Science and religion

[jstrodel]

Has science proven that miracles are possible? I mean the biblical ones. Has anyone turned water to wine? Walked on the surface of a lake or sea? Cured paralysis with a word? Cured blindness with spit and dirt? If miracles are scientific, then they can be reproduced and they can be verified.

No. That is a false sense of the word "scientific". There are many things presently unknown to science. That does not make them unscientific, as if they are similar to astrology or something like that. The fact that science cannot explain something does not prove that that doesn't exist, if that was so then the origin of life, the unity between cosmological and quantum physics, the nature of dark matter and the internal biological organization of the human body would all be considered "unscientific" because science does not know them.

That is an extremely arrogant way to look at the world, to assume that anything that you do not know falls into the category of some kind of superstitious belief.

And what is the essence of those rebuttals? Scientific explanations that allow us to reproduce miracles, or perform them under conditions that allow us to test and verify?

What if God doesn't want to prove H'shem's ways to people unless they have faith? What if the whole nature of miracles is to test peoples hearts to see who will seek God under conditions of repentance?

Many scientists recently have written about near death experiences. There is much written about natural theology. There is material written about the relationship between the big bang and theology and in fact the first to propose the big bang was a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre.

Science is pretty straightforward; if miracles are scientific, then science understands the mechanics behind them and can reproduce them, or predict their occurrence reliably and record them clearly.

See above. Because there are some things that people cannot explain does not mean that there is something false about believing them. 100 years ago science could not explain many things that it does now.