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How can you tell if an event is a miracle.

Dan From Smithville

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On another thread this was offered in defense of miracles as evidence that miracles happen.

https://charismactivism.com/2012/11/03/eleven-medically-verified-healings/

The term "medically verified" is used to lend a sense of legitimacy to the claim that each is a miracle, yet there is no medical evidence that I could find that would define them all as miraculous. All I can see that is medically verified is that the individuals were ill and then very quickly not ill. There is no cause listed for each miraculous event that would be sufficient to claim it had been verified by medical practitioners. Mostly, the events were just unexpected, dramatic and rapid. I do not think unexpected, dramatic and rapid are enough to differentiate ordinary events from miracles.

I have seen the miracles can be broken into events that defy the laws of nature and those that defy the odds. It may confound the discussion, but I had both events that seem to defy nature and those that are improbable in mind when I made the initial post. Events declared miracles seem to fall into one or the other of these groups.

What I see is that something unexpected happened and it was a positive outcome, therefore it is a miracle. I just want more than that, but I do not think that is possible. Perhaps just believing something good happening is a miracle and leave it at that as long as one does not make claims based on that believed event as evidence.

Edit: I wanted to note that the anecdotes listed in the cited link are called "case histories", but there is no reference to sources or any sort of case study. That use may just be another name to lend credence to the claim of miracle and have no valid stance as evidence of serious inquiry. I do not know fully.
 

Dan From Smithville

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I don't know either. If you think about it it's a miracle we are chatting, or is it just random chance. Too early in the morning for my brain to be thinking about these things but I don't believe I've had anything happen to me, near me or around me that couldn't be logically explained.
That is an excellent point I think. Do miracles have to be dramatic and showy. The first anecdote in the link I provided speaks of a doctor that heard a voice and revived an apparently dead patient. That is supposed to be the miracle. But what if the doctor doing the work became a doctor by the twist of some simple miracle and that is the real miracle? That he was there at all to say let's try to save this man one more time. Where are the lines drawn? Do miracles have magnitude? These things are discussed and claimed constantly, but clearly no one really knows much about them to really define them.

Actually, it is the pretty cool to be able to converse and establish online friendships with people in other states, countries and continents that I may never meet in person. That seems to fall on the scale of a miracle in some sense. I consider it miraculous, though it can be defined by established evidence. That seems to fall into the improbable event miracle category.

I have seen things that haven't been explained or had no ready explanation, but I do not know they had no reasonable explanation. Some could have been miracles. I have never seen miracles of the magnitude claimed in the "medically verified" miracles listed in the link.
 

Dan From Smithville

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There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

- Albert Einstein
I would put myself in the "I do not know what a real miracle is compared to an ordinary and explainable event" category.
 

Dan From Smithville

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I guess if the incident defied the laws of physics. Like levitation where there’s gravity, and no other reason to explain it?
Some new event may not be easily explained, but ignorance does not defy physics. I am ignorant of miracles, but that does not make them real or unreal.
 

Dan From Smithville

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... and the laws of physics are inferred from observations of what happens, so anything that actually happens - even if it's rare, unpredictable or incomprehensible - is within the scope of "the laws of physics."

The implication here is that a miracle is something that can never happen.


Sounds like you're describing an argument from ignorance. A God of the Gaps.
I see some of the elements of gap thinking in many of the claims that some event was a miracle. But it is difficult to know since no one seems to know the details and how they fit in one or the other of the two general categories described to constitute miracles. The suddenness of an event is often cited to indicate that healing was a miracle, but I do not know the rapidity of a natural remission from a disease to compare the two. In either event, both would be under the laws of physics and more about probability.

I suppose my questions really circle around to how claims of miracles are used as evidence to show that something from established science is the flawed thinking of mankind. Since we do not know how to determine if an event is a real miracle or not, then how can it be used as evidence to reject the results of science and science-based technology that has supporting evidence. This seems to be the problem of the result of considering things miracles regardless of whether they are or are not.
 

Dan From Smithville

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Interestingly, I would say that it doesn't matter. If it happened, and it's good, then be joyous, and move on.
I agree. I am thankful when positive things happen.

I occasionally met people in AA that had a profound, instantaneous recovery. It was literally as if God has suddenly reached inside them and reconfigured them. And from that moment on they had no desire to drink. Period. It was quite rare, but it did happen, occasionally.

Was it a 'miracle'? It sure was to them! And why not? Imagine suddenly discovering that your stage 4 cancer had vanished overnight!

All I can say is God bless them. (Maybe he did!) And be happy for them.
I am unsure what to make of those kinds of events. They could be miracles. I find them miraculous. But finding them miraculous is an argument from incredulity that does those events no justice. I am happy for those people as well.

My own father had the inexplicable ability to develop a habit and then walk away from it. As a young man he drank prodigiously (sometimes creating situations not in his interest, or so I was told), yet the man I grew up with never drank alcohol at all that I ever witnessed. He stopped smoking in a day, much to my mother's dismay. It took her a bit longer. Some people are blessed with unusual abilities.

The inexplicable remains inexplicable. Good or bad.
It may be that is the case. Some things can remain mysteries forever.
 

Dan From Smithville

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A miracle would be akin to the suspension of the laws of nature. It would have to be specific to a particular time and place for us to know that is the case, otherwise we might have become convinced its totally normal.

If you had a pet hamster and it defies the laws of gravity, starts drifting through the air and round your bedroom to the theme music for 2001: a space odessy, we’d be in the right area. That sort of thing.
Based on information provided by others, miracles fall into one of two large categories. Those that defy the laws of nature and those that defy probability.

Since people declare things are miracles, I am assuming some of them know the difference between ordinary events and events that are miracles. What I am hoping to see are the details that they use to make that determination. What I am finding is that I am not alone in my ignorance of those details and characteristics. It seems that in most of those instances, the details are unknown and belief that of the event as a miracles is the defining character. I am also not sure that it matters, just so long as you don't start making claims that cannot be backed up. This, in my mind, takes it to some level of false witness that I am enjoined (as presumably they are too) from engaging in.
 

Dan From Smithville

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Why not?

Because it implies that God will directly intervene to make someone sober or cancer-free if he wills it, so if someone else isn't sober or cancer-free, that's God's will, too.

For someone who's struggling, hearing people perpetuate the idea that God is perfectly happy to intervene for the "right" people with similar struggles can be counter-productive and cruel.

The corollary to "God cured Bill's stage 4 cancer" is "God could have cured Jane's stage 4 cancer but didn't." That's a pretty heavy burden for Jane and her family.
I find some of these implications very troubling.
 

Dan From Smithville

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But the laws of nature are descriptive, not proscriptive. Any real phenomenon we observe is automatically part of the "laws of nature" even if it only happens once.


How could we know that this wasn't natural?

I'm especially interested to hear how you think we could conclude that no natural phenomenon that we don't know about yet could be responsible.
Perhaps it is an emergent property of unlikely events that cannot be predicted based on what we know. Knowing about the chemistry of water does not lead to a prediction of the Mississippi River, for instance.
 

Dan From Smithville

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It depends on the context.
It should be something that defies science or is unexplainable according to today's science.
That seems to be one general description of a miracle and the one that most people seem at odds with based on the evidence we know of regarding the natural world.

Our human view of miracles seems to make God sound capricious and inconsistent. I wonder if it is a form of the observer effect applied to theism.
 

Dan From Smithville

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Do you mean something different from "natural laws" than I do? Because what I mean by "natural laws" is "the way the universe works, inferred by observations of what happens."

We build a paradigm of how things work based on observations. If something happens that's inconsistent with the paradigm, the paradigm gets adjusted based on the new observations. That's how "natural laws" have always worked.

This is why people's descriptions of "miracles" make no sense to me. "What if we observe something that doesn't fit at all in our current paradigm?!" Then we adjust the paradigm... as has been done countless times before.

If God were to exist, then he would be just one more thing within nature.

If we were to observe God breaking a "natural law," then we would infer from our observation that the "law" in question isn't universally true, so it would cease to be a law.
That is a mighty barrier I struggle with. How can something break, avoid, or go through the laws of nature? I cannot conceive of anything that makes sense.
 

Dan From Smithville

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Then science look at the conditions where it happens, looks for regularities, and uses those regularities *as* the explanation.

Levitation might be because of another force we hadn't notice before.
And not noticing is a gap and not a valid explanation.

There seems to be more of a problem in characterizing a miracle than in declaring something a miracle.
 

Dan From Smithville

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I think the first step is clarifying what you mean by "miracle." That's going to point to what the justification for one could be.
The broad definitions were thankfully provided by a few others and it may confound the discussion that I am referring to both as miracles. I will try to differentiate as best I can going forward.

I am not so much interested in the justification of a miracle as I am in determining a miracle from a non-miracle regardless of which broad category it falls into (laws of nature or probability).
 

9-10ths_Penguin

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Premium Member
That is a mighty barrier I struggle with. How can something break, avoid, or go through the laws of nature? I cannot conceive of anything that makes sense.
It can't.

The laws of nature are inferred from what happens. If we see observe something that doesn't make sense in our understanding of the laws of nature, we take this as a sign that our understanding is wrong and infer a new understanding that takes the new observation into account.
 

Altfish

Veteran Member
That seems to be another version of gap thinking. It is a miracle until we have a valid explanation. Then it is either not a miracle or it has to be drug to a different gap of ignorance.
A miracle is defined thus:" an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency."

Would you like to define a miracle in another way?
 
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