The "science" of Miracles

You can dick around as long as you like with definitions, semantics and avoidance tactics but we both know that to be a miracle supernatual intervention is necessary and that breaks the laws of nature.

You've plucked a definition that includes the word 'attributed' and latched onto it like a dying man. We both know that we're talking about supernatural intervention - if it's not supernatural intervention or you just think it is, it's not what we're discussing.This is what the entire world thinks is a miracle and what I'm talking about.

quote:

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an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs eg the healing miracles described in the Gospels

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You're still grasping at definitional straws. We all know what a miracle is, it's a supernatural intervention, it breaks natural/scientific laws.Now perhaps you'll deal with flying brigdes and moving mountains.

Nearly. I'm saying that we know what a miracle is, or would be - equivocation apart - and should one occur in a way we can test to destruction, science would be forced to accept it.I'm trying to get beyond the silly definitional tactics to the scientific one - what kind of evidence would it take for science to throw its hands in the air and say ok, not only is this unexplained but it's also inexplicable? Why would the miraculous be non-susceptible to scientific enquiry?Excuses and semantics don't work, we've got detailed and specific evidence of god moving a bridge in a way that defies all our knowledge. It's testable, repeatable and confirmed by many methods. It's as solid as the ToE, more so in fact because it's all happening real time under scientific conditions.

Yes Phat, miracles are hypothetical :-)

I've given you access to anything you could unreasonably need. What's you're problem?

Your lack of imagination is not particularly relevant or even needed. I've provided the evidence, why is it inadequate? To me it seems like there's more evidence than for many scientific ideas, it's objective, measureable, repeatable and extensive.You're objection seems to be the conclusion, not the evidence. That's not scoentific.

Yes, but we've both given hypothetical examples of things that are not just stuff we don't understand yet because they're at the boundaries of our knowledge - dark energy being an obvious example - but stuff that we have a thorough understanding of; flying bridges, moving mountains and a wine turning into blood. If such things happened routinely our science would stop explaing reality around us. It would be suddenly useless.We are not in the stone age, we now thoroughly understand many parts of our physical world. If the mountain did reposition itself we would have to accept that the supernatural was now part of our natural world. We would know that our world was being influenced by forces beyond the natural. We are no longer ignorant of how things work.Why do we imagine that science is incapable of discriminating between the natural and the supernatural?

Yes we do. Healing the sick requires a miracle if it's done with a shaman's chant and on an amputee. If it's done by a doctor an aspirin and a patient with a head ache it doesn't. Causation not outcome. Some things are just dumb.

They sure would, they'd test it to death. But the question no one likes is what happens when it's proven beyond reasonable doubt that the event just wasn't natural? ringo just says it just can't happen. I agree with him, it never has and never will, but then all we've done is say miracles don't and can't exist. Yes. And science would be able to conclude that from the evidence. I agree that everything that happens in the natural world is natural. Wine is wine and blood is blood. The magic is in the causation. I understand and Jar says the same. My answer is also the same, personal credulity is not proof or explanation of anything. Many things in science are established with indirect evidence. The ToE was established that way. The pieces form a picture. In this case it would be the God theory.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Yeh, we've agreed that several times. You're having a hard time thinking hypothetically. If we had all the evidence I've spoken of in bridge and mountain moving, regrown limbs and wine and blood stuff it would be difficult to arrive at any other conclusion. There's no need to apologise, miracles haven't ever happened and they never will. Like I've said many times.

Science would also say that it is unexplained.That's how we know it's miraculous - we're dealing with things within our knowledge, basic, simple things, yet these things are not behaving naturally.We'd say that these events are not only unexplained but are also inexplicable.

I'm saying that science would be forced to say that based on the evidence. Denying evidence is not scientific.You remember the ideal of following the evidence no matter where it leads? A principle much regurgitated here. Well this is the test.

Yes. Yes Well here's the rub. We say that our theories are tentative but we don't actually mean so much so that they can be totally overturned by some large and obvious effect in our day to day world. We mean in the way that Newton's gravity was improved by Einstein - a marginal effect to our day-to-day lives. When talk of rabbits in the Cambrian we know it will never happen but if it did, it wouldn't be miraculaous, it would be a puzzle.But with your mountain and my bridge, gravity has been defied, not changed. The rest of the world works exactly the way it always has but a new force has been introduced - a very strong and local one. Something off the scale of anything ever seen before.So science would do everything it could to examine this new force, but would find nothing because the cause is super-natural. Something just stepped in and did it. 'An event not explicable by nature or scientific laws'. Causation is everything in a miracle - it's not what happened, it's how it happened.It would be non-scientific not to have a 'goddidit' hypothesis at that point. Tentativity says that we it would be bad science to exclude anything, regardless of likelyhood. We proceed on our discovered knowledge which tells us that miracles do not occur, but you can't exclude the black swan entirely. Particularly if a seemingly miraculous event like your mountain actually occurs.I'm interested in my opponents' responses to increasing amounts of evidence. They remain moot on the subject, simply saying that such things are impossible. This is uber-unscientific. A single rabbit in the Cambrian would be a puzzle, but thousands of proven out of place fossils would force a change of mind. Cherubs, interveiews with God, as many fully evidenced moving mountains and flying bridges as are needed are provided, but divine intervention must be ruled out. Why? I don't see why not, but we have to wait for these things before we can define and describe them. V=IxR wasn't discovered without real evidence.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

It must be groundhog day.