I don’t see how science could ever explain something like an airplane crash for instance and everybody dies, except one person. It’s surely a miracle that one person survived when if they had been sitting perhaps a hairline of a difference in another spot, they would have died.
Or if a person routinely gooes to Starbucks everyday at 8:00 a.m… except for one morning their alarm clock dies and person shows up at 9:00 a.m. instead only to find the Starbucks leveled and being explained on the news that a bomb had gone off at 8:00 a.m… Had the alarm clock not died randomly in that moment the person may have very well been inside the Starbucks at 8:00 a.m. as usual buried beneath the rubble. I don’t think science can explain these “coincidental” or “circumstantial” miracles–ever.
Coincidences are often occur for no reason but to put **all **coincidences in that category implies that everything ultimately occurs for no reason - which is obviously self-refuting. Truth cannot be based on absurdity.
Actually crash investigators spend a lot of time working out why some survive and others don’t, since the knowledge can be valuable for improving safety in future designs. (If investigators just called them miracles and didn’t investigate, they’d never learn anything to help others).I don’t see how science could ever explain something like an airplane crash for instance and everybody dies, except one person. It’s surely a miracle that one person survived when if they had been sitting perhaps a hairline of a difference in another spot, they would have died.
Or if a person routinely gooes to Starbucks everyday at 8:00 a.m… except for one morning their alarm clock dies and person shows up at 9:00 a.m. instead only to find the Starbucks leveled and being explained on the news that a bomb had gone off at 8:00 a.m… Had the alarm clock not died randomly in that moment the person may have very well been inside the Starbucks at 8:00 a.m. as usual buried beneath the rubble. I don’t think science can explain these “coincidental” or “circumstantial” miracles–ever.
It would seem that a hypothetical eternal gap in knowledge doesn’t allow for any concrete examples. A better course might be to say that a miracle contravenes all possible knowledge, for example Jesus raising Lazarus with no physical intervention after his body has been decaying four days. But even then it’s setting the bar so high that hardly anything would count as a miracle, and the higher you set the bar, the more skeptics will suggest sleight of hand.
Someone linked a website with that kind of evidence before, can’t remember where, but I was skeptical. The problem wasn’t with the documentation but that it was only for specific cases, which introduced a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Sure, obviously they can see how a person might’ve been spared in that situation in a very literal sense, but they’ll never know why that particular person who was spared, was indeed spared. They’ll never know why the person was randomly assigned to sit one seat next to the window as opposed sitting in the seat directly to the left, which would’ve made the difference between life or death for them.
That’s an IF that wasn’t part of my scenario. People die everyday, but the ones who survive freak accidents or cases in which events randomly occur out of their routines that ultimately end up saving their lives, we will never know.
It’s perfectly natural to try to justify why one person died when another was spared, but it isn’t rational. When Hurricane Katrina struck, various people “knew” why they were spared and others not:
Your example isn’t comparable to the scenarios I’ve given because they’re not the same things.
I am just proposing theoretical criteria for a miracle. A miracle is not naturally caused, so it would theoretically remain inexplicable if science were to increase without bound and have the fullest observation of the event. Since one could never know if science had increased without bound or whether one’s perspective of event was full, one could never assess in such absolute terms whether a miracle occurred; one could always go on supposing that humans are too limited to explain an event and just need to learn more, even if such a belief is false. But that doesn’t quite matter for the definition of a miracle.
But science takes into account all new evidence of what is possible. If a heavy rock visibly floated in midair in defiance of the law of gravity, this would prove either that (a) gravity isn’t really a law, i.e. doesn’t exist, or (b) some other force or forces held up the rock. If (b) is right, then science would come up with a name for that force: it could be “floatity” or it could be “God”. But all of these forces would be – in scientific terms – perfectly natural.
That’s pretty much the whole idea. In all these medical cases (in the 20th century, all miracles but one that were promoted for the cause of sainthood were medical miracles), the something that all the cures had in common was that someone asked a saint for intercession - so, asking a member of your church, who has gone on to heaven, to offer their own prayers for you or someone dear to you, apparently works. You would be hard-pressed to find any other common factor, as the range of illnesses and injuries are far too broad.
I think we’re talking at cross purposes.
Would your opinion change if there were valid scientific studies showing that prayer by loved ones statistically improves the rates of cures, as opposed to your hypothetical example that prayer was disadvantageous?
Suppose a piece of bread turned into a piece of human heart tissue. Are you really saying that science would simply say “ah-ha!, we have discovered a new law of physics (or chemistry, or biology)!”?
Yes. Scientists would first try and recreate the conditions, to make sure that the event was not some sort of optical illusion. But once the event was confirmed, scientists would not chalk it up as a miracle. They would try to find the simplest hypothetical laws of nature that would explain such a phenomenon. Science is a *comprehensive *discipline; you are not allowed to brush aside significant evidence simply because it appears anomalous or miraculous.
Your original point was that the “level of scientific documentation and the astonishing nature of the miracles would make any materialist’s jaw drop”, and I’ve been saying that the collected cases I saw were indeed well documented but by not including all cases they were very misleading, there could have be as many or more “miraculous” healings of atheists who where never prayed for, no one would know.
According to this article and others I’ve seen, the results of the few good double-blind studies performed are mixed, and it looks like the more rigorously a study is controlled, the less effect there is, so I think probably it doesn’t work.
No, I’m just looking at the evidence, it would be great if it worked but the evidence is that it doesn’t.But they would not be able to reproduce the event. How do you find the simplest hypothetical laws of nature to explain such a one-time event? It is impossible, given the very concept of a law of nature.
