quote:Bangladesh, India, and China have national media. And I assure you, a regenerated limb would be national news in the Orient, too.
Not unless some very serious preconditions were met. The regenerator has to want to tell his story; and the media has to research and publish his story.
Speaking of story, this idea of miraculous limb regeneration is the topic of my next short story. Thank you, Hatrack!
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I would think that from God's perspective, everyone who had lost a limb gets it back when they die.
As for our earthly time, I think two things seem likely: Firstly, if God exists He seems to not want to make it indisputably provable that He exists. Secondly, if God exists He seems to be willing to allow some degree of pain to exist in the world. I'm personally inclined to think both of these can make sense, because neither our earthly happiness nor attaining knowledge are the highest good.
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quote:Originally posted by Scott R: ... The regenerator has to want to tell his story; and the media has to research and publish his story.
Erm, those seem like the same preconditions that would exist here. How does being "out of the way" matter? (Also, "out of the way" is kind of a matter of perspective.)
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Yes, this is the media that goes searching for the world's tallest man (and the like) in tiny villages in central asia.
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quote:Originally posted by Slim: So if you were unemployed for months looking for a job and you/someone prays you get a job and then you do the next day is that a miracle? If while reading John, you decide to pray for some extra understanding and a stranger immediately comes to your door offering religious advice, you'll treat this as an answer? Or what about you seeing said religious stranger(s) coming your way, and you try to leave but your car has a flat tire? Do you drive away anyway?
Just because A occurs before B does not mean that A causes B. Your conclusions are question begging because they rest on the assumption that prayer causes God to interfere with the world. For you to validly draw the conclusion that a miracle occurred in any one of those scenarios you would need repeated examples of the same thing occurring. For example, you would need to show that prayer increases the likelihood of getting a job sooner.
quote:Originally posted by Slim: I honestly don't expect y'all to take any of the above as miracles. But I do. I've seen them happen. I'm not saying I believe because of these things, because I don't. All I am trying to say is mankind has a strong ability to rationalize anything. Believers/Unbelievers alike. I have confidence that whatever miracle anyone names, someone else can say why it would be a coincidence.
The theory behind prayer is a good example of rationalization. It's like Carl Sagan's invisible dragon. You would expect that prayer could be falsified by showing that it has no effect on the outcome of events but nope.
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Neither of which make any sense to me. I mean, it's not likely that anyone's going to accuse you of faking the original amputation.
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In a world where people believe that the moon landing, Elvis' death, and airplanes crashing into the pentagon were faked, I wouldn't be too sure of that.
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quote:The question asked earlier was why not heal amputees?
Well...why not cure poverty? Why not heal all sickness? Why does my unborn child have heart defects?
The healing of amputees is singled out because:
a) People frequently ask God to heal other injuries and illnesses. Mormon priesthood holders (most adult males), for instance, can give a formal blessing on a sick person and such blessings often include a confident assertion that the illness *will* be cured.
b) People frequently credit God for recovery from other injuries and illnesses.
c) Amputations are inexplicably excluded from the the above. This raises huge questions how much God actually intervenes in healing matters. Most other healing attributed to God has plausible explanations other than divine intervention. Someone given a 5% chance of survival for some horrible disease may interpret their survival as miraculous, but the families of the other 19 may disagree.
Amputations, being unambiguous and having a 0% chance of recovery through any plausible natural mechanisms, are an ideal place to focus on the nature of miracles.
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So you think that someone whose arm miraculously reappears on its stump is more likely to spend the rest of his or her life concealing that fact from people, because they're afraid somebody might make fun of their legitimate medical miracle?
Why doesn't this stop all those people who claim, quite ridicuously, that they got into college only through God's intervention, or that God cured their cancer? Is there no intersection between people of this sort and amputees God wishes to cure?
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quote:So you think that someone whose arm miraculously reappears on its stump is more likely to spend the rest of his or her life concealing that fact from people, because they're afraid somebody might make fun of their legitimate medical miracle?
I can see that as a logical reason, yes. I would not have chosen to phrase it as you have done.
quote:Why doesn't this stop all those people who claim, quite ridicuously, that they got into college only through God's intervention, or that God cured their cancer? Is there no intersection between people of this sort and amputees God wishes to cure?
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Maybe God does cure amputees but he veils our eyes so we cannot perceive it. (And ears and manipulates our tactile sensations as well.)
Unambiguous miracles simply don't exist except in the minds of those who experienced something they consider an unambiguous miracle. Why not assume that includes regeneration of limbs?
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Or appropriately, if you'd prefer. There are people out there who say they only got into college or survived cancer because God helped them. These people give God the credit for this all the time, without worrying about ridicule suppressing their claim; you don't see many miraculous cancer survivors, for example, pretending to be dead to avoid the press. Why are there no ex-amputees among the group of people willing to talk about their miracles?
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quote:Why are there no ex-amputees among the group of people willing to talk about their miracles?
I don't know. Maybe God hasn't healed any amputees. It's not a point against Him in my book, so I don't worry about it.
Maybe it's socially more acceptable to claim that God cured cancer for you-- because lots of people have claimed that. National media does not focus on someone who claims their cancer was divinely chemo'd to death; it happens all the time.
Maybe that kind of media attention isn't what someone wants-- neither God nor the regenerator. I can imagine the type of circus that Tom and fugu envision-- but knowing people and who have had these types of miracles happen to them also lends credence to the idea that they WOULD keep it as quiet as they could, because of their respect for the sacred nature of the miracle.
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quote:Originally posted by scholarette: If God wanted the amputee to have that limb, why wouldn't he just prevent the loss in the first place?
What was the Futurama quote- when you do your job right, no one is sure you did anything at all?
Come on. The discussion is miracles, and what the Bible says about them. God in the Bible explicitely says he does miracles because he wants to people to see them.
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I've seen miracles. They exist. God exists. Their existence is woven deeply into the heart of the hardest of hard sciences. We overlook them because we've grown to think of them as non-miraculous. We've basically forgotten that they're miraculous. I'll write more about this later when I get back from Georgia.
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In fact, just this week I went to Wendy's and my food order was correct. It's a miracle! Proof that god is alive and well in the world!
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quote:Originally posted by Tatiana: I've seen miracles. They exist. God exists. Their existence is woven deeply into the heart of the hardest of hard sciences. We overlook them because we've grown to think of them as non-miraculous. We've basically forgotten that they're miraculous. I'll write more about this later when I get back from Georgia.
Just because you don't understand how something happens does not make it a miracle.
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The converse is also true, however, depending on how you define "miracle." Kate Boots would certainly argue that this is the case.
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quote:Originally posted by El JT de Spang: I've seen miracles, too.
In fact, just this week I went to Wendy's and my food order was correct. It's a miracle! Proof that god is alive and well in the world!
Seriously, that IS a miracle. I want NO tomatoes on my Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger. Is that such an unreasonable request? I know it's only a dollar, but it's not like I'm asking you to add something. I want less for my money!
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: The converse is also true, however, depending on how you define "miracle." Kate Boots would certainly argue that this is the case.
There ya go! If we God to regrow limbs, we had better get a move on.
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Sorry; I meant "these types of miracles" to mean, "miracles that are unequivocal miracles." Not necessarily limb-regrowing as a specific type of miracle.
That's not clear by the use of the plural, and the general understanding of the word "types?"
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I either don't believe you or disagree with your definition of 'unequivocal'.
No offense.
Miracles are like unicorns. You want to believe in them because they sound so freaking cool, but they just don't exist.
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quote:when you do your job right, no one is sure you did anything at all?
Then why did God let someone get cancer in the first place, if He's just going to heal it?
Because sometimes the experience of having cancer is a growth experience? Or has the potential to be so, anyway.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: The converse is also true, however, depending on how you define "miracle." Kate Boots would certainly argue that this is the case.
Yes, but she doesn't believe in the existence of external facts, so I don't consider her a valuable contributor to the discussion. If an explanation not using divine intervention exists and is more likely than the divine one, then it's not a miracle.
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quote:That's not clear by the use of the plural, and the general understanding of the word "types?"
I'm having some trouble imagining a miracle as unequivocal as the regrowth of a limb that you might know about and yet which has been successfully kept private. Would you share the general category of this miracle with me?
quote:Because sometimes the experience of having cancer is a growth experience? Or has the potential to be so, anyway.
And amputation never is? Remember, the argument I'm rebutting is that God wouldn't allow someone to lose a limb if He were just going to heal it.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: Define "divine" for me, KoM.
No. You deliberately reject the minimum standard of rationality needed for meaningful discussion of this subject.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Remember, the argument I'm rebutting is that God wouldn't allow someone to lose a limb if He were just going to heal it.
*shrug* I'm not going to defend something I neither said nor believe to be true.
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I think people should be more cautious before classifying a recovery from a terminal illness as a miracle. To accurately make such a classification we would have to know the survival rate for the illness with relatively high precision and we would have to know how many people survive as a result of miracles versus how many people survive naturally. High precision is needed in the survival rate because a small change in the survival rate can lead to many times more people surviving (ex: a change from a death rate of 99.8% to 99.9% would lead to half as many survivors). For example, if there were a 99.8% chance of dying from a disease and 10000 people got that disease each year then we would expect 20 people to survive each year. People tend to throw around miracle claims willy-nilly so I suspect that each one of those individual cases would be declared a miracle even though, in reality, nothing abnormal happened. Even if we could show that prayer had an effect it would be difficult to distinguish between cases of survival from natural causes and survival from supernatural causes.
This is one of the main reasons why I immediately doubt claims of miracles.
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I don't believe in healing miracles. I have heard stories and I have seen other kinds, but I don't believe in healing miracles. Not for the nonsense reasons listed above, but because if there were healing miracles, my mother would not have died. If you're saying that some people get healing miracles and there was some divine reason my mother had to die, I call bullshit. There's no scenario where the world is better without my mother in it, and the next one can wait.
That doesn't disturb my faith much because I don't believe that God is Santa Claus and, well, my faith was never based on the existence of healing miracles in the first place. If it were, then it would disappear the first time anyone I loved got sick or died. What a tenuous basis for such an important concept. No wonder the Lord does better by us than giving such a pointless and anti-our-mortal-existence foundation. Unless everyone is resurrected tomorrow, real faith has to be based on something else.
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quote:But once the miracle was over, there was simply the written record and the testimony of those who were there. Give or take about 70 years, and virtually all those involved are dead. Today one person with a cellphone can capture a miracle, and the visual record of it can't be lost.
And...? So is your argument that God doesn't do this today because we can't plausibly lose the record of it? As I've noted, that is an excuse I've heard before.
That's one reason, and God doesn't need me to excuse his behavior, so I'll thank you not to treat Him as a defendant on trial.
I think in the past far more people were willing to believe in the supernatural than they are today, and so a miracle did not have as strong an impact as it would today. Elijah calls fire down from heaven and people simply see fire from heaven sent from the Hebrew God. Doesn't mean Bael isn't still around, doesn't mean you have to obey the Hebrew God.
Today in our world of labs and skepticism a heavy duty miracle is far more invasive than it use to be. As I've already said we'd get hung up on explanations and how, not what it means.
quote:The Book of Mormon is one such miracle, the preserving of the saints as they migrated West to escape oppression was another.
quote:These are, as I've pointed out, pretty equivocal miracles. They're not nearly to the same standard as, say, the restoration of a limb.
Tom just what makes the restoration of a limb a much higher tier of miracle than say providing a book over the course of thousands of years to come out in such a time that it can undo much of the confusion people have concerning the nature of life?
We've had a conversation on this topic before, and as I recall you yourself said that God would have to do alot of explaining before you'd acknowledge Him as worthy of worship. We're God to simply toss you a miracle, it seems to me that all you'd do is wonder, "Why now, why not years ago?!"
An attitude of, "God needs to bend to my understanding" simply does not work when dealing with a being who supposedly knows all things, even what's best for us as individuals.
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"Tom just what makes the restoration of a limb a much higher tier of miracle than say providing a book over the course of thousands of years to come out in such a time that it can undo much of the confusion people have concerning the nature of life?"
It's easy to imagine how the book could have been produced and used without involvement from a superhuman/supernatural entity.
It's not really easy to imagine how an amputated limb could be restored without involvement from a superhuman/supernatural entity.
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Especially when there are several mutually exclusive books/teachings asserting they are capable of that feat.
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quote:But once the miracle was over, there was simply the written record and the testimony of those who were there. Give or take about 70 years, and virtually all those involved are dead. Today one person with a cellphone can capture a miracle, and the visual record of it can't be lost.
And...? So is your argument that God doesn't do this today because we can't plausibly lose the record of it? As I've noted, that is an excuse I've heard before.
That's one reason, and God doesn't need me to excuse his behavior, so I'll thank you not to treat Him as a defendant on trial.
Whom should we expect to defend god's behavior?
quote:I think in the past far more people were willing to believe in the supernatural than they are today...
Well, yeah, of course they were. This is the whole basis of the 'god of the gaps' argument.
What difference does that make?
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: An attitude of, "God needs to bend to my understanding" simply does not work when dealing with a being who supposedly knows all things, even what's best for us as individuals.
With that type of attitude God can never be held accountable for what he does. Anything is within his bounds since any evil can be explained away by an appeal to his authority. His plan must be good because he's always good.
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quote:Originally posted by scifibum: "Tom just what makes the restoration of a limb a much higher tier of miracle than say providing a book over the course of thousands of years to come out in such a time that it can undo much of the confusion people have concerning the nature of life?"
It's easy to imagine how the book could have been produced and used without involvement from a superhuman/supernatural entity.
It's not really easy to imagine how an amputated limb could be restored without involvement from a superhuman/supernatural entity.
Whether it can be explained or not has no bearing on the miracle's significance or import.
I don't think it's improbable that in 200 years or less we will have figured out how to reattach all limbs perfectly and even regenerate organs completely. I also think it's likely we will be able to tell the brain to regrow limbs.
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: An attitude of, "God needs to bend to my understanding" simply does not work when dealing with a being who supposedly knows all things, even what's best for us as individuals.
With that type of attitude God can never be held accountable for what he does. Anything is within his bounds since any evil can be explained away by an appeal to his authority. His plan must be good because he's always good.
This would be true if God had no interest in helping us learn. Fortunately in Christian theory God works in mysterious ways, but delights in the progression of His children.
So while our understanding may never be full in this life, there is still plenty of opportunity to start learning.
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quote:But once the miracle was over, there was simply the written record and the testimony of those who were there. Give or take about 70 years, and virtually all those involved are dead. Today one person with a cellphone can capture a miracle, and the visual record of it can't be lost.
And...? So is your argument that God doesn't do this today because we can't plausibly lose the record of it? As I've noted, that is an excuse I've heard before.
That's one reason, and God doesn't need me to excuse his behavior, so I'll thank you not to treat Him as a defendant on trial.
quote:Whom should we expect to defend god's behavior?
Sorry for triple posting but there shouldn't be any prosecution or defending going on in the first place. There are questions and right and wrong answers. There aren't good and bad ones. So we deal with possible explanations not with excuses and accusations.
quote:I think in the past far more people were willing to believe in the supernatural than they are today...
Well, yeah, of course they were. This is the whole basis of the 'god of the gaps' argument.
What difference does that make? [/qb]
Say my explanation doesn't make sense, or is inadequate, but please don't act as if I didn't offer any clarification beyond simply stating an idea. I think the concept that a miracle was less intimidating then as it would be now, coupled with the idea that men now don't wish to believe in things they can't fully understand at least starts to explain the difference.
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Do I need to explicitly state your explanation doesn't make sense? I thought I covered that by asking 'what difference does that make'? I understand your point, but I fail to see how it applies to the fact that we have scientific proof of exactly zero miracles in all of human history.
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: An attitude of, "God needs to bend to my understanding" simply does not work when dealing with a being who supposedly knows all things, even what's best for us as individuals.
With that type of attitude God can never be held accountable for what he does. Anything is within his bounds since any evil can be explained away by an appeal to his authority. His plan must be good because he's always good.
This would be true if God had no interest in helping us learn. Fortunately in Christian theory God works in mysterious ways, but delights in the progression of His children.
So while our understanding may never be full in this life, there is still plenty of opportunity to start learning.
That doesn't really address what I said. I'm supposed to ignore the vast amounts of evidence against God's supposed omnibenevolence because he "works in mysterious ways"?
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