'Extraordinary Evidence Demands Extraordinary...'

[daws101]

If a miracle is an event that violates the laws of nature, and science involves only the testing and exploration of the laws of nature, how could science possibly prove a miraculous event that is outside the laws of Nature?

miracles have never been proven to be outside the laws of physics or nature

No, they are outside the laws of science by definition. Were they within the laws of science they would not be miracles but instead would be providential events.

what is lacking is our knowledge of those laws.
miracle is just another name for short lived phenomena or rare phenomena.

Not by the literal meanings, though people often use them that way. A man I once knew said that he was in a car wreck and was tossed from the car as often happens. Everyone else in the car died, and his being tossed just happened to save his life when it more typically sends the person into the path of the rolling car and they die instead.

That is not a miracle though he doubtlessly felt it was.

I met a man in Germany who claimed to have been shot at by a viet cong at point blank range and after he killed the VC he looked at the bullet holes behind him and saw that they had to have passed through his body harmlessly. If true that was a miracle, but it is more likely that the bullet markings he saw predated the incident he was in, and so he merely was mistaken.

But one time I did see a real miracle that was inexplicable. I investigated the thing from every angle, above, below inside and outside and it was simply impossible to have happened the way I saw it happen, and yet it did. I'm not an idiot. I can explain various tricks and have a talent for doing so, such as Penn and Tellers bullet catching trick.

And I cannot test this phenomena, it is not repeatable. I cannot describe it because the details are pointless; it couldn't have happened and yet it did.

It changed my life, some good and some bad, but it totally altered me and my view of the world.

Science could never possibly prove that what I witnessed happened but that does not change what I saw or shake my certainty that it happened in reality.

THAT is a miracle.

Scientific proof is irrelevant; I know what I saw and science has nothing it can say about it. The laws of Nature were temporarily suspended for a moment and science cant touch that.

bullshit jim....the laws of nature cannot be suspended...
what you saw was out of your experience so you did the most human of things you came up with a logical fallacy.

 

[sealybobo]

The commonly repeated phrase 'Extraordinary claims demands extraordinary evidence.' would seem to be an example of confirmation bias.

An assertion or claim only seems to be extraordinary due to existing theories or experience sets. The Confirmation Bias' fallacy says that we tend to tailor evidence to meet our expectations and so we shouldn't allow our expectations to influence our perceptions. The scientific method is alone the valid method to be used.

How is demanding a higher level of evidence for anything that disrupts our current view of Reality NOT confirmation bias and a violation of objective testing?

The standard of evidence required to prove a god’s existence is immediately more than any personal anecdote, witness testimony, ancient book or reported miracle – none of which can be considered extraordinarily reliable. The human mind is also highly susceptible to being fooled and even fooling itself. One could be suffering from an hallucination or a form of undiagnosed schizophrenia, hysteria or psychosis, ruling out even our own senses as reliable evidence gathering mechanisms in this case. As strange as it sounds, misunderstood aliens might even be attempting to interact with us using extremely advanced technology. In fact, reality itself could be a computer simulation which we unknowingly inhabit.

Every conceivable argument, every imaginable piece of evidence for god is not without some fatal flaw or more likely explanation which precludes it from being used as definitive proof.

So screw extraordinary evidence. Just give us any good evidence.

The standard of evidence required to prove a god’s existence is immediately more than any personal anecdote, witness testimony, ancient book or reported miracle – none of which can be considered extraordinarily reliable. The human mind is also highly susceptible to being fooled and even fooling itself. One could be suffering from an hallucination or a form of undiagnosed schizophrenia, hysteria or psychosis, ruling out even our own senses as reliable evidence gathering mechanisms in this case. As strange as it sounds, misunderstood aliens might even be attempting to interact with us using extremely advanced technology. In fact, reality itself could be a computer simulation which we unknowingly inhabit.

Every conceivable argument, every imaginable piece of evidence for god is not without some fatal flaw or more likely explanation which precludes it from being used as definitive proof.

There is, however, a simple answer to this question: God is what it would take to convince an atheist. An omniscient god would know the exact standard of evidence required to convince any atheist of its existence and, being omnipotent, it would also be able to immediately produce this evidence. If it wanted to, a god could conceivably change the brain chemistry of any individual in order to compel them to believe. It could even restructure the entire universe in such a way as to make non-belief impossible.

In short, a god actually proving its own existence is what would convince any atheist of said god’s existence.

 

[sealybobo]

If a miracle is an event that violates the laws of nature, and science involves only the testing and exploration of the laws of nature, how could science possibly prove a miraculous event that is outside the laws of Nature?

miracles have never been proven to be outside the laws of physics or nature

No, they are outside the laws of science by definition. Were they within the laws of science they would not be miracles but instead would be providential events.

what is lacking is our knowledge of those laws.
miracle is just another name for short lived phenomena or rare phenomena.

Not by the literal meanings, though people often use them that way. A man I once knew said that he was in a car wreck and was tossed from the car as often happens. Everyone else in the car died, and his being tossed just happened to save his life when it more typically sends the person into the path of the rolling car and they die instead.

That is not a miracle though he doubtlessly felt it was.

I met a man in Germany who claimed to have been shot at by a viet cong at point blank range and after he killed the VC he looked at the bullet holes behind him and saw that they had to have passed through his body harmlessly. If true that was a miracle, but it is more likely that the bullet markings he saw predated the incident he was in, and so he merely was mistaken.

But one time I did see a real miracle that was inexplicable. I investigated the thing from every angle, above, below inside and outside and it was simply impossible to have happened the way I saw it happen, and yet it did. I'm not an idiot. I can explain various tricks and have a talent for doing so, such as Penn and Tellers bullet catching trick.

And I cannot test this phenomena, it is not repeatable. I cannot describe it because the details are pointless; it couldn't have happened and yet it did.

It changed my life, some good and some bad, but it totally altered me and my view of the world.

Science could never possibly prove that what I witnessed happened but that does not change what I saw or shake my certainty that it happened in reality.

THAT is a miracle.

Scientific proof is irrelevant; I know what I saw and science has nothing it can say about it. The laws of Nature were temporarily suspended for a moment and science cant touch that.

You know what you saw?

Miracles have not been demonstrated to occur. The existence of a miracle would pose logical problems for belief in a god which can supposedly see the future and began the universe with a set of predefined laws. Even if a ‘miracle’ could be demonstrated it would not immediately imply the existence of a god, much less any particular one, as unknown natural processes or agents could still be at work.

Most alleged miracles can be explained as statistically unlikely occurrences. For example, one child surviving a plane crash that kills two hundred others is not a miracle, just as one person winning the lottery is not. In the absence of any empirical evidence, all other claims can be dismissed as the result of magical thinking, misattribution, credulity, hearsay and anecdote. Eye-witness testimony and anecdotal accounts are, by themselves, not reliable or definitive forms of proof for such extraordinary claims.

Divine intervention claims most often concern systems and events for which we have poor predictive capabilities, for example, weather, sports, health and social/economic interactions. Such claims are rarely made in relation to those things we can accurately predict and test e.g. the motion of celestial bodies, boiling point of water and pull of gravity. If a god is constantly intervening in the universe it supposedly created, then it is with such ambiguity as to appear completely indistinguishable from normal background chance.

Note: Theists often fail to adequately apportion blame when claims of their particular god’s ‘infinite mercy’ or ‘omnibenevolence’ involve sparing a few lives in a disaster, or recovery from a debilitating disease – all of which their god would ultimately be responsible for inflicting if it existed. See also: Euthyphro dilemma, Confirmation bias, Cherry Picking.

 

[sealybobo]

What's that Starkey, some kind of guilt by association fallacy?

Lol, science cannot prove or disprove mystical experiences, dude.

My comment is an equivalent comparison (and quite accurate) to what you are trying to do.

Hint: no one can prove or disprove mystical experiences.

Mass hallucination is not probative for anything other than "Hey, there's a lot of people unable to process reality."

Inability for science to prove an event does not prove it was an illusion, hallucination or hysteria. That is merely your bigotry and prejudice slanting the plausible options in your mind.

Other than you just being a fucking liar.

A result of our naturally evolved neurology, made hypersensitive to purpose (an ‘unseen actor’) because of the large social groups humans have and the way the brain associates pattern with intent.

Humans have evolved a variety of cognitive shortcuts to deal with the mass of information provided by our senses. In particular, we tend to filter sensory input according to a set of expectations built on prior beliefs and past experiences, impart meaning to ambiguous input even when there is no real meaning behind it and infer causal relationships where none exist.

Personal revelation cannot be independently verified. So-called ‘revelations’ never include information a recipient could not have known beforehand, such as the time and location of a rare event or answers to any number of unsolved problems in science. They are usually emotional or perceptual in content and therefore unremarkable among the many cognitive processes brains exhibit, including dreams and hallucinations. These experiences may even be artificially induced by narcotics or magnetic fields. Extreme cases may be diagnosed as a form of schizophrenia or psychosis.

Spiritual and religious experiences are not only inconsistent among individuals but are variably attributed to different gods, aliens, spirits, rituals, hallucinations, meditation etc. The fact that medical conditions and other natural processes can induce these experiences is evidence they are produced by our brain.

 

[sealybobo]

What's that Starkey, some kind of guilt by association fallacy?

Lol, science cannot prove or disprove mystical experiences, dude.

My comment is an equivalent comparison (and quite accurate) to what you are trying to do.

Hint: no one can prove or disprove mystical experiences.

Mass hallucination is not probative for anything other than "Hey, there's a lot of people unable to process reality."

Inability for science to prove an event does not prove it was an illusion, hallucination or hysteria. That is merely your bigotry and prejudice slanting the plausible options in your mind.

Other than you just being a fucking liar.

Nonsense. We hear about all these stories about exorcisms, miracles and visits by spirits but they have yet to document for the whole world to see. I know friends and neighbors who swear they have seen ghosts or have been helped by angels.

By your logic, I should not doubt these people? Really?

And christians say I should not doubt the bible even though it was clearly written by men. In fact, most people realize the adam & eve, noah & moses stories are all just that, stories. Why tell those stories? To teach right from wrong.

So, my friend, if the old testament is a bunch of made up stories, what are the chances the jesus story is made up too? And you have never seen a miracle.

You people don't understand how the mind/brain works. You are so gullible it is silly.

 

[JakeStarkey]

The illness in JimBowie's thinking is that his hallucinations should be accepted as verified evidence.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Documented but not scientifically tested via the scientific method. If it were then it wouldn't by definition be miraculous as science cannot repeatably confirm a miracle.



Maybe one day, but then again, He wont be appearing miraculously by definition as in and of itself appearing is not a miracle necessarily.




The healings at Lourdes are fairly well documented, and I have spoken with a number of other Christians that have witnessed bonafied miracles.

Science cannot prove they occurred or how they happened.

Science can prove miracles happen, they just don't call them miracles, they call it spontaneous remission. The fact that scientist do not have all the answers is not proof that they will never be able to explain something, it just proves they haven't found the explanation yet. Some scientist are beginning to think that the reason that no one has developed a unified field theory is that Einstein got gravity wrong, and they are attempting to rework the entire theory of how gravity works.

If a miracle is an event that violates the laws of nature, and science involves only the testing and exploration of the laws of nature, how could science possibly prove a miraculous event that is outside the laws of Nature?

Why do miracles have to violate the laws of nature? Science can revise the laws to explain a miracle if it wants to, the so called laws are just a convenient way of pigeonholing the universe.

 

[JakeStarkey]

Science can prove miracles happen, they just don't call them miracles, they call it spontaneous remission. The fact that scientist do not have all the answers is not proof that they will never be able to explain something, it just proves they haven't found the explanation yet. Some scientist are beginning to think that the reason that no one has developed a unified field theory is that Einstein got gravity wrong, and they are attempting to rework the entire theory of how gravity works.

If a miracle is an event that violates the laws of nature, and science involves only the testing and exploration of the laws of nature, how could science possibly prove a miraculous event that is outside the laws of Nature?

Why do miracles have to violate the laws of nature? Science can revise the laws to explain a miracle if it wants to, the so called laws are just a convenient way of pigeonholing the universe.

Because humans are fallible and unreliable (think JimBowie), we use what measures of scientific method that we can employ. An assertion that a miracle does not violate the laws of the universe may be true but remains unverifiable. There it only can be personal testimony, not witness to anyone who did not participate in it.

 

[alang1216]

But back to the BB and multi-verses being NOT extraordinary; two hundred years ago if you tried to tell a scientist that there were alternate universes and the universe we live in came into being in an instant, he would have insisted that you were speaking of the miraculous. For what is the Creation if not the BB and Heaven but an alternate universe?

The process of the miraculous becoming normal seems to be the following:
1) the almost exact same behavior/phenomena is secularized with a de-religionized jargon.

2) A theory is proposed that describes the effects of the event in question, looks for non-miraculous causes, and proposes a tests based on how the exact same thing came about but not using any religious references or appeal to religious authority.

3) Testing is done and the secularized version of the miraculous event is accepted as true.

This is what happened with the BB and multiverse theories secularizing and winning acceptance for the Creation account and accounts of visions of Heaven in an alternate universe.

To say something is miraculous is to say we don't know how it happens.

So by your logic, volcanoes were miraculous in 1500 AD? No, a real miracle is miraculous in fact, and those things we once thought miracles, like the Creation of the Universe, that were done by the laws of science and science finally caught up, those are not real miracles. They are mistakenly described as miracles.

I’m confused, now it sounds like you don’t believe in miracles? I don’t since I’ve lived many years and have yet to see a miracle or any supernatural event at all.

Except that does not describe what happened with the BB or alternate universe theories.
Theologians said the universe was created in an instant millennia ago and scientists are finally realizing that they were right, and the process you have written does not reflect that reality.

What theologians were these? Genesis took a week and the earth and sun were created on different days. Doesn’t sound at all like the BB.

What an amazingly bigoted thing to say. I suppose you think that nothing that is outside the ability of science to prove is true?

Like the volcano in days of old, we don’t know how things work so we call them miracles. When we learn how they work, we realize they are not miraculous, just part of the natural world. Science can only explain the natural world and I’ve never encountered anything else, not God, angels, ghosts, bigfoot, etc.

It is the Creation Story in the form of scientific laws as depicted by modern science.

One is an interpolation of existing physics and the other is a theological story.

And the first came from the latter.

You’ll have to explain that, I don’t see any connection between the two.

 

[JakeStarkey]

The Creation Story is myth, a narrative with germinal truths in it, but unknowable.

Science does not explain the spiritual because it does not have the tools to do so.

 

[JimBowie1958]

miracles have never been proven to be outside the laws of physics or nature

No, they are outside the laws of science by definition. Were they within the laws of science they would not be miracles but instead would be providential events.

what is lacking is our knowledge of those laws.
miracle is just another name for short lived phenomena or rare phenomena.

Not by the literal meanings, though people often use them that way. A man I once knew said that he was in a car wreck and was tossed from the car as often happens. Everyone else in the car died, and his being tossed just happened to save his life when it more typically sends the person into the path of the rolling car and they die instead.

That is not a miracle though he doubtlessly felt it was.

I met a man in Germany who claimed to have been shot at by a viet cong at point blank range and after he killed the VC he looked at the bullet holes behind him and saw that they had to have passed through his body harmlessly. If true that was a miracle, but it is more likely that the bullet markings he saw predated the incident he was in, and so he merely was mistaken.

But one time I did see a real miracle that was inexplicable. I investigated the thing from every angle, above, below inside and outside and it was simply impossible to have happened the way I saw it happen, and yet it did. I'm not an idiot. I can explain various tricks and have a talent for doing so, such as Penn and Tellers bullet catching trick.

And I cannot test this phenomena, it is not repeatable. I cannot describe it because the details are pointless; it couldn't have happened and yet it did.

It changed my life, some good and some bad, but it totally altered me and my view of the world.

Science could never possibly prove that what I witnessed happened but that does not change what I saw or shake my certainty that it happened in reality.

THAT is a miracle.

Scientific proof is irrelevant; I know what I saw and science has nothing it can say about it. The laws of Nature were temporarily suspended for a moment and science cant touch that.

bullshit jim....the laws of nature cannot be suspended...
what you saw was out of your experience so you did the most human of things you came up with a logical fallacy.

There is no logical fallacy, since I agree it was impossible, hence a miracle.

What in the world do you think my logical fallacy is?

 

[JakeStarkey]

What in the world do you think my logical fallacy is?

That you have programmed yourself to believe what you want despite the fact that you don't have the tools necessary to measure its validity other than your opinion.

It's called confirmation bias.

 

[JimBowie1958]

The commonly repeated phrase 'Extraordinary claims demands extraordinary evidence.' would seem to be an example of confirmation bias.

An assertion or claim only seems to be extraordinary due to existing theories or experience sets. The Confirmation Bias' fallacy says that we tend to tailor evidence to meet our expectations and so we shouldn't allow our expectations to influence our perceptions. The scientific method is alone the valid method to be used.

How is demanding a higher level of evidence for anything that disrupts our current view of Reality NOT confirmation bias and a violation of objective testing?

The standard of evidence required to prove a god’s existence is immediately more than any personal anecdote, witness testimony, ancient book or reported miracle – none of which can be considered extraordinarily reliable. The human mind is also highly susceptible to being fooled and even fooling itself. One could be suffering from an hallucination or a form of undiagnosed schizophrenia, hysteria or psychosis, ruling out even our own senses as reliable evidence gathering mechanisms in this case. As strange as it sounds, misunderstood aliens might even be attempting to interact with us using extremely advanced technology. In fact, reality itself could be a computer simulation which we unknowingly inhabit.

Every conceivable argument, every imaginable piece of evidence for god is not without some fatal flaw or more likely explanation which precludes it from being used as definitive proof.

So screw extraordinary evidence. Just give us any good evidence.

The standard of evidence required to prove a god’s existence is immediately more than any personal anecdote, witness testimony, ancient book or reported miracle – none of which can be considered extraordinarily reliable. The human mind is also highly susceptible to being fooled and even fooling itself. One could be suffering from an hallucination or a form of undiagnosed schizophrenia, hysteria or psychosis, ruling out even our own senses as reliable evidence gathering mechanisms in this case. As strange as it sounds, misunderstood aliens might even be attempting to interact with us using extremely advanced technology. In fact, reality itself could be a computer simulation which we unknowingly inhabit.

Every conceivable argument, every imaginable piece of evidence for god is not without some fatal flaw or more likely explanation which precludes it from being used as definitive proof.

The infinite regression fallacy is evidence for a Creator and has no fatal flaw. The logical evidence for a Creator was so strong the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers almost universally accepted the concept of an eternal Creator and rejected polytheism by the time Alexander conquered Persia.

Simply because you are ignorant of the evidence and reject it out of hand as impossible proves nothing other than your own closed mindedness.

There is, however, a simple answer to this question: God is what it would take to convince an atheist.

That makes no sense. Why is God obligated to His own existence to a person whose self identity is tied to NOT believing He exists?

An omniscient god would know the exact standard of evidence required to convince any atheist of its existence and, being omnipotent, it would also be able to immediately produce this evidence.

You assume that such a standard of evidence exists.

If it wanted to, a god could conceivably change the brain chemistry of any individual in order to compel them to believe. It could even restructure the entire universe in such a way as to make non-belief impossible.

Perhaps God prefers mankind to have Free Will?

In short, a god actually proving its own existence is what would convince any atheist of said god’s existence.

Except that there is already plenty of evidence for such belief hence the reason why 98% of the people in the world are not atheists and that number is shrinking annually.

The biggest reason that most atheists are atheists is simply ignorance due to laziness or disinterest.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

If a miracle is an event that violates the laws of nature, and science involves only the testing and exploration of the laws of nature, how could science possibly prove a miraculous event that is outside the laws of Nature?

Why do miracles have to violate the laws of nature? Science can revise the laws to explain a miracle if it wants to, the so called laws are just a convenient way of pigeonholing the universe.

Because humans are fallible and unreliable (think JimBowie), we use what measures of scientific method that we can employ. An assertion that a miracle does not violate the laws of the universe may be true but remains unverifiable. There it only can be personal testimony, not witness to anyone who did not participate in it.

If you ignore the fact that medical science has documented the results of "miracles" you have a pretty good point that they are all anecdotal.

 

[JakeStarkey]

If you ignore the fact that medical science has documented the results of "miracles" you have a pretty good point that they are all anecdotal.

Medical science has documented that certain events have occurred but have no verifiable way of evaluating said events. Thus your statement is false, nothing more than examples of Confirmation Bias and why non-believers have trouble believing because of nonsense like yours.

In other words, the events are only for you and have no power of witness for others.

I have no trouble with my belief in God, despite all the junk nonsense put out there by creationists that are simply unsustainable. And I don't require Confirmation Bias as you are describing it.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

If you ignore the fact that medical science has documented the results of "miracles" you have a pretty good point that they are all anecdotal.

Medical science has documented that certain events have occurred but have no verifiable way of evaluating said events. Thus your statement is false, nothing more than examples of Confirmation Bias and why non-believers have trouble believing because of nonsense like yours.

In other words, the events are only for you and have no power of witness for others.

I have no trouble with my belief in God, despite all the junk nonsense put out there by creationists that are simply unsustainable. And I don't require Confirmation Bias as you are describing it.

The events have occurred, and you admit that medical science has documented them. The fact that they cannot yet explain them is the heart of this discussion. If you chose to ignore that science does not have all the answers that is your problem, not mine.

 

[JimBowie1958]

miracles have never been proven to be outside the laws of physics or nature

No, they are outside the laws of science by definition. Were they within the laws of science they would not be miracles but instead would be providential events.

what is lacking is our knowledge of those laws.
miracle is just another name for short lived phenomena or rare phenomena.

Not by the literal meanings, though people often use them that way. A man I once knew said that he was in a car wreck and was tossed from the car as often happens. Everyone else in the car died, and his being tossed just happened to save his life when it more typically sends the person into the path of the rolling car and they die instead.

That is not a miracle though he doubtlessly felt it was.

I met a man in Germany who claimed to have been shot at by a viet cong at point blank range and after he killed the VC he looked at the bullet holes behind him and saw that they had to have passed through his body harmlessly. If true that was a miracle, but it is more likely that the bullet markings he saw predated the incident he was in, and so he merely was mistaken.

But one time I did see a real miracle that was inexplicable. I investigated the thing from every angle, above, below inside and outside and it was simply impossible to have happened the way I saw it happen, and yet it did. I'm not an idiot. I can explain various tricks and have a talent for doing so, such as Penn and Tellers bullet catching trick.

And I cannot test this phenomena, it is not repeatable. I cannot describe it because the details are pointless; it couldn't have happened and yet it did.

It changed my life, some good and some bad, but it totally altered me and my view of the world.

Science could never possibly prove that what I witnessed happened but that does not change what I saw or shake my certainty that it happened in reality.

THAT is a miracle.

Scientific proof is irrelevant; I know what I saw and science has nothing it can say about it. The laws of Nature were temporarily suspended for a moment and science cant touch that.

You know what you saw?

With absolute certainty.

Miracles have not been demonstrated to occur.

Sure they have, Lourdes alone has dozens and dozens of miracles documented.

The existence of a miracle would pose logical problems for belief in a god which can supposedly see the future and began the universe with a set of predefined laws.

Such as?

Even if a ‘miracle’ could be demonstrated it would not immediately imply the existence of a god, much less any particular one, as unknown natural processes or agents could still be at work.

So if your neighbor Bill says he is going to kill your dog and hang it from your front porch, and the next morning you awake to find your dog hanging from your front porch and Bill admits that he killed your dog and hung him there; you could still argue that it is not proven since it is possible that any number of other things could have happened?


While you would be technically correct, the most plausible event is that Billy killed your damned dog, not that an asteroid fell from the sky and did the deed.

Most alleged miracles can be explained as statistically unlikely occurrences. For example, one child surviving a plane crash that kills two hundred others is not a miracle, just as one person winning the lottery is not. In the absence of any empirical evidence, all other claims can be dismissed as the result of magical thinking, misattribution, credulity, hearsay and anecdote. Eye-witness testimony and anecdotal accounts are, by themselves, not reliable or definitive forms of proof for such extraordinary claims.

There is no requirement that all knowledge be proven empirically, not by any means, and in trials of all kinds eye witness testimony and circumstantial evidence are accepted as also in the minds of the vast majority of people; determined atheists being a slender case of disputers.

And there is nothing magical about believing in God as it is an entirely rational concept.

Divine intervention claims most often concern systems and events for which we have poor predictive capabilities, for example, weather, sports, health and social/economic interactions. Such claims are rarely made in relation to those things we can accurately predict and test e.g. the motion of celestial bodies, boiling point of water and pull of gravity. If a god is constantly intervening in the universe it supposedly created, then it is with such ambiguity as to appear completely indistinguishable from normal background chance.

lol, so how does one who denies the existence of a subject claim to be its foremost authority? Your claims have all the credibility of a Baptist claiming to know more about Catholicism than the Pope himself.

Note: Theists often fail to adequately apportion blame when claims of their particular god’s ‘infinite mercy’ or ‘omnibenevolence’ involve sparing a few lives in a disaster, or recovery from a debilitating disease – all of which their god would ultimately be responsible for inflicting if it existed. See also: Euthyphro dilemma, Confirmation bias, Cherry Picking.

Everyone dies, and the few saved in such cases are not saved in the final sense of the word as they eventually die as well.

From the eternal perspective there is no difference but God does occasionally make allowances for His own purposes.

 

[JimBowie1958]

My comment is an equivalent comparison (and quite accurate) to what you are trying to do.

Hint: no one can prove or disprove mystical experiences.

Mass hallucination is not probative for anything other than "Hey, there's a lot of people unable to process reality."

Inability for science to prove an event does not prove it was an illusion, hallucination or hysteria. That is merely your bigotry and prejudice slanting the plausible options in your mind.

Other than you just being a fucking liar.

A result of our naturally evolved neurology, made hypersensitive to purpose (an ‘unseen actor’) because of the large social groups humans have and the way the brain associates pattern with intent.

Psychobabble horse shit that proves nothing.

Humans have evolved a variety of cognitive shortcuts to deal with the mass of information provided by our senses. In particular, we tend to filter sensory input according to a set of expectations built on prior beliefs and past experiences, impart meaning to ambiguous input even when there is no real meaning behind it and infer causal relationships where none exist.

To accuse everyone else of hallucinating is about all you've really got, though it is the thinnest excuse for dismissing out of hand what you don't wish to consider, i.e. Confirmation Bias.

Personal revelation cannot be independently verified. So-called ‘revelations’ never include information a recipient could not have known beforehand, such as the time and location of a rare event or answers to any number of unsolved problems in science. They are usually emotional or perceptual in content and therefore unremarkable among the many cognitive processes brains exhibit, including dreams and hallucinations. These experiences may even be artificially induced by narcotics or magnetic fields. Extreme cases may be diagnosed as a form of schizophrenia or psychosis.

That is simply not always true and disproves nothing even if it was.

Spiritual and religious experiences are not only inconsistent among individuals but are variably attributed to different gods, aliens, spirits, rituals, hallucinations, meditation etc. The fact that medical conditions and other natural processes can induce these experiences is evidence they are produced by our brain.

Inconsistencies among witnesses is common and actually evidence that the testimony is not contrived and coordinated.

Sorry, you have no case.

 

[JimBowie1958]

If you ignore the fact that medical science has documented the results of "miracles" you have a pretty good point that they are all anecdotal.

Medical science has documented that certain events have occurred but have no verifiable way of evaluating said events. Thus your statement is false, nothing more than examples of Confirmation Bias and why non-believers have trouble believing because of nonsense like yours.

In other words, the events are only for you and have no power of witness for others.

I have no trouble with my belief in God, despite all the junk nonsense put out there by creationists that are simply unsustainable. And I don't require Confirmation Bias as you are describing it.

The events have occurred, and you admit that medical science has documented them. The fact that they cannot yet explain them is the heart of this discussion. If you chose to ignore that science does not have all the answers that is your problem, not mine.

Starkey is an idiot, liar and a waste of time.

He likes to see his name a lot on message boards; that's about all he tries to accomplish.

 

[JakeStarkey]

If you ignore the fact that medical science has documented the results of "miracles" you have a pretty good point that they are all anecdotal.

Medical science has documented that certain events have occurred but have no verifiable way of evaluating said events. Thus your statement is false, nothing more than examples of Confirmation Bias and why non-believers have trouble believing because of nonsense like yours.

In other words, the events are only for you and have no power of witness for others.

I have no trouble with my belief in God, despite all the junk nonsense put out there by creationists that are simply unsustainable. And I don't require Confirmation Bias as you are describing it.

The events have occurred, and you admit that medical science has documented them. The fact that they cannot yet explain them is the heart of this discussion. If you chose to ignore that science does not have all the answers that is your problem, not mine.

Don't say I said things I did not say: that is dishonest.

Science does not have all the answers, but that is preferable to incidents that cannot be understood.

You may cherish and believe whatever metaphysical events you may encounter, but that is only for you; it is not a witness for others.