Religious Miracles

[The Atheist]

Can I interest you in a game of poker?

I'll give you poker as long as I get craps!

The odds are a useful fiction.

Look, I really don't want to give you a hard time here, but your understanding of maths is a level below my 11 year old daughter, and she is decidely average at maths. Regardless of claims about science, faith and all the other bits, only in Orwell does 2+2=5.

There is clearly no point contuining.

[Ecurb]

Look, I really don't want to give you a hard time here, but your understanding of maths is a level below my 11 year old daughter, and she is decidely average at maths. Regardless of claims about science, faith and all the other bits, only in Orwell does 2+2=5.

There is clearly no point contuining.

You are obviously not very bright, so I agree. Atheistic arguments like yours serve to make atheists look stupid.

For anyone else reading this thread, the odds are a useful fiction in poker because (given an honest dealer) once the cards are shuffled either an ace is second from the top in the deck or it is not ("second from the top" because the top card is "burned" in Texas Hold 'em). The 2/46 odds (there are 46 unseen cards in the deck, and two of them are aces) are irrelevant to the person with perfect knowledge of the facts. They are relevant to the card player, who is ignorant of the facts.

[billl]

I understood, Ecurb.

[Ecurb]

I understood, Ecurb.

Thanks. I didn't think it was that difficult.

[Scheherazade]

W a r n i n g

Please do not personalise your arguments.

Off-topic posts or posts containing inflammatory/personal comments will be removed without further notice.

[The Comedian]

So a favorite nature writer of mine --Bernd Heinrich (professor emeritus [of biology] at the University of Vermont) -- still holds out for miracles, though his source is nature and not religious dogma.

He's observed that certain moth larvae will will metamorphose into odd, though genetic variant caterpillars, . . . . say a larvae that normally changes into a spotted green caterpillar, changes instead into a dark brown one. . . based on genetic or environmental conditions. Of this as yet unexplained phenomenon. . . . that in insects certain genes are turned "on" or "off" based on unexplained genetic or environmental factors, he writes:

We humans cannot change into any radically different body color, body shape, or behavior. We have evolved to maintain a certain homeostasis, or staus quo that has proved to be adaptive in the past. However, the genes of a butterfly are the same as those in a caterpillar. The difference is which are turned on or off, and when. . . .

Once an end result is achieved, it is hard for us to imagine an alternative that has proceeded along a different developmental trajectory without crediting it to magic or "talent." When we see in others something that we find incomprehensible for ourselves, it is easy to pass this off as "genetic." Naturally, it is exactly that; but this description still omits the essence of development, the miracle on the miracle. The possibility of individual caterpillars to generate amazingly different forms makes me appreciate what is possible in the debate over nature versus nurture.

While I know that Heinrich is not using the term "miracle" in the religious or dogmatic sense, he is using it to express the idea that there are many things in the world that we do not understand, and that it may be an overstep of our self-confidence to say that everything is explainable.

I'm sure that that there are many here who will eagerly belittle and demean the simple idea that a miracle is not necessarily supernatural, but that miracles are those things beyond our current ability to understand. To them, I can only shrug my shoulders.

[The Atheist]

While I know that Heinrich is not using the term "miracle" in the religious or dogmatic sense, he is using it to express the idea that there are many things in the world that we do not understand, and that it may be an overstep of our self-confidence to say that everything is explainable.

I'm sure that that there are many here who will eagerly belittle and demean the simple idea that a miracle is not necessarily supernatural, but that miracles are those things beyond our current ability to understand. To them, I can only shrug my shoulders.

I'm quite happy with that usage.

Life is a miracle - so unbelievably complex that it's taken us millions of years to begin to understand it, and even now, we have no real idea of how it started.

It saddens me that that kind of miracle, which we're actually a part of, isn't enough for some people.

[Ecurb]

Since this is a literature board, I suppose it is appropriate to post:

Miracles
by Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet
and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim--the rocks--the motion of the waves--the
ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?



By the way, when Jesus (supposedly) turned water into wine for the wedding at Canae, he was merely performing the same miracle that occurs every time that the rain falls, and grapes grow and ripen and are picked and fermented. The miracles of the Father are echoed in those of the Son (the Bible suggests).

[MarkBastable]

By the way, when Jesus (supposedly) turned water into wine for the wedding at Canae, he was merely performing the same miracle that occurs every time that the rain falls, and grapes grow and ripen and are picked and fermented. The miracles of the Father are echoed in those of the Son (the Bible suggests).

So, within the terms of the word as you mean it, everything in nature is a miracle. This is perhaps a bit difficult for those of us - including the World English Dictionary - who tend to use the word to mean pretty much the opposite of that - to wit, any occurence that appears to be contrary to the laws of nature.

World English Dictionary
miracle (ˈmɪrək ə l)

— n
1. an event that is contrary to the established laws of nature and attributed to a supernatural cause


If we're going to go with your definition of the word, we're going to need another word to cover stuff like the parting of the Red Sea and the raising of Lazarus. Unless, I suppose, you'd argue that those events - historically verifiable or not - are no more remarkable than photosynthesis and the fermentation of sugar.

Just to make the comparison, could you list a few things that aren't miraculous?

[Ecurb]

I think you are confusing me with Walt Whitman. Thanks.

[The Atheist]

If we're going to go with your definition of the word, we're going to need another word to cover stuff like the parting of the Red Sea and the raising of Lazarus. Unless, I suppose, you'd argue that those events - historically verifiable or not - are no more remarkable than photosynthesis and the fermentation of sugar.

No, this is misleading at the very least.

"Miracle" has always required qualification. You only need to watch sport to realise that, and you've been just a teensy bit naughty with the dictionary definition, because they all go on to record meaning 2 of the word. Thus:

Merriam-Webster:

an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment

Or, you could just take Oxford's three definitions:

noun
an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency:
the miracle of rising from the grave

a remarkable event or development that brings very welcome consequences:
it was a miracle that more people hadn't been killed

an exceptional product or achievement, or an outstanding example of something

Isn't that why the thread is entitled "Religious Miracles"?

The crash and saving of every life aboard the plane that hit the Hudson River is an example of something truly miraculous, but purely human.

[MarkBastable]

The crash and saving of every life aboard the plane that hit the Hudson River is an example of something truly miraculous, but purely human.

I'd say that was a figurative use, like That woman is an angel, or Mark Bastable is a pedantic a**hole.

However, the original point stands: if everything in nature is a miracle, as Walt Whitman and ecurb suggest, we need to make it clear somehow that we intended to talk about the stuff that appears to be contrary to the laws of nature. As you say, the thread name implies as much, but ecurb has just cited Cana and the Loire Valley, and I'd say a distinction needs to be made between the two methods of wine production.

[Ecurb]

Many religious people refer to “the miracle of creation”. Like Whitman, they see God’s creative hand in the usual and everyday, just as in the parting of the Red Sea. My analysis of the miracle at Canae was literary (this is a literary board, after all). The literary value of Jesus turning water into wine is in part that it makes the reader reflect on the normal method by which water turns into wine, which is “miraculous” in Whitman’s sense of the word, and which, to religious people 2000 years ago was a gift from God, like Jesus' gift to the wedding party.

I'll grant that until The Comedian's post, we were not using the word thus.

[yck016]

i think we shld not take religion to seriously. its jus a set ideology to guide our actions in life.
its precisely when we overzealously protect or proselytising the belief that created much friction
in the world. there is nothing that can prove the existence of those spiritual entiies or realm,
yet we are fighting tooth and nails over it. the best approach is live and lets live.

[MorpheusSandman]

Look, I really don't want to give you a hard time here, but your understanding of maths is a level below my 11 year old daughter...

I realize this is an old thread/discussion, but I felt compelled to state that Ecurb is actually correct. Probabilities reflect our level of knowledge and ignorance about reality, not reality itself. However, I think he is mistaken in what he's implying here: "We puny humans certainly can't predict many of the ways in which "the universe, matter and energy" behave. If we could, we could make a fortune at Las Vegas." If "us puny humans" had internal and accurate General Relativity calculators we could, indeed, make a fortune in Vegas. It's the limitations of our brains-as-processors that create the probabilities in Vegas and that Casinos capitalize on.

However, The Atheist is equally correct in saying that science's best models can, indeed, predict everything that happens in Vegas with 100% accuracy and predict much more complicated things with just as much accuracy... the problem is creating a processor that can process those models within the time-span of a dice roll. The problem with those scientific models is that they're so complicated that they take time to compute, and we don't exactly have time to jot down all of the necessary information about a dice roll (force of the throw, the angle at which the dice exited the hand and hit the table, the material of the table, etc.) and come up with a predictive answer that's better than 1/6. But that's a statement about OUR limitations, not those of science. Quantum mechanics predictions are far more complicated than those of dice rolls, and they work swimmingly.