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?!?)?

[Mithrae]

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.

Suppose there were a group of people who claimed to be in contact with an advanced alien civilization; they habitually beam messages out into space asking for a kilogram of gold to be materialized at their location, and once in a blue moon that's exactly what happens. The sceptics then start saying that a kilogram of gold occasionally materializing at the requested locations are merely events which science can't explain, and it's fallacious to assume the unexplained stuff was caused by aliens. Seems to me that wouldn't be a particularly compelling argument.

Non-repeatable phenomena obviously aren't subject to the same level of scientific scrutiny and experimentation as we enjoy in fields like physics and chemistry and hence obviously can't enjoy the same level of certainty: But that doesn't change the apparent fact that in some few cases, the best available explanation does indeed seem to be a response to pleas for help by a deity to whom they were addressed.

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.

What makes you think that? What kind of a deity would serve as a bellhop answering the every whim of sycophantic 'worshipers'? I'm sure that's a very convenient way for self-centered believers to imagine what their 'god' should be like, but as far as I can tell it seems like one of the silliest; far less sensible than a deity who sets things up to run smoothly without any intervention at all. If it turns out that there is some divine intervention, common sense and of course actual experience would suggest that it's likely to be a rare and therefore special occurrence - a faint hope to help people through the rough times rather than a constant expectation to make any hardship at all feel intolerable.

[brunumb]

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.

Lourdes is a tourist attraction. It relies on promised miracles which, based on the statistics, rarely allegedly occur. Any hospital achieving 8 cures in 100 million patients would not be regarded very highly. How many people would buy lottery tickets hoping to win millions of dollars if they knew that no one ever actually won? So it is in the interests of those in the appropriate positions to prop up the institution in whatever way possible.

How compelling could the evidence be if a quarter of the Lourdes Medical Bureau and then a third of the expert International Medical Committee of Lourdes do not agree with the certification of rapid and complete cures?

We don't really know the capacity of the body to heal itself regardless of how serious we deem a medical condition. We do know the extent to which people will go to deceive others and the extent to which people are subject to self-deception. The fact that local bishops are prepared to declare some alleged cures as miracles is hardly convincing testimony as far as I am concerned.

[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.

]quote]Suppose there were a group of people who claimed to be in contact with an advanced alien civilization; they habitually beam messages out into space asking for a kilogram of gold to be materialized at their location, and once in a blue moon that's exactly what happens. The sceptics then start saying that a kilogram of gold occasionally materializing at the requested locations are merely events which science can't explain, and it's fallacious to assume the unexplained stuff was caused by aliens. Seems to me that wouldn't be a particularly compelling argument.

Non-repeatable phenomena obviously aren't subject to the same level of scientific scrutiny and experimentation as we enjoy in fields like physics and chemistry and hence obviously can't enjoy the same level of certainty: But that doesn't change the apparent fact that in some few cases, the best available explanation does indeed seem to be a response to pleas for help by a deity to whom they were addressed.

Ah yes, proof by analogy. It's Transponder's Fallacy, (using analogy as evidence), except it hasn't caught on yet. Let's suppose that a kilogram of gold materialised in a particular place every now and again, and people prayed (or wailed messages to flying saucer- pilots) and the gold appeared apparently without relation to the prayers and appeals. Well...it was appearing so it must be space aliens, right? You see the fallacy? Appeal to unknowns. Can't explain it so it mist be flying saucers. So, just as we can explain how diamonds get formed, or fossils (once thought proof of dragons) or polystrates (once thought to prove the Flood) IF gold appeared as you say, we might expect to find out the natural reason how and why, and you have skewed the analogy by assuming a supernatural cause as a given (ET doing it) and then used that false analogy as evidence for a God doing miracles.. That's the Transponder fallacy. Well maybe it isn't a new one; it's the black swan/They denied powered flight fallacy, plus the ongoing and habitual Theist fallacy - assuming a god as a given.

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.

What makes you think that? What kind of a deity would serve as a bellhop answering the every whim of sycophantic 'worshipers'? I'm sure that's a very convenient way for self-centered believers to imagine what their 'god' should be like, but as far as I can tell it seems like one of the silliest; far less sensible than a deity who sets things up to run smoothly without any intervention at all. If it turns out that there is some divine intervention, common sense and of course actual experience would suggest that it's likely to be a rare and therefore special occurrence - a faint hope to help people through the rough times rather than a constant expectation to make any hardship at all feel intolerable.
[/quote]

A fair question. And let us put aside the written guarantee that whatever you ask in faith - even as little as a mustard seed, even to have a mountain or tree uproot and remove into the ocean, that He will do, and allow Bible apologists to write in all the fine print and escape clauses that Jesus (or the gospel writers, at least) didn't bother to mention, and just assume that God is granting prayers and doing miracles, sometimes right away, sometimes later and sometimes not at all. Am I wrong in questioning whether it's a god at all, or are you doing the fallacy of assuming it's Biblegod when it might be the old fallacy of counting the hits and ignoring the misses, firing an arrow and painting a target round it and, as usual, assuming God is the answer when on evidence, coincidence and faith -fuelled self -delusion is the more probable answer.

Lack of consistent results is what makes me think that. What (other than Faith) makes you think otherwise?

[1213]

...
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.'

Sorry, my goal was actually just ask a question, not make an argument from ignorance. Please answer to the question.

[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".

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.

I'm surprised someone so familiar with the English language isn't familiar with I wasn't fussing on name it and claim it, but on your using a derogatory term to refer to others.

Had you considered the rest of my post, you'd see where I also mentioned your implying others who disagree ain't objective.

My point here is to have the -ahem- objective observer understand that besmirching others is an unreliable means of getting at the truth.

Alas, we often observe those promoters of such a violent, slanderous god, well, there we go.

[Eloi]

A miracle, from my own point of view, can include many things. For example, what results at the end of a process that no one can see with the naked eye, such as the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly or the development of a fetus. It could also be something that we see happening but we don't know how to explain it and there is no theory to explain it, like why there are places where gravity doesn't act the same way as expected according to current knowledge. Similarly it could be considered a miracle something as simple as the migration of monarch butterflies to Mexico, when no one shows them the way, even when we can make theories about why. A miracle can be a sunrise or a sunset, things that don't happen on planets without an atmosphere, or the fact that there is an atmosphere like ours only around our planet.

A miracle could also be considered an event not so special, but that occurs precisely at the time, place and magnitude convenient from a specific point of view ... even more miraculous if that event is expected without a natural cause to occure, as when the sea was opened for the israelites just when they were about to get captured ... or simply when someone gives an answer that we were waiting for without even being aware of our doubt. Anything "casual" could be considered a miracle as well under the same criteria.

Do atheists have any strict definition of what a "miracle" should be?

[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.

I'm surprised someone so familiar with the English language isn't familiar with I wasn't fussing on name it and claim it, but on your using a derogatory term to refer to others.

Had you considered the rest of my post, you'd see where I also mentioned your implying others who disagree ain't objective.

My point here is to have the -ahem- objective observer understand that besmirching others is an unreliable means of getting at the truth.

A sycophant is "a person who acts obsequiously towards someone important in order to gain advantage" - a precise description (and one of the kindest available) for adherents of the demonstrably false 'name it and claim it' belief. Similarly, dismissing anything out of hand - let alone the formal sworn testimony of four different medical workers about an amputation they'd performed - by definition is an arbitrary and therefore not an objective approach. Seems to me that anyone who gets up in arms over someone saying "That approach is not an objective one" would have to be verging on tears every time someone confronts them with a personal accusation that "You are wrong in that claim." How would such a person exist on a debate forum at all? They might have to avoid debate entirely, for example by misguided nitpicking over pretend fallacies in a post as a pretext for dismissing it entirely, rather than addressing its actual substance.

Alas, we often observe those promoters of such a violent, slanderous god, well, there we go.

It's a good thing you're not the type to do any besmirching

[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.'

Sorry, my goal was actually just ask a question, not make an argument from ignorance. Please answer to the question.

When it comes to abiogensis, the answer is 'chemistry'. There are forms of rna that are self replicating, and all the molecules that make up rna, and are the basic building blocks of life get formed when you have methane and ammonia (as the early earth atmosphere was thought to be), and you add electricity.

One you get a self replicating molecule, that is the first step into getting an evolutionary path to life, via the principle of natural selection.

[Mithrae]

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.

Lourdes is a tourist attraction. It relies on promised miracles which, based on the statistics, rarely allegedly occur. Any hospital achieving 8 cures in 100 million patients would not be regarded very highly. How many people would buy lottery tickets hoping to win millions of dollars if they knew that no one ever actually won? So it is in the interests of those in the appropriate positions to prop up the institution in whatever way possible.

How compelling could the evidence be if a quarter of the Lourdes Medical Bureau and then a third of the expert International Medical Committee of Lourdes do not agree with the certification of rapid and complete cures?

We don't really know the capacity of the body to heal itself regardless of how serious we deem a medical condition. We do know the extent to which people will go to deceive others and the extent to which people are subject to self-deception. The fact that local bishops are prepared to declare some alleged cures as miracles is hardly convincing testimony as far as I am concerned.

This opinion seems to be contradicted by the actual facts. From 1946 to 1965 there were twenty-two 'miracles' claimed at the shrine, slightly above one per year, whereas in almost sixty years since then only eight have been claimed. Supposing that the standards of scrutiny were lax in those earlier years seems reasonable, but it's obvious that much stricter scrutiny has been applied to purported healings since then. As with any provider there's obviously a tension between hyping up the virtues of the product versus having those claims and the product's integrity easily undermined, and it's evident that in this case the Catholic Church has decided that having their 'miracle' claims easily debunked in a matter of weeks or years would undermine people's faith far more than having few or no miracles to report does. Belief in present-day miracles is not a requisite of Catholic faith, after all, whereas avoiding further blows to the already shaky perception of the Church's integrity would be rather important.

Members of the Lourdes Medical Bureau needn't have any vested interest in the shrine; they needn't even be theists, let alone Christian, let alone Catholic: "Any doctors practicing in or visiting Lourdes may apply to become members of the Lourdes Medical Bureau. Additionally, nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists and members of other allied health professions may apply to become members. Members are given (and invited to wear) a small but distinctive badge displaying a red cross on a white background surmounted by the word Credo ("I believe"). However, members of any religious affiliation or none are welcomed." One of its current presidents is also the president of the Académie Nationale de Médecine. To my knowledge at least two of the more recently confirmed 'miracles' were unanimous referrals by the Bureau to the International Medical Committee - Vittorio Michelli (investigation concluded and miracle confirmed in 1976) and Sister Luigina Traverso (miracle confirmed in 2012).

Even more obviously the International Medical Committee of Lourdes, being an international group of twenty to thirty medical experts, for the most part have little or no vested interest in the shrine. Again members are not even always Catholic; it seems that they are always Christian, but all else being equal one might expect Protestant members to be more likely biased against purported healings by 'Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception' than for them! An article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (Dowling, 1984) describes the Committee's process in some detail:

• If, after the initial scrutiny and follow up, the Medical Bureau thinks that there is good evidence of an inexplicable cure, the dossier is sent on to the CMIL which usually meets once a year in Paris, A preliminary examination of the data is made and if the members agree that the case is worth investigating they appoint one or two of their number to act as rapporteur. The rapporteur makes a thorough study of the case, usually seeing the patient himself, and presents the material in a detailed written dossier circulated to the members before the meeting at which they will take their decision.
  
  The report is then discussed critically at length under 18 headings, a vote being taken at each stage. In the first three stages the Committee considers the diagnosis and has to satisfy itself that a correct diagnosis has been made and proven by the production of the results of full physical examination, laboratory investigations, X-ray studies and endoscopy and biopsy where applicable: failure at this stage is commonly because of inadequate investigation or missing documents. At the next two stages the Committee must be satisfied that the disease was organic and serious without any significant degree of psychological overlay. Next it must make sure that the natural history of the disease precludes the possibility of spontaneous remission and that the medical treatment given cannot have effected the cure: cases ruled out here are those about which there cannot be any certainty that the treatment has not been effective - e.g. a course of cytotoxic drugs would lead to the case being rejected, even where the likelihood of success was small. Then the evidence that the patient has indeed been cured is scrutinized and the Committee must be satisfied that both objective signs and subjective symptoms have disappeared and that investigations are normal. The suddenness and completeness of the cure are considered together with any sequelae. Finally, the adequacy of the length of follow up is considered.

Now of course one can always advance ad hoc speculation that "they're biased" and leave it at that: That's the 'answer' used by creationists and climate deniers against the conclusions reached by overwhelming majorities of experts investigating those respective fields too. In spite of this apparently fairly robust level of scrutiny, the conclusions of the Lourdes Bureau and Committee obviously won't be infallible... they're just highly credible in any given case, and even moreso when considering all eight of the confirmed 'miracles' since the 1970s.

[Mithrae]

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.

Suppose there were a group of people who claimed to be in contact with an advanced alien civilization; they habitually beam messages out into space asking for a kilogram of gold to be materialized at their location, and once in a blue moon that's exactly what happens. The sceptics then start saying that a kilogram of gold occasionally materializing at the requested locations are merely events which science can't explain, and it's fallacious to assume the unexplained stuff was caused by aliens. Seems to me that wouldn't be a particularly compelling argument.

Non-repeatable phenomena obviously aren't subject to the same level of scientific scrutiny and experimentation as we enjoy in fields like physics and chemistry and hence obviously can't enjoy the same level of certainty: But that doesn't change the apparent fact that in some few cases, the best available explanation does indeed seem to be a response to pleas for help by a deity to whom they were addressed.

Ah yes, proof by analogy. It's Transponder's Fallacy, (using analogy as evidence), except it hasn't caught on yet. Let's suppose that a kilogram of gold materialised in a particular place every now and again, and people prayed (or wailed messages to flying saucer- pilots) and the gold appeared apparently without relation to the prayers and appeals. Well...it was appearing so it must be space aliens, right? You see the fallacy? Appeal to unknowns. Can't explain it so it mist be flying saucers. So, just as we can explain how diamonds get formed, or fossils (once thought proof of dragons) or polystrates (once thought to prove the Flood) IF gold appeared as you say, we might expect to find out the natural reason how and why, and you have skewed the analogy by assuming a supernatural cause as a given (ET doing it) and then used that false analogy as evidence for a God doing miracles.. That's the Transponder fallacy. Well maybe it isn't a new one; it's the black swan/They denied powered flight fallacy, plus the ongoing and habitual Theist fallacy - assuming a god as a given.

Using an analogy to point out the dubious reasoning in play isn't a fallacy of any kind. If divine intervention is the best available explanation in any particular case there's not a lot of point in dancing around that fact by pointing out that maybe some better explanation will become available one day. Of course we should keep searching and even hoping for more 'natural' explanations - especially so in cases of remarkable recovery from illness which might lead to advances in medical science - but if there isn't a better explanation available now and the experts most acquainted with the case have concluded that it was likely a miracle, pretending that it doesn't have any evidentiary value seems like nothing short of dogmatism.

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.

What makes you think that? What kind of a deity would serve as a bellhop answering the every whim of sycophantic 'worshipers'? I'm sure that's a very convenient way for self-centered believers to imagine what their 'god' should be like, but as far as I can tell it seems like one of the silliest; far less sensible than a deity who sets things up to run smoothly without any intervention at all. If it turns out that there is some divine intervention, common sense and of course actual experience would suggest that it's likely to be a rare and therefore special occurrence - a faint hope to help people through the rough times rather than a constant expectation to make any hardship at all feel intolerable.

A fair question. And let us put aside the written guarantee that whatever you ask in faith - even as little as a mustard seed, even to have a mountain or tree uproot and remove into the ocean, that He will do, and allow Bible apologists to write in all the fine print and escape clauses that Jesus (or the gospel writers, at least) didn't bother to mention, and just assume that God is granting prayers and doing miracles, sometimes right away, sometimes later and sometimes not at all. Am I wrong in questioning whether it's a god at all, or are you doing the fallacy of assuming it's Biblegod when it might be the old fallacy of counting the hits and ignoring the misses, firing an arrow and painting a target round it and, as usual, assuming God is the answer when on evidence, coincidence and faith -fuelled self -delusion is the more probable answer.

Lack of consistent results is what makes me think that. What (other than Faith) makes you think otherwise?

It seems like you're trying to reason backwards, like a creationist pulling out passages from Lamarck and insisting that since observed facts don't match that early conception of evolution, evolution itself must be false. Whether or not miracles occur is a question which has no more to do with the Bible than the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita. If otherwise inexplicable and seemingly miraculous departures from the normal course of events occur for people claiming contact with aliens, the explanation that it was caused by those aliens would obviously be a high if not the best available explanation; if they occur for people visiting a shrine to Mary, the explanation that they were caused by Mary would be a strong contender; and if they also occur for people visiting a shrine to Shiva, we'd need to consider the explanations either that both Mary and Shiva are answering prayers or that they're both answered by the same deity irrespective of different names.

Personally I'd be inclined to suspect that if there's a deity answering prayers she probably wouldn't be too concerned over which religious/cultural trappings and divine names surround those prayers. To be fair, I so far haven't really seen any credible miracle reports from India or China or the like, but that may be because I'm searching in English rather than Hindi or Mandarin. But what is clear is that belief in the possibility of divine intervention isn't idiosyncratic to a particular culture or to more primitive eras: For all the obvious evidence that our world mostly behaves in a pretty consistent manner - consistency in the motion of sun, moon and stars, seasonal patterns of temperature and precipitation, patterns of motion, gravitation and so on - most if not all cultures throughout history and down to the present have also recognized miraculous exceptions to those patterns. We might reasonably dismiss them as mere myth and legend borne of a very human tendency towards wishful thinking... but when that same recognition is shared at similar rates (and much higher reported rates of direct observation) by a highly intelligent, analytical and generally well-off subset of a modern advanced country, dismissing those hundreds of thousands of expert reports of observed miraculous healings out of hand doesn't seem particularly reasonable to me.

As I noted, it essentially requires a prior assumption that there is an absolute 0% chance that each expert report of miraculous healing is correct, a prior assumption that miracles simply don't happen at all.