The Tension of Faith

Actually, no. You didn't quote enough. Here's the quote again, this time with more history that includes what you said that I was responding to: You can see from this longer quote that you were talking about evidence of miracles specifically, not evidence in general, and that's what I was responding to.For some reason you reintroduce miracles into the discussion in the last sentence of the paragraph: I'll know miracles are real when there's evidence that miracles are real. Things that are true about the real world are established using the scientific method, so you need evidence of miracles rather than stories about eyewitnesses who claimed they saw miracles. And the reason I mention the scientific method in the religion threads is because you believe your faith is supported by evidence, and evidence is studied using the scientific method.One big red flag raised by your views is that you only accept Christian miracles. You discount miracles from all other religions.Using a definition of faith that doesn't include evidence, accepting miracles as an article of faith seems fine.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Fix garbled last sentence.

I don't think anyone thought you or Modulous was saying that. Tangle has already addressed this, but I'll add a bit more. A propagandist writes his lies (the Trump era provides us a cornucopia of examples of propagandist lies) with the intent of having them believed, but I don't think we would call the lies' evidence of anything. Someone else repeats the lies, fully and honestly believing them true, but we would not call repeating the lies evidence of anything.Why isn't it enough to have faith that the miracles really happened? Why do you also need to believe there is evidence?--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Modulous was actually saying something different. This is from his Message 812: Modulous is arguing that the existence of the Gospel of John increases the probability of the miracles described therein, and that even if the values of those probabilities happened to be very low, they're still greater than zero. Paul's message has survived for religious reasons and not as a result of historical analysis. Why do the myths of religion, if myths they be, have to be associated with dishonesty? Where man's yearning for understanding his place and purpose in the universe are involved, hope and yearning win out over facts for many people. Indeterminable, and since the messengers are people, a species not known for perfection, not necessarily the most relevant factor.--Percy

I think you and Modulous might diverge on the point about "knowing" that the miracles are real. Modulous was working with probabilities. But on the important point you and Modulous are in agreement, that the Gospel accounts represent evidence of miracles.I of course don't agree. Things that happen in the real world leave evidence behind, and the gospel accounts contain not evidence of miracles but stories about people witnessing miracles. True evidence is subject to analysis using the scientific method, and no evidence of that sort is available in the gospels. My message to you would be to have faith in the truth of the gospel accounts.--Percy

Including the part of my quote that you left out makes it clear that I was talking about evidence of miracles: Concerning miracles, a supposed physical phenomena, I don't see how hearsay accounts of eyewitnesses is amenable to any scientific analysis. If you want people like me to accept miracles as real world phenomena then we're going to need real world evidence. Right now the evidence for miracles seems to be of the same quality as the evidence for leprechauns, Santa Claus and Bilbo Baggins. The details of where and how you place your faith is your personal decision. If your decision is to have faith in the historical veracity of the gospel accounts then I endorse your right to your faith. But if your decision is that your faith is backed by evidence that say things about the real world (as opposed to the spiritual world) then such evidence has standard means of evaluation, beginning with the scientific method.--Percy

We may be talking at cross purposes. In the paragraph you were responding to I was talking about the gospels as evidence of miracles, not the gospels as history. I set the context right at the beginning of my paragraph when I said, "Concerning miracles..." When I mentioned evidence about the real world and the scientific method I was returning to the context of miracles and wasn't talking about historical accounts. I don't think the scientific method has much to do with history, for example, whether Jesus asked the servants to fill the jars with water. The scientific method is much more appropriate for examining the scientific claims you want to make for the gospels, primarily that physical phenomena know as miracles exist and have happened, for example, that Jesus turned the water into wine.--Percy

I don't think I have any good answers for you. From a scientific perspective, theoretically miracles should not exist, and from an experimental/observational standpoint they've never been observed. 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 concerning the miracles of religion, I think you and GDR believe they're real phenomena. Given that science has no answers for a claimed phenomena for which there is no theoretical, experimental or scientifically observable/detectable evidence, there are a couple avenues science could take in forming an opinion.One could be that given the lack of theoretical support and physical evidence that science cannot take a position. Miracles might exist, they might not.Another avenue, and the one that I've taken, is that given that miracles are a violation of the natural laws of the universe, i.e., they're supernatural, they cannot exist as part of natural reality. That's because if miracles did exist as part of natural reality then they'd just be another natural phenomenon and therefore not miraculous.I guess it all comes down to whether you have faith that the supernatural exists, and faith that it's been observed many times.--Percy

I think that if you want to view miracles as historical evidence of supernatural events that there is little I could do to talk you out of it, which I don't want to do because you go on to say: If I interpret you correctly, it's a matter of faith for you. It's between you and your God and not something I should be inserting myself into. I just yesterday said pretty much the same thing to Faith, though I took more words to say it.--Percy

It doesn't make much sense to me either, but GDR's view, I think, is that the supernatural takes place in the natural world. Obviously I don't accept this view, describing a view much like your own to Faith in my Message 1026, but GDR says, I think, that he accepts on faith that the gospels represent evidence of miracles, and I'm not going to argue with faith. My dispute is with claims of real evidence where none exists.--Percy

You can't complain about unfair treatment here when you continually rip entire threads of people. The people you're discussing with are not the topic. Stick to the topic.I'm busy tonight (except for this brief check) and part of tomorrow, I'll answer your last post when I can.--Percy

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. No I don't. I'm not researching miracles personally. I'd be perfectly fine with reading a popularization of the scientific report issued by the team of scientists studying miracles. This is the "50 million Frenchmen can't be wrong" fallacy yet again. 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? 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 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. You've never given a good answer as to why your holy books are superior to other religion's holy books. This is too often your resort, denigrating people you disagree with. We don't believe that Napoleon and Genghis Khan and Buddha were real people because "reasonable honest people have said so," whose reasonability and honesty is often impossible to judge in the absence of corroboration. The evidence for Buddha isn't so good, about as good as the evidence for Jesus. The evidence for Genghis Khan is indisputable. His campaigns and empire left behind a great deal of written and physical evidence. Much of the written evidence is in Chinese. The evidence for Napoleon is even more indisputable. 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. This is a very credulous thing for you to say. 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. People who have strong evidence for their position don't need to unilaterally exclude other sources of evidence.--Percy

No, you should discuss with him, and everyone else, rationally and dispassionately. Oughtn't I now? In a post that is addressed to the thread at large I'm supposed to recognize it's actually addressed to Jar? Is nothing ever your fault? If you muster no arguments for how he isn't making sense, how would anyone know? There you go with more unsubstantiated allegations. Why not just stick to the topic?--Percy

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:

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A true miracle would, by definition, be a non-natural phenomenon, leading many rational and scientific thinkers to dismiss them as physically impossible (that is, requiring violation of established laws of physics within their domain of validity) or impossible to confirm by their nature (because all possible physical mechanisms can never be ruled out). The former position is expressed for instance by Thomas Jefferson and the latter by David Hume. Theologians typically say that, with divine providence, God regularly works through nature yet, as a creator, is free to work without, above, or against it as well. The possibility and probability of miracles are then equal to the possibility and probability of the existence of God.

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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

Dark matter and dark energy are very much inside "the bounds of our physical universe," or to put in terms of a song from a 1939 film, they are "morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably" a genuine part of our universe.Dark matter interacts with other matter through gravity. Theoretical indications are that dark matter should occasionally interact with normal matter, but this has not yet been experimentally verified (see, for example, The World's Most Sensitive Dark Matter Detector Is Now Up and Running).Dark energy is just a name for the effect causing our universe to expand, but we don't know what it actually is yet. However, since it is having so dramatic an effect on our universe, it is definitely a part of it.--Percy

Whether you're doing it as a ploy or not, it is almost never true, and isn't fair to the people you're discussing with because it causes them to believe discussion is over and not reply, only later to see you raise the exact same arguments again, and in a way that pretends the previous objections had never been raised.Hold up your right hand, put your left hand on the King James Bible, and repeat after me: "I will no longer unilaterally declare an end to discussion, no matter what inner impulses I must battle." And yet you find something more to say anyway.By the way, in my last post I did not say you were "misjudging the evidence." I said that your faith in your ability to tell the supernatural from the natural or the real from the fictional is misplaced. You have no such superpower, plus the existence of the supernatural has not been established. You know this in the same way that devout adherents of other religions know that their religion is the only true religion. Whatever this "objective value" is that you think Christianity possesses, Christianity is not the yardstick by which all other religions are judged. Your belief in Christianity as the "one true religion" is something you accept on faith, though to be honest the way you express it it comes across more as a unfounded conceit.--Percy