I get so tired of listening to Christian apologists blather on about the evidence for a Creator. So what! Even if a creator god exists, there is no indisputable evidence that he (or she) has ever allowed one violation of his natural laws to occur within our universe. Yes, there may be millions and millions of alleged answered prayers/miracle cures of chronic acne, menstrual cramps, and tension headaches, but no amputee has ever suddenly regrown a leg, no severed head has ever been reattached, the hundreds of thousands of bodies blown to bits by bombs have never flown back together after prayers to Jesus or his virgin mother. The supernatural is a superstition until proven otherwise.
Embrace science, my friends, not ancient supernatural tales.
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End of post.
Escaping Christian Fundamentalism 
re: “…there is no indisputable evidence that he (or she) has ever allowed one violation of his natural laws to occur within our universe.”
There is nothing saying a miracle has to be a violation of natural law.
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But if you have something that’s claimed to be a “miracle”, but that falls entirely within the scope of natural law, then how do we ever determine that it was a “miracle” and not just an instance of a low-probability event happening? For instance, an event that has a one-in-a-million chance of happening to a person on any particular day probably happened to about 325 people in the US today. Now, each of those people may personally think that they have experienced a miracle, but in reality it’s only statistical probability plus confirmation bias.
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Even the fact that the earth is a sphere is disputed – you would be able to dispute anything.
That said, I think the Resurrection is, when the evidence is objectively assessed, as assured and undisputed a fact as any in history.
So that should suffice… but: Luke 16:31 But he said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.’”
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Too many independent sources saying he same thing, when even two would would suffice, all collected into the New Testament. Too much corroboration from outside the NT. Just too large a body of historical evidence to dismiss it and still claim to be rational.
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The fact that most people have believed something to be true in the past does not make it true. Most people once believed that the earth was flat, but scientific evidence has disproved this. That people have believed that there are miracles doesn’t make their belief true. What empirical scientific evidence (not historical assertions by people whose assertions may be wrong) is there for miracles?
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Except your sources aren’t independent. They are all religious propaganda, mostly anonymous published by one small Roman-era cult. Your corroboration from outside is about the existence of this cult, which is not in dispute. There are simply no first-person accounts from outsiders saying “I met this rabbi personally and watched him work a miracle.” Or even “At this year’s Passover in Jerusalem, the sky turned dark and then there was a zombie invasion. Weird.” Your church may push how well-supported your sources are, but that’s not actually the case.
If a god were going to communicate the most important message man would ever receive by means of a book, it could certainly do a better job.
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What Christians can’t seem to fathom is that using bible scripture to validate something to a non-believer is a worthless effort on their part, not to mention a waste of everyone’s time.
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I would suggest that the existence of universe itself is evidence of a miracle.
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“WITHIN” our universe.
I titled the post to prepare for that come back.
A creator god may exist, and her creation may have been a supernatural act (a miracle), but there is ZERO undisputed evidence that a miracle has ever occurred within her universe, at anytime after the point in time in which she wiggled her nose to bring it into existence.
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Yeh, but it raises another issue.
If we allow that there may have been a Creator God who created the universe, then, what possible “protection” against miracles could there be?
This is not to say that “because there was a Creator God, therefore, miracles do happen”. But it is to say “if there was a Creator God, then there is absolutely nothing to prevent miracles from happening”.
So, while 99.999999999% of all the things which people exclaim “it’s a miracle!” may, in fact, not have been miraculous at all, still, there remains the possibility that 0.0000000001% are indeed miraculous.
But – setting that aside as simply an “observation” —
The things we call “miracles” are not really miracles themselves. A person getting “miraculously healed from cancer” isn’t the miracle. That healing (provided it did, in fact, take place) is the result of the miracle. So, the miracle itself is a step back from the result.
Let me give an example: If the Q-ball on the billiard table is set in motion, heading for another ball, that other ball will then move, and hit another, which then may end up hitting two others, and so on and so on. But, if we had all the information regarding how the Q-ball was hit – ie, with what strength, at what angle, etc – and we had all the info about conditions on the billiard table, exact locations of the other balls, etc, etc, we could literally predict the outcome of that billiard shot from the moment the Q-ball was hit.
But the introduction of some other, unaccounted for “element”, such as the ceiling fan suddenly coming on and providing the slightest breeze, could alter the outcome of that billiard shot.
The outcome would be that the 8-ball went into the corner pocket – something totally unexpected. And somebody says “it’s a miracle!!!”. But, that wasn’t the “miracle” at all. The “miracle” was that something else – outside of the original billiard-table paradigm – affected the shot.
Finding evidence of that “something else” may be impossible. I used an example of a ceiling fan coming on, but, it could have been something far more subtle, and far more short-lived – and something that could only possibly have been “observable” in the billionth of a second in which it happened – meaning – we’d never know what it was.
All we could possibly know is that the billiard shot did NOT go “as planned” as it should have, according to the complete data we had on time at the beginning of the shot.
So what I’m getting at is that asking for “evidence” of a miracle is something of a “have you stopped beating your wife yet?” question. The “evidence for a miracle” question presumes that the result, and not the cause, is the miracle, and that somehow, in the result (ie, the person healed of cancer overnight), there should therefore be an explanation available. But, it’s really just asking the wrong question.
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So we agree: It is impossible to differentiate a “miracle” from a rare, odd coincidence.
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Hmmmm.. A rare, odd coincidence – I’m not sure what you’re calling either “rare” or “odd”, or what you mean by “coincidence” — as in, “coincidental, to what?”
So, since I don’t know that, I can’t say we agree that it’s impossible to differentiate between such a coincidence and a miracle.
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Ok…
We are agreed that it is impossible to differentiate a miracle from an odd, statistically rare event.
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Well, exactly how rare is “statistically rare”???
Someone else, earlier in this thread, pointed out that a “one in a million” event would happen about 325 times a day in the US…
Not sure if that’s “statistically rare” or not. In fact, I’m not sure who (or what) actually defines “statistically rare”.
So, I’m still not sure we’re in agreement. The terms need to be a bit better “nailed down”, I think….
I mean, as far as I can tell, an event like, say, someone walking on water – my GUESS (having not studied the statistics) – is that this kind of thing is a lot more rare than one-in-a-million.
So, again – not knowing what you mean by “statistically rare”, I’m not sure if we’re in agreement.
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Typical Christian obfuscation.
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Yeh. Right.
chuckle You really depend on Gaslighting, don’t you?
Doesn’t matter. You didn’t have a point, anyway. Except to find something to argue about.
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I and Ark are still waiting to hear about your conversion experience. It must be a doozy since you are so guarded about talking about it. Did you see a ghost?
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re: “I and Ark are still waiting to hear about your conversion experience. ”
keep waiting….
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Does not sound like a rational decision.
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What’s the holdup? Are you embarrassed?
Sometime back I was asked to share my conversion experience so I wrote a post on it. Of course, the event took place a loooong time ago and my life has since taken a different direction. But even so, I wasn’t ashamed to write about it …
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Imagine if someone came onto this blog and insisted that he believes that he has a personal relationship with Zeus…but then refuses to give us the evidence. Irrational!
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So, no evidence then.
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