stahrwe wrote:Where have all the moderators gone?

The word 'miracle' does not appear anywhere in the article so why is walking on water allowed to be interjected by some rather than maintaining the focus on addressing the specifics of Stacy' s article?

As for exact sciences v. Less exact sciences, the distinction, as well the reasons for the distinction, are clearly laid out in the article.

As for her having 7 children ... odd that causes a pause when the fact that she has a PhD in chemistry from Penn State doesn't.

Allow me to add a fact that may give you pause, while she was working on her PhD, she moonlighted as a stripper.

My comment about 7 children is just a symptom of my distractability. It doesn't give me pause in the sense of reflecting on her qualifications. It might in fact qualify her as superwoman.

I noted that she nixes including creationism in school curriculums.

ANT:
From a scientific/historical perspective, the attestation of an observed suspension of natural law(s) can neither be proven nor disproven by individuals who were not in attendance at the time of a reported anomaly. Hence they are undebatable.

We can only ever talk in terms of probability, Ant. If we could transport an eye witness of this event through time and have him stand next to me and clearly lay out how he saw a man walk across the surface of water it still would lead zero credence to a miracle having taken place.

Why? Because First, all the ways he could be lying. Then, all the ways he might believe he’s reporting a factual event, but has got it all wrong. Or he’s been deceived. And because it’s easy to fake.

http://www.wimp.com/walkwater/

And because there are a million ways this story doesn’t jive with everything we know about anything at all. You like to make a stink about extending a local observation to places we haven’t personally confirmed the observation holds. But that’s the whole purpose of knowing things…

If you can set up some boundaries and say, allowing that THESE conditions are satisfied, THIS will happen, you can make predictions about what you haven’t personally experienced based on all the things that you HAVE personally experienced. All evidence suggests that this is a perfectly good way to go about things. I’ve never been to France. But I am perfectly comfortable extrapolating my experiences from the united states a few thousand miles distant and having confidence saying jumping off of a step there will give similar results to jumping off a step here.

So when, in every single second of the day billions of instances of creatures of all sorts make contact with the water and either sink or float depending on very definite and well understood characteristics of their mass / volume ratios I state with confidence that nobody ever really saw a man walk across the surface of liquid water with no hidden support beneath the surface. It is completely unreasonable to assert that in just this one instance it happened, because he was a super special guy, and in all other instances that have ever been observed it didn’t happen. And we know precisely WHY it couldn’t happen.

This is a circular argument with special pleading.
“My guy was special.”
“why?”
“He walked on water once!”
“That doesn’t, and can’t happen.”
“I KNOW! That’s part of what makes him so special!”

Un-debatable? Nonsense.

It can only be a personal opinion expressed by individuals who reject anecdotal tales of "miraculous" events. There is zero scientific basis to support any such contention.

There is exactly the same basis to reject this as there is basis to reject a claim that I have a 18 pound bowling ball that floats like a helium balloon.

As a sidebar, there are documented reports of "medical miracles" described as such, due to the highly improbable, virtually impossible nature of their occurrence. In these instances, we can only admit to our lack of complete understanding and knowledge.
Unless of course you're a self -proclaimed know-it-all.

The pre-emptive ad hominem! AKA, Damned are those who argue against me!

Medical miracles, or in other words, when things happen that we didn’t understand, or didn’t record properly, or missed the event, or mis-diagnosed a problem… That’s user error and the limits of our current understanding. Just like an accidental exposure to an antibiotic substance before we understood the phenomenon would have been called a miraculous cure in the 1400s.

There is very definitely a difference between a “medical miracle” and a “walking on water” miracle. One points to a hole in our understanding, the other ignores everything we do understand.

Stahrwe
The irony is that scientific progress has, in a sense, led to more chaos rather than less. Further, it has created questions which will never be answerable within the existence of human beings. Where these questions arise, the secular scientist's position is that science will eventually provide the answer. That approach is the other side of the, 'God of the gaps,' canard which the secular scientists invoke against creationists.

It is tremendously arrogant to believe that simply because we have not been able to discover the answer to some mystery that nobody will ever do better. Many things we take for granted had confounded our ancestors for thousands of years. We routinely do things they could not have imagined and that is largely due to the accumulated wealth of knowledge that’s come before. Take something like the knowledge of the speed of light. With that little bit of knowledge to build from we can unravel mysteries that seemed well outside the realm of human comprehension just a few hundred years ago.

What is that new star in the night sky? The night sky which was said to be eternal and without change? Now we can answer that question. A super nova. A question that nobody had a good answer for.

Ant:
scientific progress involves nearly always a faustian bargain. the many advances science has brought has also introduced some or most horrific events as a result.
and man, of course, can corrupt anything he gets his hands on.

The knowledge isn’t the problem. Our inability to properly utilize power is the problem. You can turn anything into a double edged sword with a little effort. Would we, and the world not be better off had humans never mastered fire?

Science as an answer to everything under the sun is scientism.
To say, "science is an ethical and moral framework" is an admittance to scientism. It's an extreme position that is both bigoted and dangerous in the long run. It is an exclusionary attitude that seeks to weed out those who do no adhere to it's tenets.

I suppose it’s a good thing that the only person I’ve ever heard say that “science is an ethical and moral framework “is you, then.

This is why I sometimes feel compelled to put a disclaimer next to one of your posts explaining that the alleged views of The Atheist you are always railing against are in fact just your own straw men.

Here is what the celebrated philosopher David Hume had to say about miracles more than two centuries ago. His words still ring true.

David Hume wrote: (truncated extract of summary)
An everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion is that the only way that we can judge between two empirical claims is by weighing the evidence. The degree to which we believe one claim over another is proportional to the degree by which the evidence for one outweighs the evidence for the other. The weight of evidence is a function of such factors as the reliability, manner, and number of witnesses.

A miracle is a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent. Laws of nature, however, are established by a firm and unalterable experience; they rest upon the exceptionless testimony of countless people in different places and times. Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country.

As the evidence for a miracle is always limited, as miracles are single events, occurring at particular times and places, the evidence for the miracle will always be outweighed by the evidence against — the evidence for the law of which the miracle is supposed to be a transgression. This argument might be neutralised if the number of witnesses of the miracle be greater than the number of witnesses of the operation of the law, and secondly, if a witness be 100% reliable.

No miracle has in fact had enough witnesses of sufficient honesty, intelligence, and education. Human beings lack complete reliability: People are very prone to accept the unusual and incredible, which excite agreeable passions of surprise and wonder. Those with strong religious beliefs are often prepared to give evidence that they know is false, with the best intentions in the world, for the sake of promoting so holy a cause. People are often too credulous when faced with such witnesses, whose apparent honesty and eloquence (together with the psychological effects of the marvellous described earlier) may overcome normal scepticism.

Miracle stories tend to have their origins in ignorant and barbarous nations. The history of every culture displays a pattern of development from a wealth of supernatural events – prodigies, omens, oracles, judgements – which steadily decreases over time, as the culture grows in knowledge and understanding of the world.

Many different religions have their own miracle stories. Given that there is no reason to accept some of them but not others (aside from a prejudice in favour of one religion), then we must hold all religions to have been proved true — but given the fact that religions contradict each other, this cannot be the case.

Nothing in Stahrwe's cited material gives any sound reason for belief in supernatural claims, in the face of these compelling reasons from Hume against belief.