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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: The Tension of Faith | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ringo Member (Idle past 439 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
Phat writes:
There can be evidence that an unexplained event happened. There can not be evidence that it was a miracle.
Is a given event declared a miracle by consensus or strictly by evidence?
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Tangle Member Posts: 9510 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Jar writes: I will tell you I don't know if wine can be turned into blood. You know absolutely for sure that wine can't be changed into blood by someone talking at it. You know that there is no possible mechanism for it. You know it to be utterly impossible.
I know I don't know how to do it but if there was evidence that it happened my position would be "It happened but I don't know how!" not "It's a miracle." That's because you know that miracles don't happen. It would seem like a magic trick or a fraud or somesuch. But if all of a sudden ever chalice in the land turned into blood and there was no other possible explanation you'd be left with the miracle.
Sorry but you have not presented any reason to think it a miracle other then you believe it is impossible. It would be a miracle because what has happened is impossible.Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona "Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.
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jar Member (Idle past 421 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
Tangle writes: That's because you know that miracles don't happen. It would seem like a magic trick or a fraud or somesuch. But if all of a sudden ever chalice in the land turned into blood and there was no other possible explanation you'd be left with the miracle. No, I would be left with an unexplained event. You might be left with a miracle but that does not mean I would be left with a miracle.
Tangle writes: It would be a miracle because what has happened is impossible. Too funny. No, if it happened then it is certainly not impossible.
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Phat Member Posts: 18338 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 1.0 |
It would be a miracle because what has happened is impossible. So in your mind, the only thing that is really possible is something that has a natural explanation. Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all. —RC Sproul "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." —Mark Twain " ~"If that's not sufficient for you go soak your head."~Faith Paul was probably SO soaked in prayer nobody else has ever equaled him.~Faith
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Tangle Member Posts: 9510 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
jar writes: Too funny. This has become your tell.
No, if it happened then it is certainly not impossible. If the impossible happens we call it a miracle. As you know.Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona "Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.
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jar Member (Idle past 421 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
Tangle writes: If the impossible happens we call it a miracle. As you know. Still funny. If it happened it is not impossible. YOU can call it a miracle if you want but I still see nothing that shows it was a miracle. But whatever keeps you happy.
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jar Member (Idle past 421 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
Phat writes: So in your mind, the only thing that is really possible is something that has a natural explanation. Phat if it happens in the real world then it is certainly possible. We may not be able to explain it; we may believe it is a miracle, but that does not make it a miracle. Miracles involve some supernatural intervention but I cannot think of anyway any supernatural intervention could be seen, determined or evidenced.
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Phat Member Posts: 18338 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 1.0 |
But what if the supernatural agent wanted to be seen?
Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all. —RC Sproul "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." —Mark Twain " ~"If that's not sufficient for you go soak your head."~Faith Paul was probably SO soaked in prayer nobody else has ever equaled him.~Faith
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Tangle Member Posts: 9510 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
ringo writes: Miracles involve some supernatural intervention but I cannot think of anyway any supernatural intervention could be seen, determined or evidenced. Your failure of imagination is not relevant. A supernatural intervention - what you agree would be a miracle - must involve intervention in the natural world. Any supernatural intervention would create an observable event. A child could tell that a miracle is an event not explicable by natural or scientific laws and could give you an example of a dozen possibilities in a minute. But you're fully aware of all this so I guess that's all for now.Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona "Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.
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jar Member (Idle past 421 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
Phat writes: But what if the supernatural agent wanted to be seen? Then I think the supernatural agent has a problem. If it can be seen and tested what would show it is supernatural?
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jar Member (Idle past 421 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
Tangle writes: A supernatural intervention - what you agree would be a miracle - must involve intervention in the natural world. Any supernatural intervention would create an observable event. A child could tell that a miracle is an event not explicable by natural or scientific laws and could give you an example of a dozen possibilities in a minute. Fortunately I grew up and am no longer a child. Yes, a child could do that; they are still children. But if something can be shown to have happened then it is not impossible.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I agree, you are right, I just reacted with a sort of blurt and didn't give enough information to make it clear what I had in mind. I was simply reacting to jar. And no I won't discuss such irrelevant nonsense with him..
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1471 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Percy writes: From a scientific perspective, theoretically miracles should not exist, and from an experimental/observational standpoint they've never been observed.
They've been observed and described by hundreds, thousands, but the reports of those observations are simply denied by you on the basis of your own prejudice and nothing else. I was speaking, as I said, "From a scientific perspective..." If you want to have faith that miracles are real then that's fine, but from a scientific perspective they have no more evidence than leprechauns, Santa Claus, and Bilbo Baggins. Observation is observation and there is no way to test a miracle experimentally since it is a one-time event in the past, so if you refuse to believe the reported observations of others you've made it impossible to believe miracles occur even when they do actually occur.
...you simply will never believe in miracles though millions of others have seen them. This is the "50 million Frenchmen can't be wrong" fallacy yet again. No it is not. It is a simple if-then proposition. The millions seeing them are the premise -- they SAW them, it's not hypothetical, and if this was the case you would have no way to know it because you refuse to trust witness reports.
...but the supernatural is real and those who consider it real know quite well how to tell the difference. Now there's a very interesting unsupported claim. Just how does one tell when one is witnessing the supernatural and tell that it is real? The same way you can tell a dream from the room you wake up in.
Miracles seem to be the realm of fantasy (I'm not sure whether to classify fantasy and the supernatural as separate things or as the same thing) and religion. Fantasy, by definition not part of reality, is not amenable to scientific study.
But it is fantasy only in your own fantasies. You misunderstand, and you quoted too little of what I said. Miracles are the realm of fantasy and religion, which are two different things. Miracles in fantasy works of fiction are just fantasies, as I'm sure you'll agree. Where you and I disagree is about the miraculous claims of religion. I have no idea what the point of this distinction is supposed to be.
Also, Christians don't use the term "religion" as you do,... I define the term "religion" in the same way you do, it's just that you refuse to acknowledge that flim flam is a big part of religion. If that's not true then explain Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert, Oral Roberts, Peter Popoff and Robert Tilton among many, many, many others. Religion is big industry. Fake religion is big industry, genuine Christianity is not, and there are Christians galore who call those guys fakes and charlatans.
We DO believe the accounts of the Bible as records of actual historical events, and I'd say there's plenty of good reason for that, but convincing you doesn't seem to be a possibility. You've never given a good answer as to why your holy books are superior to other religion's holy books. The differences are enormous and any literate person ought to be able to see it with some careful reading, but if you can't even tell genuine history from fiction, the style of an honest reporter from a fantasy writer, I have to give up. No, you believe in the historicity of Napolean and Khan and anybody else because you believe the written reports so apparentlly you assume the reports are honest reports. But since you deny such an obvious point I'm going to drop that one too.
That's a lot to claim to know about the supernatural and how it interacts with the real world. Without a careful scientific study, there's no way for you to know this. One knows the supernatural by experience and by reports of trustworthy witnesses and by the revelation of God. But there's no point in trying to argue with you about that either.
The only such thing I've ever seen was not a miracle, but the appearance of an apparition or "ghost" but I didn't need to have that experience to know they can occur because I'm one of those who believe the many others who have described such things, people I know to be reasonable and honest and able to distinguish the products of their own mind from external realities. This is a very credulous thing for you to say. Well, I too can tell the difference, and I think you could too if you weren't too confused by your own assumptions. Another topic to drop here.
In fact perhaps what you really need is a little more faith in your fellow man rather than this weird fantastical version of "faith" you think "religious" people have. We have a pretty good idea of the reliability of people as eyewitnesses, and the conclusion is that they're damn poor at it. What we think we know about reality is learned through study, observation, experiment, and replication, all missing from religion. If the supernatural can manifest itself in the real world, then it can be studied. No it cannot unless it can be required to perform on cue and it cannot. There is no way to study something that occurs without warning and can't be repeated on command. And you are talking completely abstractly about eyewitnesses. If someone you know well and trust tells you about an experience of the supernatural, or you have one yourself, that could be a test of your stubborn theories about these things, but I'm not holding my breath. Another topic bit the dust.
(I'm speaking only of Christians in all this, please don't drag us off into all the other religions which are not really comparable.) People who have strong evidence for their position don't need to unilaterally exclude other sources of evidence. Sorry, there is no comparison between Christianity and any other religion. Christianity is God's own revelation to the human race, other religions are human observations of supernatural things or the inventions of demons. But there's no point in arguing this either with someone whose mind is utterly closed to the evidence there is for such things. Time to call it quits on this. Maybe Mod has more energy to continue it, I don't. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Percy Member Posts: 22499 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9
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Faith writes: Time to call it quits on this. Maybe Mod has more energy to continue it, I don't. Up to you, but I don't believe you, because of your long history of using this as a ploy to forestall or at least minimize responses. I can't believe you're pulling this yet again. Are you operating under some delusion that despite all your time here we still haven't learned your modus operandi? This is from the Wikipedia article on Miracles. The first opinion pretty much sums up my own and was, unbeknownst to me, held by Thomas Jefferson. The second opinion, the one advanced by David Hume, seems closer to Modulous's opinion. The third opinion, that of theologians, I also agree with, that the probability of miracles is the same as that of God:
quote: I think your faith in eyewitnesses to miracles is misplaced. First, you don't really have millions of eyewitnesses to miracles, just lots of stories about people seeing miracles, and anyway, the closer you get to methodical approaches to truth the more unreliable eyewitnesses are discovered to be. Second, miracles never leave evidence behind that can be examined by us today, always being that special class of event that either took place long ago or that was something seen but left no physical evidence behind. Third, addressing your claim of the unpredictable nature of miracles that are nonetheless seen by millions, given how many people are taking images and videos everywhere all the time, how is it that just by chance not a single miracle has yet been captured electronically? My bet is that no miracle ever will. I also think your faith in your ability to tell the supernatural from the natural or the real from the fictional is misplaced. I also think your belief in the superiority of Christianity over all other religions is misplaced and is merely a simple conceit possessed by many devout adherents of many different religions. --Percy
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PaulK Member Posts: 17827 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: It’s the view that jar has been putting forward. The one that Faith can’t understand.
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