(May 24, 2016 at 10:32 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: They were big, purposeful, witnessed, and had theological significance. According to the stories about them.
The same can be said about the miracles attributed to Krishna (and still being attributed to him today).
These kinds of stories are readily available and widely believed about all sorts of figures.
The ancient world was a place where miracles were always happening just the next town over, and you knew that because some traveler told you a story about it, and you had no clue why you shouldn't take it at face value. If it was a good enough story, you'd tell someone else.
If you were a devout Hindu who revered Krishna, what would be different about your claims besides the details?
Frankly, I don't know all that much about Krishna/Hinduism. I would ask the following:
1. Is Hinduism theology internally consistent?
2. Does it have a coherent understanding of reality?
3. Is there some sort of body of natural theology that support the tenent of the faith?
4. Are the facts of Krishna's life believable (as a god)? (demons, killing, war, wives, children, died of an arrow wound)
Contrast that with the life and message of Christ. I went over that in detail in this post why I think that is compelling.
Back to miracle claims, I think the case is better for Christ's miracles. Not only because I think Christianity answers "yes" to the points above (which serve as background support), but because the events in the NT were witnessed, written about in the time period they happened, and believed to be real by the first century church who then wrote extensively about it (unbroken chain of belief).
The fact is that even the first century people of Palestine knew the difference between feeding 5000, healing cripples/lepers/blind, dead people not dead anymore, walking on water, etc. We are not talking about misunderstanding eclipses, weather patterns, or some other difficult to perceive physics or chemistry. It is not reasonable to assume that these people even heard (let alone believed) that there were miraculous healing or dead people rising with regularity in the area. If you don't have evidence that people misunderstood natural cause and effect in the subject matters of cripples/lepers/blind, dead people, walking on water etc., then you are left with an unsupported theory that seems to have only one purpose for one time period.