Thanks for a good reply, spectrm. But on your first point here, you must be exaggerating for effect
…
To a very certain extent, I exaggerate, but it is definitely to make a point. Claiming the catholicism birthed science is like claiming that the inventor of the wheel created centripetal force. The Jesuits put serious efforts into the sciences from the very onset of the church. My wife attends a Jesuit university…I’ve had numerous good discussions with their clergy. Jesuits generally accept a much more open interpretation of the world, both for biological and epistemological reasons. I’ve heard a number of ideas that greatly border on mysticism, from them - I even met a few atheist nuns…their views of a godhead definitely ‘unorthodox’ but they followed the dogma and other orthodoxy with faith that it’s still the right answer. Orthodoxy doesn’t seem to mean what some would think…I accept this.
But what I don’t accept is a claim to establishing a practice that has been in use for thousands of years. They may have diverted a lot of effort towards it, but they didn’t found it and are not the truly unbiased pillar of science these articles claim.
Actually, miracles offer powerful evidence for the existence of God. For reasons you give here and others, I don’t think miracles are the best argument to use to convince an atheist, but the evidence is strong enough to refute atheistic arguments (“refuting” does not mean that atheists will be converted when they see the argument, but that Catholics will see no challenge to their faith offered by the atheistic argument since it is refuted by the evidence). As I see it, atheists do not want to look at the evidence for miracles, so it’s not worth presenting that argument. For the materialistic-atheist, the solid evidence of just one miracle is all that is required to refute metaphysical-naturalism.
So to do the research, atheists would have to investigate the Catholic claims for miracles, for example. This would include not only the miracles and resurrection of Christ and the miracles of the apostles as recorded in Scripture – but the entire catalogue of miracles recorded by the Chuch over the past 2000 years. This includes thousands of miracles by saints in every era. Then there are the miracles of Lourdes and Fatima. There is the miracle of the sun, for example, witnessed by over 70,000 people. There are the healings that people experience – healings of incurable illnesses, the growth of new bone tissue and many other things like that. Many of the millions of pilgrims to Lourdes go there, not seeking a miracle – but merely to offer thanks for the miracles they experienced.
And people love to see the virgin mary in a water stain under an overpass, too…stories of miracles from long ago are akin to the story about Paul Bunyan (from an empirical standpoint). As for miracles reported modernly, and nearly all those in history, can be attributed to natural physiological happenings. There may not be a “proper” explanation for why it happened to that individual at that time, but the effects on the body (brain and all) are compose of physiological states that we’ve seen in various other clinical circumstances. As for the ‘sensation of The Presence’, this is largely subjective and, once again, physiologically reproducible. I certainly ‘feel the presence’ at a particular point during intimacy, but I have no cause to believe it’s supernatural in essence, because I know there are physiological changes that occur during such acts.
The atheist reply to these millions of events through history is that all of the people that experienced them, and all of the saints who worked them were “deluded” or “mistaken”. This is a radical skepticism that does not align with the testimonies given. It’s clearly not open to the reality of what occurred. Again, all it requires is one miracle for atheistic-materialism to be refuted. Here we have claims of millions of miracles from people of all walks of life in all geographic areas and of various kinds. We have scientists who attest to the belief in miracles.
And I have nuns who are atheist - what’s your point? A person believing something doesn’t make it true, no matter how qualified they are.
But atheists will dismiss all of this and not enter into a serious study of the miraculous.
One atheistic-materialist recently did investigate claims of the supernatural:
The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions
and during his research, he was converted. He became a believer in God and the supernatural. But this is what materialists need to do. Investigate these cases. Again, all it takes is one miracle to prove that metaphysical naturalism is false.
“Look for something long enough, and you shall find it” - the corollary being “whether it’s there or not”. I’ll have to read the book, but I’ve read many ‘conversion stories’ like it (A Case for God and A Case for Christ and numerous others) and in each of them, their approach was not truly skeptical, nor was it really scientific. Much of these stories draws on emotions - inviting you to accept the ‘feel of The Presence’ and accept it…get used to it…to the point where you no longer question it. At which point, you’ve lost ‘your inner buddha’, as it were.
But all that said, I know that atheists do not want to think about such things. It’s obvious by the way the miraculous is dismissed. Millions of claims through the centuries are dismissed without investigation. This is because of the a priori belief that miracles cannot and do not happen.
If you can describe a natural world to me where
a priori belief in something that cannot be perceived exists, I’ll describe to you a world that cannot exist.
Cosmological fine tuning would have to be the result of purely accidental, chance events in the universe.
Or gillions of iterations of the same equation - most universes with various arrangements of constants will fail (theoretically collapse upon themselves), but some won’t (and will theorecticall continue expanding and running iterations of itself inside of itself…at least that’s how the math works out). Given what we know about the universe, to presume that our universes existence is an anomaly is flawed. All I’m positing is that a godhead is not necessary to make our existence “not a fluke”.
. Although I would be willing to go for that, I’m not quite sure it’ll happen anytime soon. But I’m going to stick with Stephen Hawking on the whole quantum world not equalling God thing. : P. Btw: as a nonsequitor, both of his books A Brief History of Time and The Universe In a Nutshell are quite the wonderful intellectual journey. I suggest them to all. The second one even has pretty pictures : D!
