Miracle

[bennyboy]

By your own definition a miracle is impossible even to imagine, whereas a Christian would say Jesus coming down from the sky to raise the dead and take us into heaven would be a miracle, but that can be thought of. You can depict in your mind Jesus doing all those things. You can imagine a dead person coming out of a tomb. Hell, you see it on TV all the time. You can imagine heaven as some sort of place where ancient greeks used to chill out.

I can easily imagine a miracle, and the ability to imagine has little to do with our understanding of how the universe works. Let's say a priest touches an armless man, and a new arm instantly grows. This violates what we believe about physical reality, in two ways: 1) it's biologically impossible, because human DNA doesn't allow the capacity for limb regeneration; 2) it's physically impossible, because the amount of resources required to achieve this feat (instant growth) would so ravage the rest of the body that it would probably cause instant death. So if a priest could achieve this, and he did so solely on the basis of an appeal to God and not some hidden technology, I'd definitely call it a miracle.

But a priest never prays for this, because he knows his prayer will be unanswered. Instead, he will pray for someone with a high fever, and claim a miracle when the fever breaks the next day.

Harris has used a double logic fail to arrive at his (obviously predetermined) conclusion. First, he claims that the existence hundreds of years ago of scientific knowledge is necessarily a miracle. Then, he takes the simple idea of growth (obviously a new thing might "grow" into something greater over time), and imbues it with all the complexity and wonder of modern science. But unless he can show that the "expansion" in the Quran is really the "expansion" of the universe from the Big Bang singularity, then all he really has is a statement about new things growing, which has "miraculously" been known since people started having babies.