you can look at life one of two ways: 1. everything is a miracle. 2. nothing is a miracle. there is no middle ground. and let me save you the typing Stilton, yes, I know this because I know everything.
Whether supernatural events take place or not is subject to discussion. There are reports of "miracle" healings. Are the reports faithful, reliable accounts of what occurred? I don't know. And neither do you. This goes for biblical accounts and contemporary ones. The tendency within the scientific community is to assert that there must be some naturalistic explanation for what is unaccounted for, like a tumor being there one day and not there the next. To insist on a naturalistic explanation as the only plausible one means that you know to a certainty that supernatural phenomena do not take place. But you don't know that; you believe that because you choose to, despite reports to the contrary. I am acquainted with a couple of people who went to India several years ago and met a woman who lived in a village near Chennai. The local people said she had died and had come back to life after sufficient time that it was not reasonable to think she wasn't really dead. Dozens of people were witness to this "resurrection", and most of them, when the biblical God story was told to them, believed that God performed a miracle. Neither of us, not you and not I, knows The Truth in that situation. We can only speculate and choose to believe what we prefer. In the same area, there was a small lake that was very polluted. Dead fish. Horrific stench. But, unaccountably, the water became clear and clean. The stench went away. Nobody there knows why. But they believe that God performed a miracle. Did he? How would you know?
is the "big bang" and all that has developed from it not a miracle? in my mind, it is no less a miracle than god speaking the world into existence.
i wasn't aware until relatively recently that the term "The Big Bang Theory" ( not the TV show ) may have been meant to be a sarcastic jab, though the person who coined the term ( Fred Hoyle ) denied that.
do you know where you learned that from? I too heard that just recently, but I can't put my finger on just where. I wonder if we were watching the same show.
not at all. but for a blatant handball in 2002, we could easily have gone all the way. now Hungary even qualifying, much less winning, the WC - there you're a bit closer to a highly unlikely event, if not quite a miracle.
I would like to interject here, especially with the use of the term anything. This is either an incorrect understanding of the concept of "miracle," or what is really meant is not being articulated. If what is meant by the term "impossible" actually implies that which defies logic (i.e., breaking the laws of logic, logical impossibilities), then I would agree that no such miracle can occur. However, the concept of miracle, as described in biblical Christianity, is not defined in such a manner. I think C.S. Lewis once put it well, "I use the word miracle to mean an interference with Nature by supernatural power." We are now talking about breaking "natural laws" instead of laws of logic. If natural law can be described as naturally caused regularities, then a miracle can be described as a supernaturally-caused singularity (as Dr. Norman Geisler puts it). For example, someone rising from the dead does not violate any laws of logic, it simply goes against all observations in nature. This, then, is what a miracle can be defined as. In order to be able to state that miracles are "impossible" to occur in nature, one would have to disprove theism since, at least in Christianity, miracles are completely dependent upon the existence of a theistic God. For if a creator God exists, then the greatest miracle must have necessarily occurred at the very beginning: the act of creation. So, the argument goes right back to whether or not God exists. If not, then they are impossible to occur; but if so, then they very much are possible and, indeed, are actual since at the very least a miracle occurred with the act of creation.
i think your contention is that miracles do not occur because there is no agency that would make them occur. anybody with any foundation in reasoning would understand your statement, but it's not knowable.
My contention is that miracle is a word with little meaning outside the presupposition of god. As you noted above, they are really only known by reference. Do you know that dancing hippos in tutus don't exist?
no. of course not. but the distinction between dancing hippos and miracles is that there are phenomena that appear to be explained only by supernatural means. the dog and pony miracle healings on TV are probably 98.6% fake. but reports of miracle healings in Third World countries are much more credible, because that's what God used to do 2000 years ago, during the Apostolic age, according to Acts.
I don't get it...god withholds miracles in developed countries? I see all kinds of things that others might say are only explainable by supernatural phenomena that I doubt are. That stretching room at Disney World really flipped me out when I was six.
there are millions of Christians in developed countries to spread the good news of Jesus Christ. the point of miracles was to show God at his most expansive. the miracle of a transformed life should be enough to draw someone into a relationship with God. if you actually believe the Saul/Paul story, from the guy who was holding the cloaks of the Jews stoning Stephen, to the Damascus road experience, to the Areopagitica to his martyrdom in Rome, you have to say something happened to him. in Galatians, he tells his own tale. in Acts, Luke ( or whoever the writer is ) tells his tale. in India, there are Christians, but not in every village. pastors in India are mostly men who have day jobs and travel from small church to small church, from village to village. they go where there are already some Christians, for the purpose of equipping them to live the lives of disciples of Jesus. so, it's less common to see the kind of change that Saul/Paul went through in backwater places because there are relatively fewer Christians, and the Saul/Paul case is quite dramatic, though it should be more representative.
Actually, they could have written down accounts based upon whyt they saw heard and believed and still written fiction. But it doesn't really matter. The point is that someone must have invented large parts of the gospels. Whether it was the evangelists or someone else is beside the point. So what? Yes they claimed to write the truth, of course they did. But what does that tell us exactly? Only because someone claims something doesn't make it true, especially not when there's an obvious agenda. we wouldn't need a court system if that wasn't the case. Actually, while Luke (or rather the evangelist who wrote the gospel according to Luke) was most likely a follower of Paul, it is by no means clear that he actually knew the guy personally. And it's also rather strange that the accounts in Acts often times directly contradict what Paul wrote himself in his letters. Obviously either one of the authors lied or the author of acts didn't know what he was writing about. Great example, because this pretty much proves that a lot of the Bible was made up. How do we know? 1) We have absolutely no evidence for the historicity of any of the broad themes like the census or like Herod killing all newly borns. But things of this kind of magnitude would have left traces outside the Bible. 2) If you look at that census, the whole premise is flawed. Having to go to the place of your ancestors 1000 years back is simply impossible. First of all, who knows about his ancestors 1000 years back? And how could people have known back then without any kind of documentation? Also, 1000 years roughly equates to 40 generations....after that amount of time, your related to everybody...if all your ancestors were unrelated to each other, you'd have more than a trillion ancestors 1000 years back, so which one do you pick? Not to mention how pointless such an endeavor would be. It would bring the Roman economy to a standstill for months and wouldn't serve any purpose whatsoever. Plus, what about slaves? And why would Josef take his virgin wife with him, why didn't she go to the place of her ancestors? So if you look at all of that, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever from a historical point of view. 3) The most important fact is however that the two birth stories in the Bible completely contradict one another. So it's obvious that they're not trying to make a historical point, but a theological one: Jesus has to be born in Bethlehem according to prophecy if he is to be the messiah, but people knew that he was from Nazareth, so they made up stories as to how he was born. Stories that we now know are wrong as they completely contradict one another. The early Christians wouldn't have that knowledge though as they usually only had one scripture. Similarly, Jesus had to descend from David, therefore the convoluted family tree (again contradictory in the different gospels) and the story of the census. Although I still don't get how Josef being an ancestor of David would help Jesus in that regard, since his daddy was God himself...unless of course those who came up with this story didn't belief in that part of the story... 1) He didn't want to appear writing fiction. Big difference. 2) How do you arrive at the "good faith" part, knowing about the made up parts of the story? The one making them up certainly didn't act in good faith but against better knowledge. He might have had good intentions, but he lied non the less. 3) "Not that long after the fact" is rather relative. The oldest known gospel is that of Mark. Most experts agree that it was written in Rome, shortly before the year 70. So that makes it about 30-40 years after Jesus's death. That doesn't sound very long until you realize how the world looked like back then. This story went half around the known world for two generations, without modern means of communication. Apparently there were some older collections of Jesus's saying that are now lost, but the story of Jesus's life was transported orally. Ever played the telephone game for an entire generation? It's close compared to the 2000 years we're looking back at, but it's not as if these were recent events when they were written down. You really should read Bart Ehrman's latest book "Jesus, Interrupted" where he explains the historical critical method, and demonstrates what we can know with confidence about Jesus (like Jesus being from Nazareth, Jesus being killed/crucified, some of Jesus's sayings, Jesus being connected to John the Baptist in some form, etc.), where we can make educated guesses (e.g. early christian beliefs like that of Paul) and where we know the Bible is incorrect (e.g. the birth narrative). In the end, there's actually not all that much historical information in the Bible. So when people 2000 years from now dig up a Spiderman Comic, they should regard it as actual history, even if they don't buy the supernatural spidey-stuff? After all it takes place in a real historical place... No, there's more to history than simply accepting every historical claim. Like with sciences, there are all kinds of people working towards the same goal: increasing our knowledge. They do it with very different means, some go into the field and dig up artifacts, others go through all kinds of old writings, others explore folk tales, etc. It's like a big puzzle and when we get a picture in the end, stemming from all kinds of different sources, then we can make confident claims. Only having an ancient book, telling us some stuff isn't enough. A better analogy than Herodotus would be the Iliad. No historian would just accept the narrative as historical, neither the supernatural nor the natural stuff, as we don't have any evidence supporting it. And that in spite of the fact that we know that Troy existed, was destroyed in a war and we even discovered the Troy site thanks to descriptions in Homer's Iliad.
After Paul's conversion did Paul go directly to Jerusalem? Did the churches in Judea know Paul? Did Paul go to Athens alone? How many trips did Paul make to Jerusalem? Were the congregations Paul established made up of both Jews and gentiles? Acts gives different answers to these questions than do the letters of Paul.