Miracles are logical

[newpolitics]

Among the laws we consider transcendental, are physical and logical laws. How have you determined that miracles would have transcended physical laws, but now logical ones, and based on what evidenced are you making these claims? Oh that's right... None. This is pure speculation about nature of something for which there is no evidence. Nice!

 

[Mr. H.]

Repeated personal sensory observation is proof enough for me. I haven't determined a damned thing. And I don't seek determination. I make no claims nor offer evidence. It just is what it is.

If you place any merit in the Image of Guadalupe then you have an idea of my experience, however peripheral. The details are mine to keep.

 

[The Professor]

Miracles are simply those events or occurrences which supersede the known physical laws. Anyone with a basic understanding of physics and who believes that we actually exist should believe in miracles. The existence of our world is unintelligible, impossible to bring about through the application of known physical laws. These laws must then have been superseded.

In a way, there is substance to your claim. The human intellect rebels against the thought that something can be produced from nothing. It also rejects the notion that something could have always existed, never having been created. Yet, it is with certainty that the existence of anything proves that one of those hypotheses must be true.

There is no greater miracle than existence. And until we can produce sentient, self replicating life forms from inanimate, nonconscious material, life is the second greatest miracle (or, if you will, the first). However, these things are not miracles because they defy the laws of the universe; rather they are miraculous only because they remain well beyond our capacity to comprehend them.

However, if a miracle is defined as something which violates the laws of nature, said laws being necessary for the orderly function of the universe, then they are not logical. A principle or law cannot simultaneously be both inviolate and violable. If there are no laws, then what appears to be a miracle is a natural consequence of interacting elements. If there are laws, then miracles cannot occur.

However, I am not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, and that is just my personal and very humble opinion.

 

[newpolitics]

Miracles being logical is an unintelligible concept and a red herring from a discussion about whether they actually occur. Logic pertains to thought. The OP is making a category error. Miracles cant be logical or illogical, they can simply either exist or don't exist as an occurrence. The fact that they don't confirm to transcendal physical laws is all that could be said of them. It could be said that, it is illogical or logical to believe in them, but the laws themselves can not be logical. This is a fallacy of reification. However, being that they exist in this universe, they should be detectable and possible to observe in a scientific setting, but have not been shown to exist. They are merely biased interpretations of many humans perception of their realty and experiences, as well as an attribution error.

 

[AVG-JOE]

Miracles are simply those events or occurrences which supersede the known physical laws. Anyone with a basic understanding of physics and who believes that we actually exist should believe in miracles. The existence of our world is unintelligible, impossible to bring about through the application of known physical laws. These laws must then have been superseded.

In a way, there is substance to your claim. The human intellect rebels against the thought that something can be produced from nothing. It also rejects the notion that something could have always existed, never having been created. Yet, it is with certainty that the existence of anything proves that one of those hypotheses must be true.

There is no greater miracle than existence. And until we can produce sentient, self replicating life forms from inanimate, nonconscious material, life is the second greatest miracle (or, if you will, the first). However, these things are not miracles because they defy the laws of the universe; rather they are miraculous only because they remain well beyond our capacity to comprehend them.

However, if a miracle is defined as something which violates the laws of nature, said laws being necessary for the orderly function of the universe, then they are not logical. A principle or law cannot simultaneously be both inviolate and violable. If there are no laws, then what appears to be a miracle is a natural consequence of interacting elements. If there are laws, then miracles cannot occur.

However, I am not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, and that is just my personal and very humble opinion.

Remove the Divine and all you have left is luck.

Is the presence of 'luck', both good and bad, evidence of the Divine?

I might think so if worship and/or religious righteousness were any kind of an indicator of what kind of luck, both good luck and bad, that a Monkey could expect in life. The reality of Sentient life on the ground is that luck seems to be doled out on a very random basis.

Discover why this Monkey is lucky and that Monkey is unlucky, and you too can gaze upon the face of God.
Based on that litmus test, the ancient stories fail.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Here are some truths to compare with the op

1)Man is born into ignorance

2)Man has science, but the science is not complete. For the religious, this means that man does not know everything about the world.

3)Religion is considered justifiable when we consider knowledge in areas that man does not know scientifically.



Using the op and the above truths, I can conclude how religion will survive forever. It will keep creating new subject areas and reign supreme in those areas! Anyone disagree?

There are no above truths.
1)Children, not men are born ignorant. Science cannot say what the first man knew.
2)"Science is not complete" The concept is vague and meaningless.
3)Religion requires no justification. Man's knowledge is not quantifiable. Religion and science are not mutually exclusive.

1. The interpretations and explanations provided by science come, mainly by way of our observations, and a few instruments. Human observations. But birds and bees communicate within the ultraviolet portion of sunlight… a part of the spectrum that humans don’t see. Ultraviolet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

a. And eyesight is our most important sense. It provides the majority of our sensory information about the world. Consider how much less we’d know if we had no eyes. Even so…we’d probably feel that we knew everything about our surroundings. But we don’t know about the world in ultraviolet. Or in infrared. We live between 400 and 700 nanometers. What Wavelength Goes With a Color?

b. And the inner ear contains hair cells that are moved by sound waves between 20 and 20,000 Hertz. Sensitivity of Human Ear That’s the extent of our contact with the real world. Beyond said ranges…we don’t know about it!



2. Further, our sensory system actually distorts the information that we do collect. For example, there is no such thing as color in the real world: color is made in the mind based on the wavelength information that the eyes send to the brain.

a. And, when we look at a rock, or any solid material, what we are actually seeing is swarms of subatomic particles with lots of empty space between; over 99% of the rock is empty space. Yet, that’s not what our limited senses and processing center tell us is true and real.



3. So, do we gather and understand half of what there is to know about the universe? A tenth? A millionth? Is it possible that there is a force, God, in the universe, and we are unable to process the information due to our limited senses and limited ability to interpret sensory data? And, by extension, miracles.

a. “Erasmus Darwin paternal grandfather of Charles Darwin and maternal grandfather of Francis Galton,… proposes that reason is inferior to generation. [It was his] view of deity as a designer that was present in Newton. The "cause of causes" harkens back to the Aristotelian/Thomistic definition of God as the prime mover who sets all things in motion.

Generation and reproduction are thus put into the realm of a causality that is willed by a God who is Himself causeless. believed that the process of evolution was due to "...the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements to by generation to its posterity, world without end." Erasmus Darwin

b. Perhaps claiming that we are abandoning ‘faith’ and engaging ‘reason’ is no more than hubris. Rather, the abandonment is based on not realizing how little we know of the parameters of what we call reality. It may simply a question of God in a form that we can never perceive or comprehend.
Parker, "The Genesis Enigma"


‘It is best to keep an open mind in the absence of decisive verification.’

 

[hobelim]

Miracles are simply those events or occurrences which supersede the known physical laws. Anyone with a basic understanding of physics and who believes that we actually exist should believe in miracles. The existence of our world is unintelligible, impossible to bring about through the application of known physical laws. These laws must then have been superseded.

When Jesus healed the blind man he put a paste of mud and spit on the mans eyes and then put his hand over that and then asked the man what he saw. Obviously is was a gradual healing of perception and not sight with Jesus teaching the man how to think and interpret scripture where trees, what the man first 'saw' are often symbolic of men.

In the same way there is a rational explanation for every miracle attributed to Jesus from 'feeding' a large crowd to raising the dead, which have nothing whatever to do with fish sandwiches or decaying corpses.

 

[Derideo_Te]

Here are some truths to compare with the op

1)Man is born into ignorance

2)Man has science, but the science is not complete. For the religious, this means that man does not know everything about the world.

3)Religion is considered justifiable when we consider knowledge in areas that man does not know scientifically.



Using the op and the above truths, I can conclude how religion will survive forever. It will keep creating new subject areas and reign supreme in those areas! Anyone disagree?

There are no above truths.
1)Children, not men are born ignorant. Science cannot say what the first man knew.
2)"Science is not complete" The concept is vague and meaningless.
3)Religion requires no justification. Man's knowledge is not quantifiable. Religion and science are not mutually exclusive.

Nice of you to concede that everyone is born an Atheist.

 

[Derideo_Te]

Miracles are simply those events or occurrences which supersede the known physical laws. Anyone with a basic understanding of physics and who believes that we actually exist should believe in miracles. The existence of our world is unintelligible, impossible to bring about through the application of known physical laws. These laws must then have been superseded.

Care to provide the proof as to exactly how you reached that conclusion? The existing laws of physics demonstrate that the universe has always existed and will always exist in one form or another. That is both readily understandable and requires no suspension of the known physical laws.

 

[amrchaos]

I wonder what he would have said if I used the word "Human" instead of "Man"--That zygotes are concepted, no one is truly born?

 

[Jimmy_Jam]

Miracles are in the realm of subjective human experience, sometimes even amongst groups. Whether they are real or not is equally subjective, and I deal with them on that level. I do not discount them entirely, I simply question the human tendency to embellish.

I knew a girl who pretended to be possessed at a church retreat because she was young and wanted attention. Everybody believed they witnessed a demonic possession, and a miraculous exorcism by the pastors present, including the pastors themselves. Most of them probably believe it to this day. She of course became the center of attention for the rest of the retreat as she desired, and the stories of what people claimed they witnessed and saw became increasingly elaborate as the days proceeded, with others agreeing that they saw the same thing. None of these things happened. The girl convulsed and talked in a strange voice and said some incendiary things and before you know it people were saying they saw all kinds of things that didn't happen. My suspicions were confirmed a couple of years later when she confessed to me that she pretended the whole thing. I feel certain that had I taken her around to everybody at the church and had her confess to them, most of them would have still insisted that a miracle happened. It's extremely difficult to accept when one has been duped.

This story does not prove one thing or the other, but it has been a valuable lesson to me in just how easily people can perceive miracles, not just individually, but in groups.

Miracles can be deeply personal things as well, like the desperately wanted recovery of one's child from a seemingly insurmountable illness after considerable prayer. Those things happen, whether due to prayer or not. Nobody can judge miracles quantitatively. However, some can be discounted quantitatively and should be when they are obvious shams.