RE: What would you do if you found out God existed
October 27, 2017 at 3:00 pm
(This post was last modified: October 27, 2017 at 3:07 pm by FatAndFaithless.)
(October 27, 2017 at 2:51 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: I've been looking into the case of the Brazilian man with the brain abscesses and I find it is much more convincing. Have you looked into it?
https://thewire.in/18318/in-search-of-mo...in-brazil/
I mean, I haven't looked into every miracle that the Catholic Church recognizes because I don't have the time or inclination since so many times the 'evidence' is so similar. From that article, the grand conclusion is that the doctors don't understand how the patient recovered like that. The article writers then say "So, in the opinion of the doctors, it was a miracle." - which is a little disingenuous since the doctors didn't say that, they simple stated they don't know. The doctor that DID claim it as a miracle is a practicing Catholic. These little red flags aside, this still gets to my main, overarching problem with miracle claims - namely that the fact that we don't have an explanation for something now does NOT mean we can suddenly turn to something supernatural that we understand even less about, and claim it as the cause. How do we determine that the group of priests and doctors exhausted every possible other explanation? What mechanism or line of evidence did they have explicitly tying this event to Teresa's spirit as a necessary cause? It's essentially saying "we can't think of anything else at this point, let's go with God (or spirit of a saint, etc) as the cause."
The only concrete facts that we have in this case is that a very sick man got better unexpectedly, against the predictions of his doctors. I won't say this happens "all the time," but there are plenty of cases like this that are not able to be explained at the time (though that doesn't stop religious institutions for using them for their own ends..many of whom are not Catholic). Pointing to a lack of an explanation as evidence for another explanation is just something I find extremely flimsy and irrational.
You can find medical miracle stories like this that all point to different sects of different religions with different Gods. A miracle accepted by the Catholic church that isn't demonstrably different or more genuine in any discernible way (besides the names of the gods/spirits/souls being invoked) than any other claimed miracle, with no greater amount of better evidence, is no more convincing to me.
Also, damn font formatting again.
In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson
- Thomas Jefferson