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Supernatural Miracles
Some of the other threads here touch on this subject. I'm starting this thread to see what people think about miracles. Now I called the thread supernatural miracles, because I don't want to get bogged down discussing things like a child survining a Tsunami in unlikely circumstances, or love as a miracles or such stuff.
First of all, I 'd like to know if supernatural miracles happen. I'm fairly positive that the vast majority will say no, but not always a bad idea to ask the obvious.
Second, what would booktalk members consider to be proof of a miracle, or if something that cannot be explained and which defies all conventional wisdom occurs, then is it simply put on the long finger? Could an apparent miracle ever be considered evidence in favour in God.
Third, I'd like to see how members explain two apparent miracles, one fictional, one not so much. I'm not suggesting that these miracles require an explanation, only how you classify them, or what you think is the most likely cause.
The first miracle, is what's commonly referred to as The Miracle of the Sun. This miracle occurred back in 1917 (if my memory serves me well). It is estimated that 50,000-70,000 people reported seeing the sun dart around the sky in strange patterns. Others report seeing nothing, while some report seeing visions of the blessed virgin, Jesus and the like.
Scientists recorded no unusual solar activity on the day. Skeptics and believers both reported having the vision. Some scientists reported seeing the vision and declared that they'd seen nothing similar in their time or work. They also claimed to have been calm when witnessing the vision.
The vision was predicted by three children who claimed to be receiving visions form the Virgin Mary who lead the people to the location where the vision occurred.
The second miracle, which has, to the best of my knowledge, never actually happened, is a scenario where 2 billion humans claim to have seen a vision of God in the night sky. They claim that the figure spoke to them, and told them who he was.
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Re: Supernatural Miracles
Niall001: First of all, I 'd like to know if supernatural miracles happen.
I've never seen one, and I've never seen or heard a description of one that I both trusted and couldn't think of in natural terms.
Second, what would booktalk members consider to be proof of a miracle, or if something that cannot be explained and which defies all conventional wisdom occurs, then is it simply put on the long finger?
Given the modern understanding of what's considered miraculous, I don't know. I suppose it would have to be an occurrence that stands in such stark contradiction to everything we believe about the world that we have no other way of explaining it. And it would probably help if just about every skeptic who looked at the occurrence threw their hands up in frustration. Even then, I'd probably reserve judgment.
But that's just in regards to the modern understanding of the miraculous, which I take to be implicit in your question. I think that, historically, the miraculous was probably regarded in a very different sense, that the distinction between the natural and the supernatural wasn't an explicit (and in most cases, probably not an implicit) part of the criteria, and that the modern understanding is probably a failure of modern culture to adapt the historical meaning of the miraculous to the contemporary context of the natural/supernatural dichotomy.
Here's the wiki on the Miracle of the Sun, for more information. I don't feel all that inclined to speculate as to what caused the phenomenon.
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Re: Supernatural Miracles
Niall:
From Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things:
Quote:...when one is confronted by a true believer whose apparently supernatural or paranormal claim has no immediately apparent natural explanation, Hume provides an argument that he thought so important that he placed his own words in quotes and called them a maxim:
"The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), 'That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.'" (p. 45)
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Re: Supernatural Miracles
The way I would respond, Niall, is to put the onus on you to provide as many first hand sources of the occurence to us. Not just a paragraph stating the case to have happened. And while Wiki is a great source for quick info, I would not cite it as a source credible enough for this matter.
Mad: WHY would you not care to speculate? Is it that you just do not feel it would do anything either way or that you hold some belief about the event and would rather not offer it?
I'm not saying it's usual for people to do those things but I(with the permission of God) have raised a dog from the dead and healed many people from all sorts of ailments. - Asana
The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.
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Re: Supernatural Miracles
E.O Wilson tells us that fewer than 10% of life forms are known to science and that fewer than 1% of those have been studied beyond a simple anatomical description and a few notes on natural history. The number of species of organisms discovered to date (comprising all known plants, animals and microorganisms) lies somehwere between 1.5 and 1.8 million. Estimates of the true number range from 3.6 million to 112 million. If anything, it seems this kind of ignorance regarding Nature, should give us pause before defining what must and can only be true about it.
It seems the same pause is called for when confronted with the notion of Dark Matter which is galactic, cosmic matter that cannot be observed directly, but can be detected by its gravitational effect. In some cases, it is argued that 90% of the universe is Dark Matter...unobserved and only indirectly detected.
Thus, when looking right here at home or upward into the night sky...we are seeing far less than what is actually there. And what we are seeing is but a fragment of an abysmally large unexplored, undefined, uncharted, unmeasured, unknown. Edited by: Dissident Heart at: 12/12/06 3:25 pm
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!
Quick reply just to address what Nick said, I'm not trying to persuade anybody of anything here.
And to be honest, I'm less interested in whether something like The Miracle of the Sun was a miracle or not, than in how somebody would explain it, if events happened as described.
Likewise with the second "miracle" that clearly never happened.
In these situations, you've got to remain totally agnostic, or explain the situation as being the result of a conspiracy, mass hallucinations, a combination of both.
And given my goddam lack of copy function from this terminal, I'm in a poor position to provide references. Sorry.
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Re: !
You can also say that another example may be peer pressure. One person spreading a fire by overstating what he or she saw. If the majority of a population are inclined to believe in a miracle, it would be easier to persuade more people to corroborate.
I know you were not looking to convince Niall...I am just saying that if someone presented me with a miracle, I would demand as much to back it up before even considering the claim.
I'm not saying it's usual for people to do those things but I(with the permission of God) have raised a dog from the dead and healed many people from all sorts of ailments. - Asana
The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.
The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"
I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper
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Re: Supernatural Miracles
misterpessimistic: Mad: WHY would you not care to speculate? Is it that you just do not feel it would do anything either way or that you hold some belief about the event and would rather not offer it?
Mostly it's because I don't believe anything in particular about the event. I think it's entirely likely that there's a perfectly scientific explanation for what happened. And I think that doesn't really matter -- at least, not for the people who perceived it as a miracle. From our point of view, it's bizarre phenomenon, to say the least, but even if we were to say, okay, that's a miracle, so what? The whole point of a miracle is that it has some sort of special meaning to the people involved. We weren't involved, and the event has no particular meaning for us.
Chris OConnor: Live chat with Eugenie Scott Thursday at 9:00 pm eastern, 6 pm pacific. Please attend if you can!
Wow, that's uncanny! Just like the children who predicted the Miracle of the Sun!
I'm not saying it's usual for people to do those things but I(with the permission of God) have raised a dog from the dead and healed many people from all sorts of ailments. - Asana
The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.
The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"
I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper
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Re: !
Nick, the idea that peer pressure could account for something like the supposed miracle seems unlikely, but given the unlikely nature of all other possibililties, it's probably the most likely.
Of course, there are a fair few problems with that. For instance, for 50,000 people to all suffer from such peer pressure at the same time, well it seems a little unlikely. There's also the rather strange fact that even people who thought that the whole thing was a scam saw the vision. You would have expected such people to have been primed to have a very different reaction.
But even then, there's the problem that people in similar situations had very different reactions. For instance, on December 31st 1999, many people were expecting some sort of apocalypse, but there were no mass hallucinations.
Mad in regards there being a scientific explanation for the events, that seems probable. But that does not tend to solve all the problems in that particular situation. For instance, there is the problem that if what happened was natural, how did three children predict such an event? Let's face it, no scientist had predicted the event, so how did three kids predict the event?
Unless of course they had help from some sort of unknown expert or they were rather lucky. In fact, they'd have to have been extremely lucky.
But the problem is that Nick's response that somebody would have to back up any claim that an event was a miracle with evidence is very reasonable, but the problem with supporting any claim is that there are almost impossible to support without first assuming the existence of the supernatural. If you assume that anything that happens must have a natural basis, then even if you can't explain it, that not support the claim that a miracle occurred.
On the other side, if for example Nick, Chris, Fiske or most other atheists found themselves in a situation where they experienced a group vision of God with 70,000 others, then I suspect that their position would probably chance. I think that there is a disconnect between intellectual arguments and the way we experience life. Even if every star in the sky re-arranged to spell out the message "God is here" then it would still be more likely that the event had a natural explanation. Indeed, if you believe in the theory of a multi-verse, then there is probably a universe out there just like ours, where such a even happened.
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Re: the sun!
Frank: So it is acceptable to believe a miracle has meaning even if it is (apparently) probable (from looking at the old testimonies and the later atmospheric data) that the three girls saw this phoneme two days in a row and decided to predict the next one as proof of their faith?
What do you mean by acceptable? The way I see it, miracles are not a category of phenomenon; rather, a miracle is an expression of what a particular event means to a particular group of people. If the people who witnessed this event feel so strongly as to call it a miracle, good for them. That doesn't have to mean anything for us, but if we want it to mean something for us, we can start by looking at it as a way of understanding them. I think it's a little silly to debate from the outside whether a particular event was a miracle or not. If what you've said about the predictions being rooted in prior observations is true, I probably would not have regarded it as particularly miraculous. But then, I'm so far removed from the event that I don't see much reason to weigh in as to whether or not I find it miraculous.
To my mind, it's a bit like trying to decide whether a particular event was a tragedy or not. It's a tragedy if you were involved in it, and that's what it meant to you. The term "miraculous" has long been a category of description similar to "tragic", and it looks to me like a relatively modern shift to think of it as a demonstration of the supernatural.
Now obviously, some people have tried to give "miracle" a more objective meaning, framing it in naturalistic/supernaturalistic terms. And I think those people are shooting their own toes off. Historically, it looks to me as though the emphasis were on the social and cultural meaning of an event, not on whether it happened by natural means.
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Re: the sun!
Mad
Quote:I'm so far removed from the event that I don't see much reason to weigh in as to whether or not I find it miraculous.
So am I and that is why I am being careful not to claim anything as particularly factual.
Quote:To my mind, it's a bit like trying to decide whether a particular event was a tragedy or not. It's a tragedy if you were involved in it, and that's what it meant to you. The term "miraculous" has long been a category of description similar to "tragic", and it looks to me like a relatively modern shift to think of it as a demonstration of the supernatural.
Well tragedy I can relate to and sympathize with, as I suspect most people can, but miracle looses me completely.
I do not know how to relate to it or what it feels like, I get nothing, and what some people claim to be miracles baffles my senses.
I guess I wonder why someone would not question what they saw more critically if they knew it to be unbelievable to anyone who did not witness the event.
I have seen things that I could not explain at the time of the sighting, but with a little research I discovered each event to be nothing out of the ordinary. I really just do not understand the concept of crediting a god every time something unusual happens and just leaving it at that.
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Re: the sun!
Frank: I really just do not understand the concept of crediting a god every time something unusual happens and just leaving it at that.
If you take a strict cause and effect approach to anything, it turns out that everything is involved. Any happening results from multiple interacting reverberations emerging out of prior events: ripples and waves and tsunamis of existents flowing, colliding, merging, reconfiguring and moving....pulses and waves of energy in a fantastic display of universal light and dark.
Why we choose to say "This point, here, right now, this particular thing is responsible for why this event is happening" means reducing the entirety of all this universal energy into something we can manage, control, and live with.
This reductionism is probably unavoidable and inevitable: and some reductions are probably better than others. But I think it clear it is always a matter of choosing to ignore a great deal of information: to simply silence it, keep it out of the equation, and make believe it doesn't matter.
Actually, it seems that our reductionism is a result of what we define as "This matters".
Calling something a Miracle, is one way of deciding what really matters.
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Re: the sun!
DH
That is probably the best explanation of miraculous thought that I have ever heard; but why the suppression of possible relevant facts? Is this due to ignorance of the actual working of the world? Denial? Wishful thinking?
You would probably say faith... right?
What if it is proven that the entire event is a hoax? How do you cope with that? Denial again?
It seems to me that the church has had its share of embarrassing moments from this method of logic. The church has been very hesitant to label most events as miraculous because of that embarrassment.
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