actually witnessed a possible miracle. And some people believe they have. I don’t know otherwise.
For as-yet unexplained events:
– Non-theists charge theists with “God of the gaps” with respect to miracle claims.
– Theists charge non-theists with “science/naturalism of the gaps” with respect to presuming naturalistic phenomena will in future explain things.
Both the claims and the counter-charges rest on assumptions based on priors.
Godspell’s “I don’t know, and neither do you” position is a very appropriate response to both.
Hngerhman said
For as-yet unexplained events:– Non-theists charge theists with “God of the gaps” with respect to miracle claims.
– Theists charge non-theists with “science/naturalism of the gaps” with respect to presuming naturalistic phenomena will in future explain things.
Both the claims and the counter-charges rest on assumptions based on priors.
Godspell’s “I don’t know, and neither do you” position is a very appropriate response to both.
Thests believe in naturalism and their actions prove it. In a country where 90% of the people believe in a divine power or Creator Being, the death tolls due to earthquakes are tamed not by prayer, but by building codes. If a volcano is suspected to be about to blow, they do not go to their church, but follow the evacuation route. When a hurricane is headed inland, as many as possible move out of the way, instead of gathering in church where the faith of a mustard seed could save them all.
In the search for answers, humans certainly did try to figure the gods. Mark Antony watched the flight of birds to divine the divine. The Judean elite understood that the paths of stars did not tell their fate as they did for other peoples, but that fate rested with YHWH. All sorts of people searching for answers as best they know how.
If you call the Flood a miracle or the destruction of Sodom a miracle you are simply acknowledging that someone’s mythology has become reality somehow. At that point, you are the miracle.
When we sugar coat the truth on these matters we become a part of the problem. “Hey, I don’t know whether a Flood happened. Some people can heal the blind with their spittle.” Then we can sit back and watch the “extremist” Christians explain why Gog and Magog is Iran and Russia, and the country called Israel can push Palestinians off the land YHWH promised them 3000 years ago.
This is the same thing we (including the atheist four horsemen) call out moderate Muslims for. Why are they not stopping the underage marriage over there? Why can they not stop the violent Jihadists?
I don’t have all the answers. But I do see danger in sidestepping those who ask, “Could the Flood have happened?” No. The Bible Flood clearly did not happen. No. Supernatural Beings are not interested in the sexual positions favored in California. No. No one promised that little strip of land (or Nile to the Euphrates) to a chosen race of people.
Hi FMV –
Thanks for the thoughts. I think we can agree that actions grounded in false or poorly justified assumptions are generally not a good idea.
Let’s distinguish a descriptive epistemological position from any prescriptions based there upon. And let’s also distinguish probabilistic claims from categorical assertions of existence.
If I were asked by someone to answer the question “Do you, like me, believe there is a real Flying Spaghetti Monster?”:
– In the probabilistic and practical sense, I would say “No, that’s extremely unlikely”.
– In a deeply and definitively categorical or epistemological sense, I would say, “I don’t think so, but I don’t definitively know, and neither do you.”
If someone were to then take this agnostic epistemology as license to base their life on the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I’d say that’s, at the very least, a non sequitor fallacy.
This post is: do you believe in miracles. Miracles as in Biblical Floods and Dying and Rising Son of God that goes to the Underworld. These are not unexplained happenings. These are fictions that have become foundational beliefs. This is not about the epistemology. This is about intentional ignorance in order to find Deepak solutions to life.
I can respect “I cannot KNOW their is not a god.” I consider myself a (7.0 – 1/infinity) on the Dawkins scale because of that. A 6.9 is a tip of the hat for fundies, imho. (It COULD be that Iran is Gog and Russia is Magog and our missiles are judgment by YHWH.)
For some, there is only ONE book that they need. Whether that is the Holy Bible written in Shakespearean English translated from Latin from Greek from Hebrew from Greek from Hebrew from Aramaic from Hebrew or its the Quran that came into being as Arabic came into being, that one book has implications.
Again, people let theists off the hook when they use epistemology as well. Theists have their personal undefined God that no one can deny as long as its personal. Yet they tie it to the God of the Bible. The bible has implications. It has a Genocidal God as the main character of its fictional stories.
I really want to say its all right. Believe what you want to believe and it will be all right. I guess that is akin to postmodernism. But false beliefs are at the basis of the confusion in the world today. Atheists and fundies alike refuse to inoculate their babies from measles at the same time that the Singularity is drawing near. Will we listen to Reason when its based on data? Or will we fight for our Faith?
There is no hook. Beliefs not based on factual reality (which everyone has, without exception) can be neither proven nor disproven. When theists say they are proven real, I say bosh. When atheists say they are proven false in their entirety, I say the same. I don’t believe in literal miracles, but the whole subject is far too nebulous to have an argument about. We know things happen that science can’t explain, and we can consider those miracles if we wish–until an explanation is found.
Atheists–not all, but many–continually treat the pseudo-scholarship of Mytherism as if it was based on objective reality, when in fact it’s a batty half-assed conspiracy theory, based on willful misreadings of ancient sources, motivated by dislike of Christianity. When scholars (often atheists themselves) call them on their errors, or flat-out untruths, they start throwing out accusations of crypto-theism, and repeat the tired old saw about Flying Spaghetti Monsters (as if there aren’t far stranger creatures than that in our oceans right now).
Again, I find basically the same fallacies and dysfunctions at work in both extreme theism and extreme atheism, and I laugh equally at both. Because both to me represent the mortal sin of stupidity. Both are over-literal, both lack respect for the beliefs of others, both are afraid to really think. Because to think means opening yourself up to the very real possibility you might be wrong. And on the subject of God, I see no reason to assume anyone is right.
Bart J. Ehrman is now suddenly open to some version of God again. Why? Because he’s a human being, and we are always wrestling with ideas, and ideas are not real. Ideas are all, without exception, Flying Spaghetti Monsters. Some of them fly longer than others, but probably they all come crashing to the ground, sooner or later. Pass the grated cheese. 🙂
FocusMyView said
This post is: do you believe in miracles. Miracles as in Biblical Floods and Dying and Rising Son of God that goes to the Underworld. These are not unexplained happenings. These are fictions
Do you think miracles such as these did not happen because:
A) miracles are improbable, or
B) miracles are impossible?
I think I am not 100% sure at all times which is which.
“Remove this dead man’s heart, then put it in this living man’s chest, to keep him alive.”
“That’s impossible!”
Some time passes, and it’s improbable–a matter of vague speculation, but unproven, impracticable. Some more time passes, it’s possible, but nobody’s done it yet. And now it’s done about 2,000 times a year, on average.
Arthur C. Clarke said sufficiently advanced technology would appear to be magic to those unable to understand it. Imagine trying to explain your cellphone to somebody living a hundred years ago. (Fifty years ago, you could have said “Computers” and they’d nod sagely, pretending to know what you meant.)
This is a matter of technology, which isn’t what religious people are talking about when they say miracle. If we know how something is done (or at least somebody does, I have no idea how my cellphone works, nor will I ever), then we may use the word ‘miracle’ but we don’t mean it in the same sense as a religious miracle, which is something nobody can ever explain, except by invoking supernatural powers. There is some founding intelligence of the cosmos that is in charge of all the rules governing reality, and can break them at will, if it so desires. Can we ever know if this is the case or not? Improbable.
Are there more likely explanations for people believing Jesus rose from the dead than that he actually did so? Unquestionably. But in saying that, we have proven nothing. There are not one, not two, but innumerable possible scenarios for how that came to pass. (Muhammad said Jesus didn’t die at all–it was somebody else on the cross–no I don’t know why he thought that, though I can make guesses.)
Atheists who wish to not question this or that part of the story, but to insist the story is entirely fiction, concoct their own miracle–in the form of a conspiracy theory. (A secular sort of miracle, in which secrets are easy to keep, and nobody ever asks any inconvenient questions.) Somebody made up Jesus out of borrowed bits and pieces, and in three hundred years, almost everybody in the Roman world believed he was real, increasingly worshiped him as God, and there is no record of anybody ever questioning his existence, even if they thought the beliefs about him were stupid. If that ain’t a miracle, I don’t know what is. Can the people floating this scenario come up with any evidence it happened? No. Can they point to documented events that resemble this? No. Do they back down one inch from their claims? No. Because they want to go on believing it, and they want everybody else to believe it too. Ironies abound.
What Jesus seems to have believed was that if someone had absolute perfect faith, he/she could do anything (he also seems to have thought it was possible for someone to have greater faith than he himself did–he was well aware of the fact that he had doubts sometimes).
Lots of people who aren’t religious at all have this same positive thinking mantra–just know you can do it, and it’ll be done. It’s a focusing technique, and sometime it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, the retort is that you didn’t believe enough. No arguing with that, particularly since we all know that it’s hard to believe without any reservations or doubts at all. The basic idea is so rooted in our culture, it exists outside conventional religion entirely, would continue without it. Ya gotta believe. With faith, all things are possible.
Not for me, they ain’t. But I’ll work on it. 😉
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