If God can create sentient beings on a whim, if Jesus can create food and bread to feed multitudes, then can both save their own faithful once in ******* while.
He does. I've seen it.
I've seen it doesn't qualify as proof. That's just magical thinking
By that standard, testimony given in court isn't proof either. Thankfully, this world doesn't operate by your idiotic standards. Eyewitness accounts actually mean something to intelligent (meaning not you) people.
Miracles have not been demonstrated to occur. The existence of a miracle would pose
logical problems for belief in a god which can supposedly see the future and began the universe with a set of predefined laws. Even if a ‘miracle’ could be demonstrated it
would not immediately imply the existence of a god, much less any
particular one, as unknown natural processes or agents could
still be at work.
Most alleged miracles can be explained as
statistically unlikely occurrences. For example, one child surviving a plane crash that kills two hundred others is not a miracle, just as one person winning the lottery is not. In the absence of any empirical evidence, all other claims can be dismissed as the result of
magical thinking, misattribution,
credulity, hearsay and
anecdote. Eye-witness testimony and anecdotal accounts are, by themselves,
not reliable or definitive forms of proof for such extraordinary claims.
Divine intervention claims most often concern systems and events for which we have poor predictive capabilities, for example, weather, sports, health and social/economic interactions. Such claims are rarely made in relation to those things we can accurately predict and test e.g. the motion of celestial bodies, boiling point of water and pull of gravity. If a god is constantly intervening in the universe it supposedly created, then it is with such ambiguity as to appear completely indistinguishable from normal background chance.
Note: Theists often fail to adequately
apportion blame when claims of their particular god’s ‘infinite mercy’ or ‘omnibenevolence’ involve sparing a few lives in a disaster, or recovery from a debilitating disease – all of which their god would ultimately be
responsible for inflicting if it existed. See also:
Euthyphro dilemma,
Confirmation bias,
Cherry Picking.
See also:
Argument from Miracles,
Why won’t god heal amputees? [
Video],
Spontaneous Remission of Disease,
The problem with anecdotes (a must watch).
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” – Carl Sagan
“Elite athletes make first place, strange shapes appear on toast and some people narrowly escape death, but amputated limbs never regrow, mountains never move and food never spontaneously appears in front of the hundreds of children that starve to death each hour.” – Anonymous
