Jesus and Miracles

[FallentoReason]

I understand everything as coming from God. The miraculous is something extraordinary that follows biblical precedent.

God filled the tank with gas: supernatural event that supposedly has some meaning or we would dismiss it as not God sourced. Facts: the tank was empty, it's now full with no physical explanation. Along comes materialist who doesn't believe supernatural intervention. Person is deluded, they forgot that they had already filled up/they want to believe the car suddenly appeared to get heavier/ etc.

Supernatural acts can always be explained away naturally, but that doesn't mean that they actually were natural acts. It's possible to construct a natural cause in explanation that doesn't acknowledge the actual cause.

It took us 3 days to finally be on the same page... you could have said that the supernatural acts *SUPERNATURALLY* in the realm of nature... instead of continually being ambiguous about natural phenomena in what I kept thinking was the scientific sense, *not* the "naive materialist" sense.

All I have to say is that it would depend on the situation whether we could know if it's a supernatural event or not e.g. registering a jump in my car's weight due to fuel spontaneously appearing would be a dead give-away. Looking for my car keys for 15 mins, then praying to God to help me and finding them a minute later would be more on the ambiguous side. But of course, the charm of religious thought is that God essentially *needs* to act shyly by human definition: the more ambiguous the situation the bigger the gap for God to fit in.

---

Were the meteorites an unlucky coincidence...to bombard that particular strip of earth?...where along the line does God stick his hand into the universe?

As I understand it, God influences every single event at all times.

I can't make sense of this, unless your view is pantheistic.

Since ...every event to be naturally explainable...then it means ...God interfered *indirectly* when he set the universe in motion"....doesn't that mean that certain people ...were deterministically doomed?

Well, not from the very beginning of time, no. And not of necessity. The natural order seems to be much more dynamic that once believed, most certainly at the subatomic scale. It could very well be that very very small pertubations could ripple up with massively unpredictable results (from a human perspective at least). At least that's the idea behind chaos theory.

I realize I'm engaging in a large measure of rationalizing, i.e. this his how miracle might possiblely, just maybe work. At the same time, your view of natural law is already a deterministic one. Initial conditions of the universe have already established what my responses to you will be and vice versus. My point in I am not just defending my belief in God, but also my belief that "I am not a number; I am a free man."

I only believe in a very mildly believe in determinism. When it comes to things like e.g. meteors, I tend to see it exactly the same as a game of pool; once the white ball has been hit, every motion of all the other balls have been determined. When it comes to complex structures such as us, I don't hold the belief that we can be explained entirely in a naturalistic way (when it comes to the mind/brain etc), so I have the gut feeling that determinism can't possibly account for the behaviours in someone's life. There's something extra there to account for.

Secondly, the dominant view of causality not so cut and dry as it seems on first blush. The dominant idea is that event A leads to B leads to C etc. I do not think that progression is justified. The past no longer exists, so how can something that does not exist act on that which currently does exist? I do not have the answer. I find the problem interesting. (You may recall my previous thread about the discontinuity of reality at the Plank Scale.)

Instead, I see the relation of cause and effect as one of identity. The lighted match being the cause of the fire and the fire being the effect of the match are actually the same condition differently described.

I'm still well and truly stumped on that thread you made!

---

Dont forget, Christ healed lepars, brought a man back from the dead after he began to decompose, scraped scales of the eye balls of the blind, reconstituted withered limbs, even reattached a severed appendage, among hundreds if not thousands of other things. I would assume being resurrected had something to do with that power he had or had access to.

All of what was done is indeed explainable. Just maybe not to where any of us can explain or even comprehend the explaination even if we heard it. Isn't it a little presumptuous to think that just because something can be explained you are smart enough to decipher what has been explained to you?

Can you blame me for trying?