RE: Theists: would you view the truth?
December 1, 2016 at 11:51 am
(This post was last modified: December 1, 2016 at 11:54 am by Neo-Scholastic.)
(November 30, 2016 at 10:06 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: (November 30, 2016 at 6:34 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: I think I was pretty clear in listing various considerations: conformity with prior traditions or revelatory expectations, uncanny accuracy of prophetic statements, and reliability of witness testimony.
Evidence means that which is evident. Of what it is evidence requires judgment and discernment. If an everyday person makes an uncanny deathbed prediction I would consider it a real example of precognition whereas I would consider the same coming from a professional mentalist a clever stage trick.
So confirming what you already believe and some stage magic is all it takes for you? I'm surprised.
Well-established beliefs can be difficult to shake. There is an old saying that science advances one funeral at a time. At the same time, my personal history suggests and hopefully my time here has demonstrated that I do not have particularly rigid beliefs.
As for stage magic let me tell you a story. For my nephew's 2-year birthday, I bought a unique gift: a small wallet. No one knew about it except me and my wife. Just for fun I wrapped it in nested boxes, so it would look like a much bigger present. When I brought it into the party, my nephew looked at the box and without any prompting said, "Oh! my wallet!"
We can pretty much rule out stage magic.
Now I know full well that a skeptic will say that I' haven't accounted for all the thousands of times people make guesses and fail. Plus it's
just an anecdote. And both are true. They'll say it is
only a coincidence. Perhaps, but to my mind the odds are so astonishingly remote and hit incredibly direct and specific suggests more. Giving a wallet to a child is a very unusual gift - one based on my distant childhood memory. The parents never asked for it. Nor were our intentions communicated to them. My nephew never expressed any interest in anything having to do with money. The outer appearance of the package was intentionally deceptive. No one prompted him to make a guess.
Could it be
merely chance? I guess that depends on what one believes about the role of chance in natural events. Depending on how you count them there less than 200 recorded miracles., but otherwise, again depending on how you estimate the timeline, one miracle occurs about every 20 years. And really these are all clustered around very short periods, like 40 or so in the 5 years surrounding the Crucifixion or 10 plagues over however many months that took. What IS important is how the Lord works within history, within the natural course of events and through the lives of people. Does it matter if Joshua blew his horn at the exact moment of an earthquake? Does it matter more than the story of the Hebrew people's rise to nationhood? People focus too much on the purported miracles of the Bible, but in the grand scheme of things those are far less important than the consistent theme of the Lord's Providence. The only miracle during the Passion was Christ's display of loving self-sacrifice.
So in summary, I find it a bit comical when skeptics think that by reducing miracles to naturally occurring phenomena they have invalidated the witness of Holy Scripture. Yes, my nephew's uncanny guess could indeed be coincidence, but not
merely coincidence. That event has become part of his story and we just have to wait and see how that plays out in his life. In what way would it change the story of Our Lord's Mercy and our Salvation, if I substituted the phrase 'string of uncanny coincidences' for every claim of the miraculous in the Word. To my mind, not much, if any.
