Evidence of miracles.

[Astrid]

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.

Refresh my memory- are you also a Noahs ark believer?

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

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?

They always find some reason or another for such puzzles - if all else fails, 'God works in mysterious ways'.

With regard to 'mass hysteria', I don't know what the current psychological or psychiatric opinion is on that, but it's well-established that the social pressure to conform in groups can lead to people both pretending to agree, and convincing themselves that they agree, with the group consensus. ISTM that looking at the sun and experiencing visual disturbances should not be particularly surprising, and interpreting them as miraculous because others are claiming to, should not be particularly unexpected.

Similar misinterpretations of visual phenomena by more than one person have occurred with mistaken UFO observations. If the first person to see the glowing lights (or whatever) exclaims "What the hell is that?!", others may take that as a cue not to expect some mundane object, and will interpret what they see accordingly; so several people can misidentify Venus, or car headlights on a hill road, or balloons, or oil flares in the Gulf, as alien and inexplicable.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

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.

I suspect you'll find that Mike only sees as credible the evidence claims that support his view, and reacts badly to any questioning of those claims.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

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.

That sounds like a companion to the 'convergence' theory of truth - the abstract ideal towards which all rigorous investigators will eventually converge.

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

This ^^^

 

[Mountainmike]

That is exactly your position, not mine.
If the forensic reports of Eucharistic miracles said “ fraud” I would be happy to believe it. They didn’t. So you invent any old sophistry to ignore a clear pattern.

I suspect you'll find that Mike only sees as credible the evidence claims that support his view, and reacts badly to any questioning of those claims.

 

[Mountainmike]

Refresh my memory- are you also a Noahs ark believer?

Refresh my memory, are you a flat earther?

 

[Mountainmike]

There is sufficient evidence to make some form of abiogenesis the best scientific hypothesis.

As actual status. It isn’t even a valid hypothesis.

No evidence it happened.
No evidence it repeats.
No way to repeat it.
No conjectured structure for the first cell.
No conjectured chemical pathway to that from non living. ( the abiogenesis bit)
No quantum probability, band gap or likelihood for that pathway.
No conjectured path way from that cell to the present minimum cell.
No pile of failed debris from self designing cells that couldn’t eat or replicate! The trail of debris from failed blind watchmaking.

NOTHING.

It is not a hypothesis , since there is no evidence it happened , mechanism for it conjectured so nothing to test by experiment. Check Basic scientific process.


You also have an irreducible complexity problem.
What first cell can have been complex enough to evolve to what we have, but simple enough to result as an inert chemical reaction of non living things? the first living thing. You have no answer.

ALL that exists by analogy is some conjecture on how a roof tile , or a brick might have occurred.
But no evidence of how roof tiles or bricks came to be is evidence of self building or self designing or self evolving houses. Bricks and roof tiles are evidence of houses, not spontaneous appearance of them.

At present the simplest cell is more complex than all the chemical factories in a typical country put together. 18000 proteins. Works flawlessly.


All you have is conjecture.

I am open to the idea, but there is no substance at all.
But that is because i care about evidence, not dawkins utterly stupid assertion he has no idea how it happened but he claims it is a “ fact” that it did! He may be old, he is not old enough to have witnesses it!

I have actual forensic evidence of five instances where complex organism and cells came into existence, in a way that makes them impossible to fake by present means. How does human dna fail to sequence in samples that are clearly not old - samples young enough to have white cells still extant?

So it is you not me that has a problem with letting your beliefs override evidence!
You prefer a pile of supposition to actual physical evidence.

 

[Astrid]

Refresh my memory, are you a flat earther?

Ah ok, ifn you dont want to admit something just plead the
5th. We will understand.
Some miracles are " evidenced", others are in the bible but
didn't really happen

 

[Mountainmike]

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

Which is utter b@ll@x, but believe it if you prefer it to evidence.

Needless to point out, that author wasn’t there. Yet you believe his rants?

I prefer the evidence of those who were there. Several books full of statements include rabid sceptics, atheists and professional and scientific withnesses, That’s the difference between us.

I like the actual evidence. I study it. You are happy to accept the words of any who agree with your apriori view.

You have form on this:
- accepting skeptoid as evidence at Fatima, not those , including scientists who actually witnessed it.

- preferring a magician who wasn’t involved to the hundreds of doctors/ medical professors who concluded at Lourdes.

-taking pure supposition as “ the best hypothesis” regarding abiogenesis whilst actual forensic evidence of created life is ignored?

Which one of us is guilty of confirmation bias?

 

[Mountainmike]

Ah ok, ifn you dont want to admit something just plead the
5th. We will understand.
Some miracles are " evidenced", others are in the bible but
didn't really happen

Yet you don’t comment on the forensic evidence of those that have it.

 

[Astrid]

Yet you don’t comment on the forensic evidence of those that have it.

Dodge away. Make your evasion about someone else.

You going to evade for a third time?
Not answering at all is also evading.

 

[Mountainmike]

Dodge away. Make your evasion about someone else.

You going to evade for a third time?
Not answering at all is also evading.

This thread is for discussing evidence not your apriori beliefs.
On the ark there is no evidence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

So Why do you disagree with forensic pathologists on samples you have never seen, and you would not be able to interpret them even if you had?

 

[Mountainmike]

Study some of it before comment.
Good order.

None of the below worth commenting till you have.

Eg The unscientific dating of the shroud , and the way they tried to defend their nonsense , was a disgrace to all concerned.

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



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".



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.



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



Doing science unscientifically does not make it better science.



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.



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.



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?



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

 

[Opdrey]

...

 

[NBB]

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.

He may be wrong in believing in YEC who knows. But everyone else that discard God is wrong in the worst possible way, not only they ignore that God is still up there and made us, also that the only thing that matters in this life is finding Him, everything else passes away and is not of comparable value.

 

[AV1611VET]

Not answering at all is also evading.

-- That's rich.

If that's the case, you're one of the most evasive persons I've met.

 

[Opdrey]

He may be wrong in believing in YEC who knows. But everyone else that discard God is wrong in the worst possible way, not only they ignore that God is still up there and made us, also that the only thing that matters in this life is finding Him, everything else passes away and is not of comparable value.

How long must one look for God? What if God doesn't appear to exist to them? Do they then simply "fake it until they make it"? Is God OK with people who worship him even if they have no idea if he is real or not?

I am not asking to be mean or nasty, but the key here is for some of us we haven't found sufficient evidence that God exists. Certainly not in the way you clearly feel. It is quite easy for you worship God and praise him, but if someone simply fails to experience God as real then worshiping and praising is just going through the motions.

I have always struggled with the concept that, as you said, finding God is the only real thing in all of existence. But God set the rules presumably. Why would he then "hide" from some but be so "obvious" to others?

Are some simply created to be damned?

 

[Opdrey]

So Why do you disagree with forensic pathologists on samples you have never seen, and you would not be able to interpret them even if you had?

I honestly would be VERY interested to see these forensic studies you keep vaguely mentioning. I assume these are the ones that found transsubstantiation to be a real physical thing (?)

You seem to go out of your way to avoid actual citations.

 

[Opdrey]

Study some of it before comment.
Good order.

None of the below worth commenting till you have.

Eg The unscientific dating of the shroud , and the way they tried to defend their nonsense , was a disgrace to all concerned.

I am a chemist. So I think I've got a reasonable handle on many of these topics.

 

[AV1611VET]

How long must one look for God?

It depends on your sincerity.

Luke 11:10 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

The same day too!

2 Corinthians 6:2 (For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.)