The nature of evidence

[Mudhammam]

I am glad someone actually tries to debate with me, instead of doing just pure unbased mockery.

"Would be a violation of the natural order". I do not find this correct. Miracles are supernatural works from God. By stating that miracles cannot exist because they "would be a violation of the natural order" you are stating that God is subject to the very nature He created, and this is incorrect.

I agree that would be incorrect, but that was not my claim. To establish that a miracle occurred, you must demonstrate that 1. A god exists. 2. That this god sometimes intervenes to interrupt the natural order, which, apparently, he felt wasn't quite adequate to bring about his purposes, though he was the one who supposedly fine-tuned its initial conditions. 3. That an event occurs. 4. That the occurrence of this event is best explained by this god.

My point that miracles violate everything we know about nature is that given, on the one hand, the large number of bizarre, and often mutually exclusive, phenomena that people claim to encounter, but fail to substantiate with credible evidence (think UFO abductions, of which miracles professed now or in biblical literature are of no better quality, and in the latter instance, are even much worse); add to this fact the number of instances in which what were believed to be of a supernatural order were merely misunderstood, but natural, if not rare, occurrences; and then the susceptibility of humans to lie, exaggerate, and imagine things that don't really happen the way that memory later projects; then, on the other hand, you have the scientific enterprise, and the thoroughly convincing manner in which collaboration has produced our knowledge about the world. And you must admit that the stack is decked against the miracles alleged in the Bible in the same way that you probably believe they are in the works of Homer, the Sira of the Prophet, or any of the other thousands of stories that have spawned an equal number of silly religious beliefs.

And if you want to claim that non-Christian miracles are the acts of demonic powers, well, then you've created a new problem for yourself, namely, how do you know you haven't been deceived?