A scientific device wouldn't pick up the divine essence of angels if they were perceived.

http://www.dump.com/tornadosurface/

This is how just knowing something about the sun undercuts the god of your imagination.

God’s wrath is depicted as flooding the earth, or causing earth quakes, fires, storms, dust bowls, famine, disease, hunger heartache and misery.

Do you realize that the plasma tornado in the video above is larger than our entire planet. In fact, it could roast several dozen planet earths.

A tsunami hits and kills a couple hundred thousand people, and we are over-awed with the power of it. Religious demagogues want to claim it as god’s wrath for not killing gays. God’s wrath? This little twitch of ocean on our tiny planet?

Look at that plasma tornado.

It could fully obliterate every trace of humanity on the planet. And THAT is nothing but a magnetic storm caused by the regular clockwork of the sun. A small-ish star indistinguishable in a gigantic cloud of similar stars, itself lost among the endless sea of galaxies which populate our neighborhood.

You think god’s wrath is terrible? Try getting on the wrong side of physics.

Ant:
How are you able to determine a miracle recorded in history did not happen?

Several ways. As in all things, we cannot say 100% certainty, but we are still dealing with confidence levels so high it may as well be 100% certainty. Much better than your odds of not winning the lottery, haha.

So how?

First, through demonstrable experiments, or comparison to reality.

Taking only walking on water, but realizing that these apply to all instances, what’s the claim? Jesus walked on water. This is implied to be a deep body of water, and not a mere puddle, and that he walked across the surface of that body of water without sinking as though it had the same supportive properties as land.

Empirical check: Can a man walk on water? I don’t have to do an experiment now, because I’ve been dealing with water my whole life and in every single instance I have ever observed and in every single instance which has ever been reported to me humans are unable to walk across the surface of water as though it were land. We sink beneath the surface.

Why is that? Because our tissues are more dense than water. There is a deep and fundamental reason why we can’t walk on water and it is a testable physical thing. The way to walk on water is to be so light so as not to break the surface tension, as is the case with so called water bugs, or to have a volume greater than your weight comparing like-units. This formula works because it finds your relative density to water. 1 unit of water in volume corresponds to 1 unit of water in mass. If your volume is larger than your mass in corresponding units, you are less dense and can therefore float. Although even in these instances some portion of the floating object is generally submerged so that too misses the image implied by “walking on water”.

So is it physically possible to walk on liquid water? No.

“Walking on water” does not fit with the physical realities of this world. The claim is invalidated demonstrably.

So what are the alternative explanations, if it is not a situation where a man physically walked on water?

The first, and the one true believers advocate is that Jesus performed a feat of magic and suspended the physical laws and that enabled him to walk on water as a demonstration of his supernatural magical powers.

Another alternative explanation is that Jesus rigged up some physical mechanism to allow him to fool onlookers into thinking he walked on water, but he was in fact walking on a jut of stone just under the water’s surface, or perhaps being a carpenter he built a ramp which he could walk out on the water and seem to stand on its surface.

Another alternative explanation is that the story of the event was blown out of proportion. Perhaps Jesus merely waded out into water, or stepped nimbly through sinking mud, avoiding losing his sandals, or perhaps jumped over a puddle and his followers told and re-told the story, embellishing it with each telling so that in the end their leader appeared to be more powerful, or to have performed some magical feat, rather than the ordinary less than news-worthy thing he actually did.

Another alternative explanation is that the story is a complete fabrication of Jesus’ followers who sought to build a supernatural event for believers to get behind and upon which they could establish Jesus as being more than a mere man.

How do we analyze these alternative explanations? By comparing what we know of the world with what is reported in the story.

Have we ever seen anything remotely resembling magical powers? No.
Have we seen people perform illusions to fool onlookers? Yes.
Have we seen people exaggerate stories? Yes.
Have we seen people lie? Yes.

Seeing as there have never been any credible, verifiable instances of magical powers, yet thousands, millions of instances of the other alternatives the obvious conclusion is that it was one of the three “yes” alternatives.

This can also be analyzed categorically. We group things in accordance to their shared characteristics. Grouping all things which share common characteristics and leaving out those things which do not share those characteristics. This is how we can separate things into identifiable groups and it works well with everything we’ve tried it on so far: biology, chemistry, physical law, mathematics, linguistics etc…

What we have in the case of “Jesus walked on water” is a claim.

It shares characteristics with other stories with which it can be grouped. It is set in a historical period, true, but it also makes claims of magical and fantastical events, so that separates this claim out from “history” and into “Fiction”, along with the thousands of other stories in fiction which make similar claims of characters performing magical feats, unsubstantiated by record, evidence, and in conflict with empirical demonstration. The fact that this claim takes place in some identifiable historical context gives it no more credence than “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire hunter.”

So, what do we know?
Humans cannot walk on liquid water.
No human has ever demonstrated magical abilities, despite urgent desire to perform magical feats.
Humans do lie.
Humans do desire power.
Humans do perform illusions.
Books can contain falsehoods, and they can be misleading.

So, we don’t need to chase this rabbit any further at this point. Somebody lied and wrote it down in a book.

There is no justification for treating this claim more seriously than spiderman clinging to walls

Ant:

Historians study past events that can not be repeated.

The fact that historical events cannot be viewed in real time is no impediment to determining their veracity. A big clue is if, in a historical account, something happens which cannot happen. Such as walking on water, or transmutation, or becoming a wear-wolf.

Ant:

An event might be considered miraculous to one person and something else to another

Events either are miracles, or have rational explanations. You might think birth is a miracle, but it is not. Being ignorant of the processes does not provide you with some special referential frame where you view a legitimate miracle. It just means you are ignorant of the facts. Eclipses were thought to be miracles to millions of people in the past. They were all unequivocally wrong. You may be amazed at them, you may be astounded by them, you may be surprised, energized, terrified, awed… fine. Eclipses are not miracles, and they are not made so by being ignorant of the cause.

Good job everyone and thanks for a great debate about ghosts,but I still have not changed
my mind about my ghost. Three decades later my ghost is still a figment of my reality.
Space traveling inter galactic immortals, moving at mind warp speed, destination unknown.

Mind over matter?

Nope.

http://io9.com/5928230/the-physics-of-firewalking

Science is the pursuit and illumination of those things which we can demonstrate are actually true with real world examples.

Why is it, then, that people reject sciences assessment of areas of faith? What does that mean?

People of faith don’t categorically reject evidentiary support. In fact, if any bogus fact surfaces that SEEMS to support their religious belief, it is pounced on from all angles and held up as a shining beacon to non-believers. Even after these pieces of evidence are shown to be frauds and hoaxes, they are still referred to by the faithful, enthusiastically, as support of their beliefs.

No. The faithful reject evidence in opposition of their preferred beliefs. It is pure confirmation bias. It has nothing at all to do with what can be resoundingly demonstrated to be actually true about the world, and everything to do with believing what they want to believe for no other reason than that they want to believe it.

So what is meant when people say that science doesn’t apply to areas of faith? Why would they imagine it does not? Science doesn’t pursue any agenda, it merely is a process of assessing the state of the world then verifying, and demonstrating the true state of the world with empirical means. So if you make a claim that has empirical ramifications, or that implies there should be testable empirical conditions that would result if your claim was true, then it is a matter for science. And when it turns out the evidence that SHOULD be there if you were right… ISNT there, then that isn’t a fault of science.

You were wrong.

Skepticism should be taught to every child.

Always in the back of your mind should be the thought:
"What's the more likely explanation."

Here's a psychic. If you were brought into this tent and he started to relay all kinds of secret, or personal informaiton about yourself, how would you react?

http://www.wimp.com/mindreader/

What questions go through your mind? Just think: What's the more likely explanation.

For him to know my bank balance, and what tattoo is on my lower back, he would be able to get that info by looking through my facebook pictures, and hacking into my bank account. He would have to have people feeding him that information before hand, or maybe through a concealed radio.

That may sound unlikely to you. Sure. In most cases i would say that it's unlikely. But not if he's coming up with the kind of accurate detailed information he is. Especially when he's presenting me with another explanation.

That he's communicating with mysterious spirits, or reading my mind.

I know that people can hack into bank accounts, that there is a wealth of information about me online, and that people are perfectly capable of trying to scam me.

I don't know that psychic powers are in any way possible.

One is known and there are plenty of examples to call upon, the other is un-proven, with plenty of exposed frauds and lies attached.