Your miracle

[nobspeople]

Some say miracles are real, while others say they're not. The naysayers often point out to limbs not growing back, other dead people not raising up and 'living their best life', no one since Mosses has interacted with a talking and burning bush that's not consumed, etc.
Yet believers do point out that Billy Bobchristian was 'healed' from his sin. Or Bobby Billchristian survived his 11th hour surgery that saved his life. And the like.

For discussion:
So, here's your chance, believers, once and for all. What miracle have you experienced that you KNOW was a miracle and that it was from god (if you're willing to have it, potentially, challenged - and why shouldn't you? You have faith it's real that's all that matter to you, right? Why not use this time to witness the power of your god?!?)?

[TRANSPONDER]

I had a think about this yesterday and I reckon the arbiter (life or not) is DNA. A seed contains DNA and so must be alive even if sleeping (dormant). That it can die if it falls on stony ground (no nutrients) or thrives in a hydroponics farm where nutrients are provided, is beside that it (unlike a rock) has the basics of life. Fertilisation may be a red herring. DNA is the difference between Life and non life.

So we get to Abiogenesis and the origins of DNA. The creationist case hinges on making it stick that DNA from inert biochemicals is not possible. The non -believer case insists that it is possible, supported by a feasible mechanism and by circumstantial evidence. It is not a debate terminated by demands for the absurd like making babies from sand, Mammoths from butterflies or dogs from cats. The gap for a god (1)(name your own) hangs on this puzzle of whether and how inert biochemicals could produce DNA. If atheist science could show that this can happen and evidently (e.g in fossils) did happen, that gap for God would be closed.

As it is, it is NOT (as Believers seem fondly to believe) an argument for or evidence for a creator (let alone Biblegod) but is at best a logically valid gap in which Godfaith can survive. (n.b 'appeal to unknowns' is a logically invalid argument, although it is surprisingly common amongst Christians, because they still think that God is the logical default until 100% disproven - as I've said, 'reversal of burden of proof', a logically false claim that messes up pretty much all their arguments and case.

(1) the third and weakest of the Big Three (cosmic origins, consciousness and Life).

[Tcg]

[Replying to TRANSPONDER in post #21]

I don't know. Even that which we describe as living, us included, is made up of inanimate matter. The line between living and not living is actually quite fuzzy. It is quite unlikely that we went from dust, or sand for that matter, to fully formed humans. I suspect a few more steps were involved. Whatever they were, our composition still boils down to inanimate matter.

Tcg

[TRANSPONDER]

I agree. But what 'Life is', and how it happened is the question. We are made of biochemicals plus water which is evidence of a water origin rather than dry dust as per Genesis, but Bible apologists who try to find 'science in the Bible' have argued that 'Dust' is 'science proves the Bible'. But then they all seem to love to use science to validate the Bible, from seashells on mountains proves the Flood to Egyptians made bricks proves Exodus.

Then the fossil evidence from single cells through date matched strata to graptolites, trilobites, fish, amphibians (and plants) on land, insects, coal forests and reptiles, dinosaurs and flowers, mammals and humans, argue evolution rather than a week long creation, even if one divides the age of the universe into 7 'days'.

So poking holes (real or imaginary) in evolution is not a valid case for God. Questioning whether abiogenesis is possible IS a gap for God (name your own, of course). DNA as the basis of the chromosome is surely what makes non -life life. And RNA is not yet DNA but just a biochemical. self -replication is what started life, and I would stake my hope of salvation (unlikely though that may be) on that being what 'Life' is and how it started.

Abiogenesis says that it came about through millions of years of sloshing about in a warm chemical bath (Create life in the Laboratory, atheists!) while the believers claim that it was a god that did it (which god, theists?) and that is the gap. They often try to say that life from non -life is 'impossible' (so a God had to do it) but since a hypothetical mechanism is there, is it is not Impossible and thus there is no good reason to suppose that a god dunnit, though the evidence does not prove as yet that Life happened through natural means, so that Gap is still open.

So the upshot is that a seed is living even if dormant, even though it is made of inert chemicals and even if it falls on stony ground, gets no nutritionary support, withers and dies.

[Mithrae]

Some say miracles are real, while others say they're not. The naysayers often point out to limbs not growing back, other dead people not raising up and 'living their best life', no one since Mosses has interacted with a talking and burning bush that's not consumed, etc.
Yet believers do point out that Billy Bobchristian was 'healed' from his sin. Or Bobby Billchristian survived his 11th hour surgery that saved his life. And the like.

For discussion:
So, here's your chance, believers, once and for all. What miracle have you experienced that you KNOW was a miracle and that it was from god (if you're willing to have it, potentially, challenged - and why shouldn't you? You have faith it's real that's all that matter to you, right? Why not use this time to witness the power of your god?!?)?

If we lived in a world in which half a dozen genuine miracles occurred every single day, somewhere in the world, we'd still expect only about 1 in 10,000 people to actually witness any of those miracles in a lifetime (assuming average four witnesses per miracle; 7billion / (6x365x80x4)). That may in fact be the world we live in - obviously we don't live in one with a deity eager to prove her existence to every sceptic under the sun, nor one with a deity at the beck and call of every 'name it and claim it' sycophant - and the evidence for that possibility is actually quite compelling in a way that anonymous personal testimonials obviously would not be, even if we happened to have one of those 1 in 10,000 people on the forum.

For example, apparently the miraculous regrowth of a limb on at least one occasion is indeed a distinct possibility, according to the formal sworn testimony of four medical workers involved with the 'miracle of Calanda.' Absolute proof? No of course not, they presumably could have engaged in a conspiracy to falsify a miracle, but it's hardly something that an objective person could dismiss out of hand.

More recently and convincingly, over the past 50 years eight healings at the shrine of Lourdes have been documented and certified first by a three-quarters majority of the Lourdes Medical Bureau and then after more detailed investigation by a two-thirds majority of the expert International Medical Committee of Lourdes as rapid and complete cures of serious physical ailments without medical explanation, and therefore eventually deemed miracles by the patients' local bishops. Obviously in some of those cases, there are some other medical experts willing to offer speculative 'explanations' for how the documented healings might have occurred, and it does seem plausible that even the stringent criteria of Lourdes is not one hundred percent reliable, but the odds of speculative alternative explanations being correct again and again and again seems likely to become vanishingly small, more like an article of faith than an actual assessment of the available evidence and likelihoods.

If we wanted a way of distinguishing between a world with a dozen miracles occurring every day and a world with no miracles whatsoever, probably one of the best and only ways of doing so that I can see would rest on the premises that A) If miracles from a benevolent god do occur then divine healings should feature prominently among them, as in the NT and in popular perception, since illnesses tend to be our times of greatest need and powerlessness, and B) If miracles don't occur then well-off, highly educated analytical thinkers should be much less prone to belief in them borne of desperation/hope or ignorance/superstition. As it turns out, the large and otherwise diverse but generally well-off and highly educated subset of the population represented by medical doctors - at least in the USA where data is most readily available - are about as likely to believe in miracles as the general population and far more likely to report having personally witnessed miraculous healing. Not only is this data apparently inconsistent with a no-miracle world, the one in which we'd expected highly educated folk to be less prone to belief, but the sheer number of reported observation of miracles by experts in their field which these figures suggest implies a near-certainty that thousands of them were indeed genuine miracles: Even if we were to arbitrarily assume that any given medical expert's report of observing a miraculous healing were 90% likely to be incorrect (due to their biases, or misdiagnosis/personal ignorance, or limitations in all medical knowledge etc.), that would still imply that in twenty such reports there's an ~88% probability of there being at least one genuine miracle (1-0.90^20) and a virtual certainty of there being a genuine miracle for every hundred such reports. The claim of having personally observed miraculous recoveries by the majority of American doctors implies hundreds of thousands of expert reports over the past fifty years, in that country alone.

So the evidence seems pretty compelling, both in terms of the breadth/number of reported observations by experts, and the depth of investigation and documentation from Lourdes, and in the 'wow factor,' the distinct possibility of even a regenerated amputation on at least one occasion. In order to conclude that miracles do not occur, we would have to dogmatically assume in every case that there is a 100% probability of the medical experts being incorrect about the nature of the recovery, an absolute 0% possibility of miracles occurring in every single case: Obviously a wildly irrational position.

[brunumb]

Abiogenesis says that it came about through millions of years of sloshing about in a warm chemical bath (Create life in the Laboratory, atheists!) while the believers claim that it was a god that did it (which god, theists?) and that is the gap.

It's ridiculous how theists simply ignore the bit about millions of years and then demand that scientists reproduce the same outcome right here and now in the laboratory. If they can't then, bingo, God did it. When you think how far scientists have come in the laboratory in just a few decades, maybe their demands will be met in the near future after all.

[POI]

Abiogenesis says that it came about through millions of years of sloshing about in a warm chemical bath (Create life in the Laboratory, atheists!) while the believers claim that it was a god that did it (which god, theists?) and that is the gap.

It's ridiculous how theists simply ignore the bit about millions of years and then demand that scientists reproduce the same outcome right here and now in the laboratory. If they can't then, bingo, God did it. When you think how far scientists have come in the laboratory in just a few decades, maybe their demands will be met in the near future after all.

For many believers, the goal posts will just move perpetually; as belief is often times not about logic.

[Goat]

...
So, here's your chance, believers, once and for all. What miracle have you experienced that you KNOW was a miracle and that it was from god (if you're willing to have it, potentially, challenged - and why shouldn't you? You have faith it's real that's all that matter to you, right? Why not use this time to witness the power of your god?!?)?

I think this life is a miracle and that we have had this short period of quite free world. If this life would not be from God, I would like to know how we got life?

And, this is the logical fallacy known as 'argument from ignorance'. You don't understand, so therefore god. It can also be described as 'the argument from personal belief.'

[JoeyKnothead]

If we lived in a world in which half a dozen genuine miracles occurred every single day, somewhere in the world, we'd still expect only about 1 in 10,000 people to actually witness any of those miracles in a lifetime (assuming average four witnesses per miracle; 7billion / (6x365x80x4)). That may in fact be the world we live in - obviously we don't live in one with a deity eager to prove her existence to every sceptic under the sun, nor one with a deity at the beck and call of every 'name it and claim it' sycophant - and the evidence for that possibility is actually quite compelling in a way that anonymous personal testimonials obviously would not be, even if we happened to have one of those 1 in 10,000 people on the forum.

If...genuine...

But of course doubters're "sychophants".

Let's take a moment and let that'n sink in.

For example, apparently the miraculous regrowth of a limb on at least one occasion is indeed a distinct possibility, according to the formal sworn testimony of four medical workers involved with the 'miracle of Calanda.' Absolute proof? No of course not, they presumably could have engaged in a conspiracy to falsify a miracle, but it's hardly something that an objective person could dismiss out of hand.

Doubters're sycophants, who ain't objective.

It should be clear to all that an argument that sets out to denigrate any and all who disagree ain't worth the effort it took to type it up.

Mithrae, you're beyond question one of the smart bunch here, but I am disappoint.

[Mithrae]

If we lived in a world in which half a dozen genuine miracles occurred every single day, somewhere in the world, we'd still expect only about 1 in 10,000 people to actually witness any of those miracles in a lifetime (assuming average four witnesses per miracle; 7billion / (6x365x80x4)). That may in fact be the world we live in - obviously we don't live in one with a deity eager to prove her existence to every sceptic under the sun, nor one with a deity at the beck and call of every 'name it and claim it' sycophant - and the evidence for that possibility is actually quite compelling in a way that anonymous personal testimonials obviously would not be, even if we happened to have one of those 1 in 10,000 people on the forum.

If...genuine...

But of course doubters're "sychophants".

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Name_it_and_claim_it

I'm surprised someone who spends so much time debating Christianity isn't familiar with one of its most popular trends.

[TRANSPONDER]

We don't seem to have any personal miracles, but rather pointing to "things that science can't explain", (origins of life, a leg supposedly growing back), and supposing that 'God' has to be the answer. This is of course the basic fallacy of Godfaith. 'Unknowns' are unknowns, and unexplaineds are unexplaineds, not evidence for God.

In past debates I have had various 'miracles' presented and digging into them has shown every one to be enhanced, shall we say to look more miraculous than it actually was, from the blackened corpse to one person saved from a collapsed building, and the oft recycled recovery from cancer story to a holy icon remaining unscathed when a church collapsed (lots of those, folks ).

So far despite various claims of answered prayers and miracles, I have only seen the claims, and not the verification. I mentioned the study on prayer that showed no effect (one helpful poster pointed to the study) but I don't recall the one who claimed that a study proved that prayer healed ever provided a link.

Hard truth is, that the believers try to make unexplained events or remarkable coincidences (which is all that my 'miracle' was) into evidence for their God, but miracles and answered prayer would be so unfailing that, if it was real, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.