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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