Creationism and life in general

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StAnastasia said:
What would be really interesting would be to see God causing the arm or leg of an amputee to regrow. That would be a spectacular miracle!
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razredge said:
Indeed - though there is a possible response to this I find plausible:

Simply, there might not have been an amputee who sincerely believed that God would miraculously regrow their arm and prayed for this to happen - this is plausible since it is quite a leap of faith from asking God to cure your cancer and curing something very material such as a missing limb which defies all common sense and conventional wisdom (wheras most cancer patients believe that there is a change that their illness will go into remission).
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It seems to me that there is also another way we should look at this situation.

All human life is precious to God. Those who are normal. Those who are not. Those who are smart. Those who are not. Those who suffer greatly. Those who don’t.

Life is a gift from God. When we say things like “God wouldn’t/shouldn’t have made that person suffer…” or “God should heal this or that person…” we are not looking at the inherent good of the person, but rather focusing on his/her “defects”. Of course, it is our own definition of defective that we use. To God, is that person defective because they have an amputated limb (or some other malady)? Isn’t it the soul that is important? If anything, pray for the person’s soul.

God is love. Everything that happens to us is for our own benefit. (But sometimes only to our benefit if we freely choose to take advantage of an available opportunity).
 
razredge said:
Then what is the point of praying if disasters fall on believers and unbelievers with equal likelihood?
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Most people
understand that the point of praying to God is to deepen one’s relationship with one’s Creator.
The problem with this is infallibility is essentially unfalsifiable since you claim as infallible the teachings that haven’t changed and as fallible the ones that have.
It then becomes a case of ‘vaticinium ex eventu’ and I doubt that earlier Catholics or Popes would accept your modern revisionism of their then current doctrines as fallible.
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Oh dear. These comments sidestep the fact that infallibility has to do with content and protocol all under the supervision of the Holy Spirit
 
StAnastasia said:
There seem to be limits to either God’s power or God’s willingness to grant healing. Miracles are often about things that may eventually be explained, such as spontaneous remissions from cancer. What would be really interesting would be to see God causing the arm or leg of an amputee to regrow. That would be a spectacular miracle!
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You must be joking about God.😦
 
inocente said:
Going only on posts on CAF, I’m not sure Catholicism does tackle the question, or if it does it didn’t publicize the answer very well – there’s a whole host of views on who will get to heaven, what heaven is, and what eternal life will be like.

The reason for asking was issues with Matthew 6 (the whole chapter). Most Christians follow the advice about keeping donations private but somehow not about praying only in private, even though it’s right next to the Lord’s prayer, you can’t miss it. So already there’s confusion about the nature of treasures in heaven. Then if we’re not to worry about tomorrow, the treasures can’t be about storing up air-miles to heaven, that would make our motives selfish. The treasures must be about today, about growing closer to God today. No?

I’m not questioning the promise of an after-life but wondering about the core of Catholicism. If the choice was to live forever or to make a better world today with no assurance of an afterlife, and a Catholic could only opt for one, which would be the officially approved good choice?
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I’m a Catholic and I am totally confused by some of the posts by Catholics. Maybe these Catholics should start drinking bottle water.:rolleyes:
 
tonyrey said:
The development of doctrine in the light of new discoveries is consistent with the fundamental teaching of the Church.
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Not exactly.

What new discoveries? Divine Revelation was completed in Christ Jesus.
 
grannymh said:
Not exactly.

What new discoveries? Divine Revelation was completed in Christ Jesus.
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I agree with your statement, but perhaps tonyrey’s reference wasn’t to divine revelation.

Perhaps the reference was to something like the “discovery” of IVF. 50 years ago there was no Church teaching about it since it didn’t exist at the time. Now there is a teaching.

🤷
 
tonyrey said:
Then it stands to reason that there is a reason! For example, coercive miracles defeat the purpose of giving us free will.
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How do you define “coercive miracle”? One we have to witness at gunpoint?
 
tonyrey said:
To believe in miracles is different from tempting Providence!
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Ok, to give another example, if there’s a spontaneous remission from cancer after prayer you may want to call it a miracle. But how many remissions are there without any prayer, and how many occasions when praying fails? We don’t ask these questions naturally, we’re really bad at statistics, we just pick out favorable cases and shout hallelujah. But a little scientific training and then we do ask, and find it may not be a miracle after all, which is one way science unwittingly embarrasses religion.
 
inocente said:
Ok, to give another example, if there’s a spontaneous remission from cancer after prayer you may want to call it a miracle. But how many remissions are there without any prayer, and how many occasions when praying fails? We don’t ask these questions naturally, we’re really bad at statistics, we just pick out favorable cases and shout hallelujah. But a little scientific training and then we do ask, and find it may not be a miracle after all, which is one way science unwittingly embarrasses religion.
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You are generalising! Does it follow that miracles never occur?
 
tonyrey said:
You are generalising! Does it follow that miracles never occur?
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Yes, science likes generalizing to find general laws. 🙂

Miracles seem to fall into the same bracket as remote viewing and such – each time procedures are tightened-up to remove more mundane possibilities, less effect is seen until it disappears all together. That doesn’t rule them out completely but means if they happen they must be exceedingly rare, much rarer than usually claimed. And after all, they’re supposed to be exceptionally unexpected events hence the name.
 
inocente said:
Miracles seem to fall into the same bracket as remote viewing and such – each time procedures are tightened-up to remove more mundane possibilities, less effect is seen until it disappears all together. … And after all, they’re supposed to be exceptionally unexpected events hence the name.
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Actually, the name means “something we regard with wonder.” (Latin = miro, marare)
 
StAnastasia said:
Actually, the name means “something we regard with wonder.” (Latin = miro, marare)
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As in “something not explicable by the laws of nature”, but more often “something not yet explained” followed by “rats, someone’s now explained it”. 🙂
 
inocente said:
Ok, to give another example, if there’s a spontaneous remission from cancer after prayer you may want to call it a miracle. But how many remissions are there without any prayer, and how many occasions when praying fails?
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Inocente, your comment is interesting. A scientist friend told me a few your as back about a Christian prayer group that were assigned to pray for half of a population of couples trying get pregnant through an in vitro fertilization clinic in Japan (these people didn’t even know they were being prayed for half a world away). The couples who were prayed for conceived at a statistically higher rate than the couples who were not prayed for. The difference was so marked that the experiment was rerun to rule out other factors. I’ll try to track down that study for you.

StAnastasia
 
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