The "science" of Miracles

Nicely summarized. And a major concession from your previous insistence that repeatability was required. Thanks for your honesty.

Witness testimony is evidence. But are stories about witness testimony evidence? In my opinion, that is the easiest criticism to level at claims of "tons of witnesses" evidence. Very little of the Bible is a witnessed account of anything or even purports to be such an account.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I don't intend to add any commentary to my statement. Your words speak for themselves.

Perhaps we do not have tools to study the supernatural. But the question here seems to be simply whether we can identify the supernatural. Can we determine which phenomena are simply not within our capacity to investigate?I agree that even the more simplified question is difficult to answer. But perhaps it is not impossible at least for some cases.

I don't think this is a useful definition. Scientific laws are merely descriptive, and many of them are not linked to any ultimate cause. For 200 years after Newton formulated the law of universal gravitation, the actual mechanism for gravity was a complete mystery; in short inexplicable. Should attraction at a distance have been characterized as a miracle during that time? Now we have accepted that gravity is an effect generated by the warping of space by mass, but is that warping miraculous? Why should mass or energy distort the geometry of space-time?For lots of science, it is accepted on faith that things we have no mechanism for actually do have a natural cause even when we are absolutely clueless regarding what that cause is. We can only verify after we successfully explain them to some arbitrary degree that such things are explicable.If magic actually worked and was repeatable, would an explanation that saying phrase x and making gesture y creates an effect by sufficient to make the magic not miraculous?In short, we cannot explain the miraculous. But often we cannot even explain the mundane. Hence inexplicability is insufficient to categorize the two.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I don't care where it came from. The definition has some rather obvious flaws in it.
Dictionaries have their limits. The problem is that we don't know everything. I tried to demonstrate that with an example or two, but that does not seem to have made the slightest impression. The moon orbiting the earth was never a miracle no matter what we thought back when.

What I said about the definition was that it was useless and what I mean is that consulting those definitions in the dictionary will not advance the discussion here in any way. The problem is that phenomena can fit the dictionary definition and yet we will all agree that those phenomena are not miracles.And I have explained in detail why I think that is the case. To summarize, even when things cannot be explained at the time by the knowledge of the day, we still do not call those things miracles as long as we are willing to speculate that science is merely not currently advanced enough.The explanations I am giving here are not new. They are in my previous posts. Your statement that I am not explaining why the dictionary is unhelpful is just plain wrong.

Who are you referring to as "we". Mankind? Folks born in the 20th century? Folks born after the 17th century?

Science does not require all of that stuff and it does not require scientists.
Observations are required, but often the data used in science is stuff that anyone can see with the naked eye.For something like a floating human body in an auditorium, I believe an investigation to rule out natural causes could be conducted without anything more than observations, a couple of paper clips, some sticks, and some paper to take notes on.For a floating bridge, a bit more is requires because of the scale of the problem, but it is also the case because of the forces required, the natural candidates for such an event are extremely limited. But let's not make science and the scientific method anything more than what they are. One of your other posts contains an excellent description of the scientific method. It's not about getting a bunch of folks in lab smocks to participate.

Working on the bleeding edge of science may require sophisticated tools. Determining whether there is a natural explanation for what appears to be a man floating in the middle of the room requires substantially less sophistication. I suspect that you can leave the LIGO's Interferometer at home for that task.The basics behind the scientific method haven't changed all that much since Galileo's day. You are right. We are going to disagree on this one.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Let's say we did do that. Isn't that just equivocating? Supposedly the word miracle has some meaning and isn't just "new scientific terminology." Absent some reason to tolerate equivocation, then no we wouldn't use "miracle" as scientific terminology.

The paradigm of science is that all caused events have a natural cause. By definition that would mean that there are no such things as miracles. Now scientists cannot prove that there are no miracles. But science does have an impressive track record of uncovering causes so that it is not merely on faith that scientist assume that things they cannot currently understand will turn out to have a natural cause.It is not a coincidence that we don't find floating objects in a situation where the floating cannot be explained by the forces we already know to exist in nature. That's why I suggested that a couple of folks with ordinary tools and unlimited access could figure out whether a floating man was a miracle or not. By and large, the accounts we have for miracles of that type all exist in texts whose accuracy is impossible to verify.So what should we make of the word 'miracle' then? Is a destitute single mom winning the lottery a miracle? Is a computer a modern miracle of science? Is remission of cancer a miracle? Yes, those things all fit one of the dictionary definitions of the word, but none of those things are miracles in the strict sense that this discussion should be about. If I am wrong about that, let me know because then I will understand that the topic is not one I am interested in.

Scientist have a firm idea about what would be called a miracle. The issue is that they never encounter such things in their work.Subjectivity is not the issue. Lots of things we deal with in life are subjective. Those things are not to be avoided.

It should not be about that. The answer as to whether it is a miracle or not is not subjective in that way. The believers would be wrong if they attributed UFOs to magic.But if they believe it is alien technology, then they are not calling it a miracle anyway. So your comment would not seem to make sense.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.