Evidence of miracles.

[Mountainmike]

Meanwhile back in science.

You do not observe the sun , you observe how it interacts with other things , through the limitations of your senses. Or as Plato said you observe a shadow world of reality. Or as Kant said You observe phenomena not noumena.

Look up in the night sky. You observe manifestations of the sun as the brightest things in the sky. It is seen moving in the light of the moon and Venus.

Look at a rainbow. It is a manifestation of the sun and subjective seen by only a few, but none the less it is real.

Or see an Aurora, or a mirage, that too is the sun interacting with your senses.

I can say with precision what those at Fatima saw, it was clearly localised, and extraordinary. It was physical, it dried the ground rapidly.
It is None the less real for being localised.
It has not happened before or since, but did happen in the place and time prophesied.

It seems you are well behind in physics however , which recognises the role of the observer influencing the observed in some interpretations of such as wave function collapse, or that bell experiments prove that something may not exist till observed.
Does the moon exist before you observe it? So subjectivity is also part of physics. Your perception of time is subjective and unique amongst observers.

So spare me your inadequate grasp of physics In presuming that experience of manifestations of the sun cannot be localised.

In any event you are clearly flippant, and not interested in truth.
So you just carry on your apriori faith in scepticism! But please Don’t confuse it with science.

So don't.



The word you're avoiding is "subjectively."



And yet, my miracle is still better.



Right-- I forgot you believed that.



It would have, had it actually happened... unlike my miracle, which was quite real.



Were you there?

 

[TLK Valentine]

A post graduate is someone who has gone through schooling at the USPS Academy.

Speaking as a USPS veteran myself, I think that might be a case of stolen valor.

 

[TLK Valentine]

I can say with precision what those at Fatima saw, it was clearly localised, and extraordinary. It was physical, it dried the ground rapidly.
It is None the less real for being localised.
It has not happened before or since, but did happen in the place and time prophesied.

Well, that's what happens when you spike the well water...

 

[Opdrey]

All sorts . A fair amount military hush hush.
Optimal / adaptive Control, so underlying processes. Estimation. Detection. Signatures. Noise processes in electronics. Unusual semiconductors.

Interesting.

 

[Astrid]

Interesting.

It is intetesting and rather sad when a person
trained in the rigorous discipline of scientific thinking
goes so wrong and throws it all away for magical
thinking, confirmation bias, self deception.

Dr K Wise is a good example. PhD in paleontology
but forced into total disregard for intellectual integrity
by irrational religious conviction.

"....even if all the evidence in the universe turned
against yec, I would still be yec as that is what the bible
seems to say".

If a person can believe in a world wide flood or
human heart tissue miracled into a crackerthere may
not be anything beyond belief, no matter how poorly
sourced, as long as it fits the preconceived (ie totally
anti science) notions.

For such as De. K Wise, a science background, real or otherwise doesnt make
the assertions more believable, it makes the claimant look
pathetic.

 

[Opdrey]

It is intetesting and rather sad when a person
trained in the rigorous discipline of scientific thinking
goes so wrong and throws it all away for magical
thinking, confirmation bias, self deception.

Dr K Wise is a good example. PhD in paleontology
but forced into total disregard for intellectual integrity
by irrational religious conviction.

"....even if all the evidence in the universe turned
against yec, I would still be yec as that is what the bible
seems to say".

If a person can believe in a world wide flood or
human heart tissue miracled into a crackerthere may
not be anything beyond belief, no matter how poorly
sourced, as long as it fits the preconceived (ie totally
anti science) notions.

For such as De. K Wise, a science background, real or otherwise doesnt make
the assertions more believable, it makes the claimant look
psathetic.

I have seen several examples of highly skilled intelligent scientists who also had strange, non-scientific beliefs. I think it is a human feature/bug. We all carry around illogical beliefs to some greater or lesser degree. We can often compartmentalize and keep the two halves of our brain separated.

I once worked with a great chem grad student who was extremely sharp and extremely clever. But he was also a Creationist, bordering on YEC. A great deal of that was due to his lack of skill or knowledge in geology so it was easy to ignore all THAT science.

 

[Astrid]

I have seen several examples of highly skilled intelligent scientists who also had strange, non-scientific beliefs. I think it is a human feature/bug. We all carry around illogical beliefs to some greater or lesser degree. We can often compartmentalize and keep the two halves of our brain separated.

I once worked with a great chem grad student who was extremely sharp and extremely clever. But he was also a Creationist, bordering on YEC. A great deal of that was due to his lack of skill or knowledge in geology so it was easy to ignore all THAT science.

Chemists are a bit like engineers.

But yeah, none of us are 100% logical.

What i was talking about, though, is the wholesale
abandonment of intellectual / scientific integrity.

Which generally is a career killer.

 

[TLK Valentine]

Chemists are a bit like engineers.

But yeah, none of us are 100% logical.

What i was talking about, though, is the wholesale
abandonment of intellectual / scientific integrity.

Which generally is a career killer.

True -- Arthur Conan Doyle may have created Sherlock Holmes (a paragon of intellectual/scientific integrity in action), but it didn't stop him from drowning in spiritualism and other assorted hocus-pocus.

I don't think he ever fully recovered his reputation after falling for the Cottingly Fairies hoax... At least not in my mind.

 

[Mountainmike]

It is intetesting and rather sad when a person
trained in the rigorous discipline of scientific thinking
goes so wrong and throws it all away for magical
thinking, confirmation bias, self deception.

So why do you do it then? Why do you allow your apriori sceptic beliefs to get in the way?

Eg
On Eucharistic miracles , I follow what many forensic pathologists and other science have concluded
Ditto
The bleeding statue of Cochabamba. Several forensic pathologist involved.
Eg
On inedia of Alexandrina I accept the report of the two sceptic hospital doctors who performed the trials, aiming to debunk it, ended confirming it.
Eg
on the Lourdes miracles I accept the verdict of hundreds of doctors and a panel of the best medical professors in France.

Unlike YOU I don’t let beliefs get in the way of the science.

 

[Opdrey]

On Eucharistic miracles , I follow what many forensic pathologists and other science have concluded

I may have missed this: do they conclude that transsubstantiation actually occurs in physical reality? That the Eucharist becomes the body of Christ and the wine the blood? I have never seen that conclusion from scientists

Unlike YOU I don’t let beliefs get in the way of the science.

Miracles are very tricky in science. You accept that these miracles occurred, but if you were doing a mathematical model of a problem and you ran into something that you couldn't explain in your model would you immediately attribute it to a "miracle"?

Which is more likely? That you made an error or that the measurements were in error or that you are simply seeing something that has yet to be "discovered" as a physical feature of the physical world?

As a scientist you are beholden to a relatively strict set of things you can infer. When you see something unexpected happen in your experiment it is not really allowed to assume "God did this". It is like a soccer game. You are barred from using your hands (unless you are goalie). That does not mean you have no hands, just that this option is not available to you during play.

 

[Mountainmike]

I may have missed this: do they conclude that transsubstantiation actually occurs in physical reality? That the Eucharist becomes the body of Christ and the wine the blood? I have never seen that conclusion from scientists

Repeated ad nauseam on these threads
Forensics for four different instances have concluded:

-Human heart myocardium.
-Recently live because of white cells which would lyse quickly post mortem. Yet these survive in vitro.
- Traumatized because of striation and elongated white cells.
-A lot of nuclear DNA that won’t sequence. ( that alone makes them impossible to fake)… a fraud would have victim DNA
- But they have mitochondrial ( maternal) DNA of Middle East haplogoroup.

Dr Robert Lawrence forensic pathologist said “ strong and credible evidence of creation of cells” referring to the origin as wafer.

Different scientists and teams. Many involved.
Buenos Airies. Tixtla. Sokolka. Legnica

- similar for the bleeding statue of Cochabamba
( except was epithelial tissue with vegetative spine cells too)
CT scans proved no hidden channels, and it happened repeatedly on live continuous camera footage

- similar detected on the sudarium of Oviedo.

So yes.., it is the science Interests me.

Miracles are very tricky in science.

The limits of what science can conclude have formed a substantial part of the thread. I will not repeat it again. Clearly science cannot conclude God.

But then science is just an axiomatic model of the universe, it is not the universe itself.

All science can do is point at the seemingly inexplicable that breaks many rules, with no realistic possibility of fraud in a theistic context.

 

[Opdrey]

Repeated ad nauseam on these threads
Forensics for four different instances have concluded:

-Human heart myocardium.
-Recently live because of white cells which would lyse quickly post mortem. Yet these survive in vitro.
- Traumatized because of striation and elongated white cells.
-A lot of nuclear DNA that won’t sequence. ( that alone makes them impossible to fake)… a fraud would have victim DNA
- But they have mitochondrial ( maternal) DNA of Middle East haplogoroup.

This isn't a literature citation. I will look up on my own (since it is clear you are not familiar with standard science-reference protocol).

The limits of what science can conclude have formed a substantial part of the thread. I will not repeat it again. Clearly science cannot conclude God.

Correct. That does not mean that God and miracles ipso facto "exist" per se.

But then science is just an axiomatic model of the universe, it is not the universe itself.

Agreed, but the lack of evidence for something does not equal the positive evidence for a catch-all term like "miracles".

All science can do is point at the seemingly inexplicable that breaks many rules, with no realistic possibility of fraud in a theistic context.

Let us assume you have modeled a system using a statistical model. You have a number of independent variables and dependent variables. The model can only explain 85% of the variance in the dependent variables. Are you 100% certain you have all the independent variables that may be in play? Are you accounting for "noise" in the data which may affect the fit?

The point being that in such cases you would not be in a good situation if you just said a "miracle" explains the remaining 15% of the variance.

This is not to say that miracles don't happen. I have no idea one way or the other. I've just never seen a miracle and I am unaware of any real miracles. It would be irrational to assume that all those things science has yet to understand are "miracles" since there are so many other possibilities. Possibilities we've seen throughout history.

The "God of the Gaps" theology is often dismissed by theologians precisely because it decreases the value of God by making Him smaller and smaller with each discovery in the sciences.

There's also the issue of potential error or just made up stories. Indeed I assume stories like the funeral of St. Christina the Astonishing is probably simply made up. (I assume you are familiar with the story that during her funeral she came back to life and flew up into the rafters of the church and made faces at the congregants). It is reasonable to assume maybe a death-like state could be confused with death at that time, but flying up into the rafters is quite something different.

The world is full of stories like that. Across all religions. So if a miracle is evidence of the God of Abraham we must also agree that the "milk miracle" is evidence of Ganesha's existence in Hindu.

 

[Astrid]

So why do you do it then? Why do you allow your apriori sceptic beliefs to get in the way?

Eg
On Eucharistic miracles , I follow what many forensic pathologists and other science have concluded
Ditto
The bleeding statue of Cochabamba. Several forensic pathologist involved.
Eg
On inedia of Alexandrina I accept the report of the two sceptic hospital doctors who performed the trials, aiming to debunk it, ended confirming it.
Eg
on the Lourdes miracles I accept the verdict of hundreds of doctors and a panel of the best medical professors in France.

Unlike YOU I don’t let beliefs get in the way of the science.

Projection projection

 

[Mountainmike]

Projection projection

Science.

 

[Mountainmike]

On the first insult “ clearly not familiar “ you are out.

You mean “ academic literature on science”

On the first word:
Let me point out most murderers are sent to jail or the electric chair on the basis of criminal forensic labs reports whose procedures are far better than any academic lab. It is criminal forensic pathologist speaking on these.

On the second word science is just a model. It is limited in scope. It can only model repeated observations. It has nothing to say on Something that does not repeat or cannot be repeated, why it happens or who did it. It only comments on observation. You just assume it will always do what it did yesterday.

It didn’t do the usual at Fatima. Something unique and extraordinary happened, on a day predicted 6 months before.


The evidence stands regardless of whether it appears in an academic journal.

Apart from which you only have to look at such as the utterly incompetent now thoroughly debunked dating of the shroud of Turin to recognise that academia loses all objectivity around phenomena presumed religious. Thankfully a few like Adler , carried on to show what the shroud really is. You won’t have heard of him. He didn’t follow the academic religiously held scepticism. He analysed what was there.

Indeed in most cases academia refuses to get involved, as the researchers primarily tesoriero / Willesee discovered. They used forensic labs who are happy to report on what they find, not report on their personal prejudice.

Let me tell you what happens when academia did get involved.
Two forensic pathologists at Bialystok university prepared sections of the samples they took from wafer at sokolka. The slides are there to see. They concluded as above. Heart myocardium.

The dean of the same university, determined to quash it, who had never even seen a sample or slides said it was red bread mould, despite the fact it looks nothing like. That is how unobjective academia is in trying to protect its sacred cows.

So if it’s science you want look at the forensic reports, comments of those who studied them.
If it is unobjective academic prejudice , go look at dawkins illinformed rants.

As for the rest , spare me the lazy tropes.

Science has nothing to say on who or what did it. Either for or against God. It codifies patterns in observations where they repeat, can be repeated , or are a logical consequence of the previous. It cannot conclude on cause either way.

Transubstantiation and prophecy are so far away from the existing model science would need rebuilding ground up to accommodate them, and even then i contend it could not.

so the score remains.
1/ Actual forensic evidence of abiogenesis in eucharistic miracles: 4
- ie creation of heart cells.

2/ Actual evidence of abiogenesis from chemical soup. Big fat zero.
- ie random chance chemistry leading to heart cells.
Not even a model conjectured.
Science even breaks its own rules to consider abiogenesis a valid hypothesis,


Let me know if that changes, till then I am with
1/ because there is actual evidence that has been investigated.

This isn't a literature citation. I will look up on my own (since it is clear you are not familiar with standard science-reference protocol).



Correct. That does not mean that God and miracles ipso facto "exist" per se.



Agreed, but the lack of evidence for something does not equal the positive evidence for a catch-all term like "miracles".



Let us assume you have modeled a system using a statistical model. You have a number of independent variables and dependent variables. The model can only explain 85% of the variance in the dependent variables. Are you 100% certain you have all the independent variables that may be in play? Are you accounting for "noise" in the data which may affect the fit?

The point being that in such cases you would not be in a good situation if you just said a "miracle" explains the remaining 15% of the variance.

This is not to say that miracles don't happen. I have no idea one way or the other. I've just never seen a miracle and I am unaware of any real miracles. It would be irrational to assume that all those things science has yet to understand are "miracles" since there are so many other possibilities. Possibilities we've seen throughout history.

The "God of the Gaps" theology is often dismissed by theologians precisely because it decreases the value of God by making Him smaller and smaller with each discovery in the sciences.

There's also the issue of potential error or just made up stories. Indeed I assume stories like the funeral of St. Christina the Astonishing is probably simply made up. (I assume you are familiar with the story that during her funeral she came back to life and flew up into the rafters of the church and made faces at the congregants). It is reasonable to assume maybe a death-like state could be confused with death at that time, but flying up into the rafters is quite something different.

The world is full of stories like that. Across all religions. So if a miracle is evidence of the God of Abraham we must also agree that the "milk miracle" is evidence of Ganesha's existence in Hindu.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

... I have not discounted the idea of abiogenesis from soup. But it remains pure supposition, and not a shred of evidence supports that it happened.

There is sufficient evidence to make some form of abiogenesis the best scientific hypothesis. Briefly, we find evidence of life almost as soon (in geological timescales) as the Earth became able to support it; we have evidence that all the requisite chemical 'building blocks of life' were present in the environment; we have evidence that early life was extremely simple and progressively became more complex and diversified over time. This suggests abiogenesis. We also have a simple principle by which this could have come about.

It could have been different - we might have found complex sophisticated life existing all the way back to the earliest times, or it might have appeared suddenly long after conditions became suitable; the 'building blocks of life' might not have been present, and so-on.

Not least, There is still the fundamental problem called irreducible complexity.

It's an interesting concept, but yet to be conclusively demonstrated in nature. In what sense is it a fundamental problem here?

We can both discount the idea that an 18000 protein cell popped into existence by a random chance encounter of chemicals.

Yep, that's a red-herring.

How can a first cell be simple enough to be the first leap as a joining of non living chemicals, yet complex enough to self evolve from there? Not a single credible structure for that has been conjectured, or the probability that it could appear from non living chemicals.

There are various hypotheses for how the first cells emerged, but in general, like the rest of evolution, they involve populations of protocells, not one 'first cell'. Some involve self-replicating molecules or self-replicating reaction sequences prior to encapsulation, some involve self-replicating lipid vesicles that encapsulate suitable reactants, some involve combinations of the above, and so-on. This is not the place to go into the details of the various hypotheses being explored.

Much of the basic chemistry underlying these options has been demonstrated. If you want to critique a specific hypothesis, go for it. That you ask the question suggests you don't know enough to make informed comment, and need to educate yourself on the current state of research.

Also , If it was sufficiently probable to happen by random chance, Why is there not a continuous chain of lower form cells appearing and evolving, ( and many failing) so why have we never seen even one, on the road to our minimum cell?

The process is not random chance alone; as with all evolution, natural selection is involved (including in prebiotic chemistry).

I already gave some reasons why we don't see primitive cells. Why you no listen?

There is no model. It cannot be made to happen, it has not been observed to happen. The irreducible complexity is a serious barrier to it ever being explained.
The lack of simpler cells in evidence a barrier to any realistic process go get there.

There are models; we don't know if it can be made to happen, but the work to date is extremely promising; we weren't around when it would have been happening; irreducible complexity in this context is an unsubstantiated argument from incredulity.

Despite the huge volume of money and such as Harvard, nasa and other programmes, they have so far got nowhere, but conjecture.
So abiogenesis from soup is for the present “supernatural”. Beyond science to explain.

Huge sums of money with little publically visible results have been spent on many problems (e.g. disease cures, nuclear power, etc.), but many of them have since been solved. If you want to say that they were 'supernatural' until solved, I suspect you'll be on your own.

Seems you have supernatural and natural back to front.
My evidence trumps yours. Because however much you dislike it, I have some evidence.

Your definition of supernatural as 'not yet explained' is yours alone. A moment's thought ought to show how daft it is. "How did the window get broken?"
"We don't know"
"Ooh, it must be supernatural!"

It's not a question of whose evidence trumps whose; you're comparing apples and oranges. You have anecdotal claims and wishful thinking for a motley collection of miracles; abiogenesis has a rapidly growing body of promising scientific research results ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Yawn. Last I checked, the sun shines over the entire planet... Why only a small number of people allegedly saw... something ... Isn't terribly impressive.

Skeptoid has an article about this: Illuminating the Fatima Miracle of the Sun.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

There is so much wrong with your assumptions , physics and metaphysics it’s hard to know where to start.

You do not experience the sun directly. It is a projection through your senses. So the fact that some can experience it objectively differently does not demand all in the world experience the same.

If, as you say, it is an experience by projection through your senses, then it is a subjective experience, not objective. All experiences are subjective. Perhaps it's your metaphysics that needs sorting out.

 

[Opdrey]

On the first insult “ clearly not familiar “ you are out.

You mean “ academic literature on science”

My word construction was just fine as it was. Thanks.

On the second word science is just a model. It is limited in scope. It can only model repeated observations. It has nothing to say on Something that does not repeat or cannot be repeated, why it happens or who did it.

Well, yes and no. What it does NOT allow (and this is basic inference, which you presumably know quite well) is to propose some unevidenced supernatural effect.

As I noted: if you ran a statistical model and you could only explain 85% of the variance in the data you would be acting improperly to assign the other 15% to "supernatural/miracle phenomena".

It didn’t do the usual at Fatima. Something unique and extraordinary happened, on a day predicted 6 months before.

Personally I would doubt the Fatima example for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it is far easier to explain the dancing of the sun in the sky due to:

1. Human errors in perception (especially after looking at the sun for an extended period of time and doing damage to their vision, etc.)

2. Human propensity for being mistaken about something (especially when primed to believe in "miracles")

As opposed to suggesting that the entire sun literally moved around in space and briefly came close to earth without causing world-wide effects.

Apart from which you only have to look at such as the utterly incompetent now thoroughly debunked dating of the shroud of Turin

You mean the 14-C dating of the Shroud that almost perfectly matches the first mention of the Shroud in the 14th century?

You won’t have heard of him. He didn’t follow the academic religiously held scepticism.

Doing science unscientifically does not make it better science.

Transubstantiation and prophecy are so far away from the existing model science would need rebuilding ground up to accommodate them, and even then i contend it could not.

Sounds like you are setting it up such that it doesn't have to follow the "falsification criteria" of normal science. Just make up a bunch of hand-waving stuff like saying they are "so far away from existing model science" in hopes of creating a fog of "excuses" for when they fail to show up as actual data in the real world.

so the score remains.
1/ Actual forensic evidence of abiogenesis in eucharistic miracles: 4
- ie creation of heart cells.

Yet you still, strangely, have not provided any citation other than just waving your hands and vaguely mentioning people you have heard of.

This is where actually completing a graduate degree would come in handy. Again, citations make a difference.

2/ Actual evidence of abiogenesis from chemical soup. Big fat zero.

Interesting. Why does life use ONLY regular organic chemicals that occur in non-living things all over the place? Why does life prefer a specific chirality that strangely matches the inorganic mineral surfaces that would have been an available substrate for the first life and it didn't wind up a complete racemic mixture?

Science even breaks its own rules to consider abiogenesis a valid hypothesis,

No it doesn't. It's OK to admit you don't understand abiogenesis or biochemistry very well.

 

[Opdrey]

If, as you say, it is an experience by projection through your senses, then it is a subjective experience, not objective. All experiences are subjective. Perhaps it's your metaphysics that needs sorting out.

And that's an interesting aspect of our perception of reality. Given that we can communicate with others "reality" can be approximated by an ensemble of observations. Like the central limit theorem, we can close in on the most likely accurate perception of reality.

If the sun danced around in actual space and zoomed toward the earth and put off different colors, etc. it would have been seen all over the daylight side of the globe.

However "mass hysteria" or whatever the current hypothesis is for Fatima could easily have been limited to a group of people in one locality who had been staring up at the sun long enough to possibly damage their sight and wholly expecting a miracle to happen.

Occam's Razor is always good to bring out here.

But more to the point: why does God allow "miracles" from a theological point of view? The answer is obviously to impress on the viewer the reality and might of the Heavenly realm. My question is: why not do so for EVERYONE on earth? Why make it a few isolated events that only a select get to see and thus be saved while those who didn't see it are forced to wonder whether it was true or not?

Didn't God know that not every human blindly accepts the words of another person without fail?