Today I will be dealing with a contested subject among Atheists and Christians alike.
Miracles.
This proof that will indeed convert me very quickly is extremely difficult to produce depending on your definition of a miracle. Since you're trying to convert me specifically here, we'll use my definition and then I'll go about converting the rest of those stubborn unbelievers.
Item the Second: Miracles
Conversion Status: Absolute until proven false
Ease of Evidence: Difficult
Well you're off to a good start- every religion claims miracles were done(and usually are the basis for the religion in the first place), and that miracles happen frequently still.
I'd like to see one.
Here's how you do it: Predict when and where a miracle will occur(you can use prophecy here for a double whammy) and get me there to witness it. OR if your particular religion grants YOU the ability to perform one, simply throw one down right there.
But Liz, you ask, what miracle would you like us to do? I can speak in tongues or attest that the sun rises every day- isn't that enough to inspire your faith?
No. Let's define a miracle, shall we?
"A miracle is a perceptible interruption of the laws of nature, such that can be explained by divine intervention, and is sometimes associated with a miracle-worker." This is from Wikipedia, which is a website I can only assume Christians have seen and had a chance to edit- thusly it's the accepted definition.
I have previously defined what does not count as a miracle- things that have explanations you just don't understand, or things that are mundane but "good" (finding your car keys or overcoming a disease) and things that have been proven not to be miracles, but are established phenomena of the human psyche or emotional reactions.
So- while your mother overcoming cancer is not a miracle, everyone in an entire hospital suddenly overcoming their ailments with no medical explanation might be.
Here are some examples:
Amputee Limb Regrowth
Verifiable Resurrection (not just brain death- but total cessation of life processes and decomposition begins)
Translocation or Transmutation of objects(again, verifiable only please)
Demonstration of abilities not possibly possessed by an individual- heavy investigation required
Things that do not represent a miracle-
Things that have no apparent cause(investigate. Don't draw a conclusion first, then test for it.)
Mundane Occurrences
Occurrences that through denial of established scientific fact, then lack a cause
Things that have a natural or explainable cause
Proofs I will accept for a miracle:
Witnessing it personally
Testimony of multiple witnesses that were not in a highly-emotional state, at least one who is/was a skeptic, with correlating evidence(pictures, video footage, the end result of the miracle) - this will be investigated thoroughly.
Cataclysmic evidence (IE, mountains that have actually moved, geological evidence, must be material)
Proofs that I will not accept:
Your personal testimony
Testimony from ancient texts
Testimony from a large group of people in a highly-emotional state
Testimony from individuals unable to think critically about other things
Video evidence alone, or pictures alone, or transmogrified object alone.
Proofs of non-miracles, or miracles that could be fakes(stigmata, speaking in tongues, telepathy) - you will have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true, due to the ubiquitous nature of falsehoods surrounding these.
The idea of a miracle is however, difficult to maintain. As the late, great Arthur C. Clarke once said- "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." and rightly so. I could travel back to any point before 200 years ago and perform magic with only the knowledge of today- not even the technology. Miracles performed in ancient times could only be the result of lack of knowledge about the world around them leading them to believe in a supernatural cause.
Do not be surprised if a miracle you have come to believe in gets debunked or explained- this is only the march of progress. It does not disprove your faith, only fails to affirm it, and returns to you the burden of positive proof, a reason to believe.
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Excellent treatment of miracles. You're right to put the bar high; miracles are supposed to come from God, not from the laziness of our intellects which are unable to come up with an alternative explanation.
ReplyDeleteI think you should be careful that you don't, in your fervor of coming up with a good benchmarks miracles should match, accidentally prove that nothing is to be believed.
Do you believe the big bang? How about evolution? How about that Napoleon conquered much of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century? How about this (for the more philosophical): do you believe the entire history of the world has happened?
If you use the criteria above, you would have difficulty really proving these. If you think I'm being ridiculous, that might betray your prejudice that God can't do miracles, or that there is no God.
Again, with the whole "faith is necessary" argument.
ReplyDeleteThe idea is that God/Prophets should make faith a little easier. When you get right down to it, you can't believe anything at all- even your own eyes or your own thoughts because you can't be sure any of this is real.
So you have to go by arbitrary guidelines that you set for yourself to figure out what is going on.
What I purpose is to set the bar a little higher, and try a little harder to figure it out before you go off saying "well, can't be done, I'm off to the pub."
So I have MY arbitrary rules set out here- follow them and I'll be happy to give your theories the same credence I give to others that have met the came criteria.
Are you sure you're applying the same standard to how you interpret history? Your standards work quite nicely for everyday life, but believing something like evolution or the origin of the universe would would be difficult.
ReplyDeleteYour standards:
Witnessing it personally (doesn't work b/c you weren't there before the 1980s)
Testimony of multiple witnesses that were not in a highly-emotional state, at least one who is/was a skeptic, with correlating evidence(pictures, video footage, the end result of the miracle) - this will be investigated thoroughly.
In history, we usually only have a handfull of sources, so that is difficult. Using science, we can know things but it's based on weighing the evidence; there were no video tapes around during the big bang.
Cataclysmic evidence (IE, mountains that have actually moved, geological evidence, must be material)
There is evidence for the big bang and evolution, but you have to draw conclusions. That's why people can go around selling books that say that the earth is 6000 years old and that evolution never happened. It's because the evidence doesn't make it obvious. Yet I presume you believe these things, right? How do you reconcile those?
As for history- many of the examples you mentioned have cataclysmic evidence and multiple sources. We have letters from soldiers as well as records from France about how much Napoleon was paid and even constructs that still stand today(the roads that have trees lining them, so soldiers can march in the shade.).
ReplyDeleteBut what you might be talking about are things like ancient history, such as existence of the Myan empire and the events that actually transpired during the crusades.
The fact is that we don't know. We can guess, and get very close- but we have no idea what happened in the lives of individuals or the consequences of anything smaller than the movements of a great empire. The problem is that most things, including transient social structures, don't make much of an impact on the observable world around us.
As for the big bang however-
Here's how light works: It moves at a certain(very fast, but not infinite) speed. It, upon striking objects, bounces off at a trajectory that's very easy to calculate using basic physics.
We have these things called telescopes. They orbit the planet and strain their wee mechanical eyes to see into the farthest reaches of space- where we see light. Light that has bounced off objects older than our sun, older than the stars around us and nearly as old as the universe itself.
We know they are old because they are very far away- and the farther they are, the longer it takes the light to reach us, allowing us to calculate exactly how old those things are by their relative distance.
What we are doing is looking backwards into the past.
Now- as we look farther and farther and see little bits of dust that are smaller and smaller, we begin to notice that the light coming from the other side of the universe indicates that the universe was once much, much smaller. Eventually we even get light that might be some of the first light ever produced. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0317_060317_big_bang.html
Now. Eventually we have to start using math to express what happened, because the laws of the universe were different back then, but we have handy clues like cosmic background radiation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_radiation ) and other such nonsense to point us in the right direction.
The reason all of these things are accepted is because they fit in a greater structure called modern science.
We have these theories. We do experiments to test the theories and they come out right 100% of the time. The theory is then accepted, and when integrated with the whole, the entirety of science is internally consistent. Because of other areas of science, the mathematical formulas and empirical evidence all points to a hole in science where the big bang fits right in without any wiggling.
You don't have to draw conclusions with any jumping for these things, because if you accept one part of science, you accept all parts of science. You can't logically accept cell theory without accepting DNA and you can't accept DNA without accepting evolution and particle physics, and you can't accept those without accepting sociology and mathematics and the big bang theory, because it's all an interlocked structure that can't be pulled apart.