Why don't you tell me the scientific journals that prove Teddy Roosevelt existed. Miracles being done in the name of Jesus are an historical fact.
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The plank in the materialist's eye
- Thread starter npetreley
- Start date
I can only assume from this that you do not have scientific proof of miracles. Why did you lie, randman?
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Satman, this is why I don't respect the crowd from Infidel. I have absolutely told you the truth 100%, and even told you the college course where I first heard about the miracles of Aimme Semple McPhearson. It was a graduate level course I was taking as an udnergrad at UNC with a visiting Dook professor.
The fact is there have been countless documented cases of miracles, cases documented by medical doctors. Is this scientific evidence? Heck, the way you guys spin, I don't think you can define what "is" is. You definitely define "transitional" to include species that may have not evolved at all.
Sat, if you want to choose to delude yourself about God, and miracles, and spirituality, hey, guess what? I can't stop you. Life is short. You will find out soon enough.
Wish I could do more to help you.
The fact is there have been countless documented cases of miracles, cases documented by medical doctors. Is this scientific evidence? Heck, the way you guys spin, I don't think you can define what "is" is. You definitely define "transitional" to include species that may have not evolved at all.
Sat, if you want to choose to delude yourself about God, and miracles, and spirituality, hey, guess what? I can't stop you. Life is short. You will find out soon enough.
Wish I could do more to help you.
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You don't respect them because they aren't fools who gullibly believe your every post? Or because they're too aggresive to apologize to you when you're blatently incorrect and stubbornly cling to your assertions?
Of course! How could I have been so foolish as to not know that the ambiguous statement "very liberal women's study course" actually means "truth 100%."
Instead of giving this alleged evidence, you simply insult. Sorry, this just isn't a viable argument.
Ah, and where would randman be without the baseless threat? No doubt God will torture me forever and ever because I used my brain instead of accepting randman as my new prophet with 100% truth.
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Sat,you are the one who accussed me falsely of lying.
Why?
Are you that insecure in your beliefs?
It is one thing to point out an actual lie, and then accuse one of it, but to claim someone is lying when they have told you the truth, and you have apparently done nothing, obviously, to research the issue, but call someone a liar, this is shocking, and this is pretty much why I think evolutionism is a cult for many.
What else can explain such weird behaviour?
A normal person might state they find it hard to believe, or they might recall a story they heard, or any number of things except the type of confusion and response that the hard-core evolutionist gives.
It is cultish.
Why?
Are you that insecure in your beliefs?
It is one thing to point out an actual lie, and then accuse one of it, but to claim someone is lying when they have told you the truth, and you have apparently done nothing, obviously, to research the issue, but call someone a liar, this is shocking, and this is pretty much why I think evolutionism is a cult for many.
What else can explain such weird behaviour?
A normal person might state they find it hard to believe, or they might recall a story they heard, or any number of things except the type of confusion and response that the hard-core evolutionist gives.
It is cultish.
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My accusation was forced upon me by the facts. Namely, that you claimed to have scientific evidence for miracles. You now refuse to reveal this evidence even though it would be highly beneficial to your cause while being minimally costly in terms of your time. Thus, it now appears that you do not have this evidence, making your original claim false.
Odd, I'm not the one who threatens people for not accepting bizarre and apparently false claims.
You keep claiming that you have the truth, but there's never any compelling reason to believe that you have any truth. It doesn't help that you keep throwing out these unrelated (and likewise unsubstatiated) claims like it'll hide your getaway.
People who don't buy into whatever claims randman is hawking at the moment, no matter how unsupported these claims may be, are cultists? It seems you have some unnecessary pride there, randman.
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You missed the point entirely. What I demonstrated that IF A SUPERNATURAL EVENT OCCURRED, such as the tree being created out of nothing, you could have scientific knowledge of it having occurred. Thus it is not true that you cannot possibly have scientific knowledge of a supernatural event.
The rest of the post was only meant to point out that the only difference between my example and creation (as in the Bible) is a matter of witness. It having happened in the past when no one was around to witness it occur is what makes it difficult to "prove" by scientific means. But that's also true of evolution, which is why that is also impossible to prove. So the difference has nothing to do with the natural vs. the supernatural, and everything to do with the amount of time since the events occured.
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But my example assumed it WAS a supernatural event, not the result of some natural cause beyond our comprehension. Otherwise my whole post makes no sense. Either you didn't understand that, or didn't want to, because you wasted an awful lot of energy on a lengthy response that ignored the point of my post.
Perhaps you are trying to emphasize that you may not WANT to conclude it was supernatural. Fine - it is perfectly reasonable to explore every possible explanation. But that doesn't negate the fact that a supernatural event occurred, and that you have scientific knowledge of it -- which directly contradicts your previous assertion.
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The historical record of Jesus performing miracles is more reliable (as measured by secular standards, no less) than any other historical documents of antiquity. If you do not doubt that Teddy Roosevelt existed based on books you trust, then there is no reason to doubt that Jesus performed miracles, because the documents are of at least equal reliability as your history book (and probably more reliable).
That's not scientific proof, but it's as compelling. Some would even say it is MORE compelling than the kind of "scientific proof" you read about in science books, since many of those so-called "proofs" are constantly being "disproven" and replaced with new theories. The New Testament record, on the other hand, hasn't changed in 2000 years.
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Just what historical record has Jesus performing miracles? Your equivocation of Teddy Roosevelt existing and Jesus performing miracles is bizarre; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. For example, if you claimed that you drove your car this morning, your testimony is probably enough to convince most people. But if you claimed that you drove your car to the sun and then to Neptune where you met fuzzt green unicorns, I'd want a bit more.
So science gets better and better over time while the Bible remains as inaccurate as it was 2000 years ago? Um, I'm not seeing your angle here. Incidentally, please learn the difference between "proof," "theory," and "record." It's just a bit difficult to take someone seriously when they equivocate, say, an explanatory framework that draws on multiple observations with a mathematical or logical construct based on a few axioms with religious stories.
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That changes nothing. My post showed why we cannot know scientifically that it was a supernatural (even if it was). Sure we can have scientific knowledge of the existence of event A (tree appearance for instance), but we cannot have scientific knowledge of the fact that it was caused supernaturally.
I hope you will go back and re-read my post after you finish reading this one. I hope you will see then, that I did anything but ignore your point.
I was trying to emphasize that it I CANNOT conclude a supernatural cause, and maintain a scientific perspective at the same time, and showing the good reasons why. I CAN conclude a supernatural cause (in my private thinking), but the conclusion isn't a scientific one - it is an intuition.
I have scientific knowledge only of the RESULTS in nature, not of a supernatural CAUSE, of which we can have no scientific knowledge... Let me go on to say that your hypothetical depends on the possibility of the supernatural - so to some degree, you are begging the question. If the supernatural never happens, then your hypothetical doesn't even get us to the point of having scientific knowledge of the results in nature, of an event with a supernatural cause.
If you will re-read my last post, I hope you will come to understand why it is that if we stretch science to include investigations of the supernatural, then we can no longer maintain any certainty about even the basic facts of nature.
If we abandon materialism, we cannot even have knowledge of the results (the appearance of a tree) of supernatural causes. Furthermore, you will see that, abandoning materialism, we have little hope of coming to any conclusions about the results of purely natural causes (i.e. normal tree growth).
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No, I understand your point I am just saying that I don't think we can have scientific knowledge of a supernatural event in the first place. We may have scientific knowledge of a very strange event that we can't explain but that does not make it supernatural. It might be supernatural but that would be an unscientific conclusion. Science does not deal with supernatural events.
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Nick the key here is that YOU assumed it was a supernatural event. You can't make some else (Jerry or myself) assume it WAS a supernatural event. Hence to US your "whole post makes no sense". You can't state as a begining premise that a supernatural event occurred because that requires an interpretation on the part of the viewer. You, randman and those volumes of historical references you have for Jesus's miracles may be comfortable with seeing these events as "miracles" but that does not make them truly miracles and it also does not mean that everyone will interpret the events the same way.
Nick I appreciate your (and Philip Johnson's) methodology here but you have to understand that the use of the supernatural in science leads to chaos. Right or wrong this is the case. I will also say that once the supernatural was removed from science (early to mid 1800s) the pace of scientific advances increased dramatically.
Did you not understand my computer bug analog? No comments on it?
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In the famous 1982 trial of McLean vs. Arkansas Board of Education, in which the court struck down an attempt to force schools to incorporate "creation science" into the curriculum, Judge William R. Overton defined the "essential characteristics" of science as follows:
1. It is guided by natural law;
2. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law;
3. It is testable against the empirical world;
4. Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; and
5. It is falsifiable.
Now please explain to the court what alternative theory Mr. Johnson is proposing that meets these criteria.
On another note, I was rather struck by the following quote from Johnson:
What is Johnson saying here? That we can prefer to believe whatever we want even if it is contradicted by the facts? Now I realize that creationists do this all the time, but Johnson insists that us materialistic evolutionists do it too. If this is true, then could someone please tell me what these alleged contradictory facts are?
1. It is guided by natural law;
2. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law;
3. It is testable against the empirical world;
4. Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; and
5. It is falsifiable.
Now please explain to the court what alternative theory Mr. Johnson is proposing that meets these criteria.
On another note, I was rather struck by the following quote from Johnson:
What is Johnson saying here? That we can prefer to believe whatever we want even if it is contradicted by the facts? Now I realize that creationists do this all the time, but Johnson insists that us materialistic evolutionists do it too. If this is true, then could someone please tell me what these alleged contradictory facts are?
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I'm not sure what you mean by abandoning materialism. I am not advocating that anyone stop investigating material causes, but that they cease to assume that only material causes exist.
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Saying you will not consider the possibility of supernatural causes in science sounds to me like saying you refuse to deal with imaginary numbers in math simply because they don't exist. You can certainly do that if you like, but it seems rather ignorant to me.
I assume YOU don't believe that creation occurred. Fine. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise. I am only trying to point out that it is not logical to assume one cannot have knowledge of a supernatural event, as someone else stated.
If creation is true, then you DO have knowledge of a supernatural event. You simply do not have knowledge of how the supernatural works. The fact that you don't want to interpret the evidence to show that we were created supernaturally doesn't make creation cease to be true or cease to be supernatural or magically erase your knowledge of the fact that you're here.
Here's how I see it.
1. You may be right that you cannot prove scientifically that the event (creation or the tree) was supernatural. So what? Can you prove evolution scientifically? You may think you can, but you can't without a time machine. So does that mean you should give up studying evolution?
2. Given the supernatural placement of the tree: Suppose we do it your way and conclude that science cannot deal with the supernatural, so scientists must always look for natural causes.
Great. You can now spend the rest of your life looking for natural ways the tree could have appeared the way it did. You will waste all of your time and never reach the correct conclusion.
Is wasting time and being wrong somehow supposed to be a "good thing" simply because you believe that's how science should work?
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The New Testament, for one. If you aren't familiar with all the evidence that testifies to the historicity of the New Testament, I suggest you familiarize yourself with it. It is quite fascinating.
There are other records, as well. Josephus. And contemporary enemies of Jesus ascribed the miracles to sorcery, but they did not deny that the miracles occurred.
So I take it you won't believe that quantum tunnelling is true until you see someone drive a car through a brick wall without disturbing either the car or the wall? I'd say that's a pretty extraordinary claim, and it's one nobody has ever seen occur.
On the other hand, thousands of people witnessed Jesus perform miracles.
The bottom line is that you'll believe what you want to believe. Wow, what a revelation. Somebody call the papers.
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If you allow supernatural causes in science then all theories are equally valid and none can be faslified. This is abandoning materialism. You don't believe god interfers with your computer program do you? If you did and could "prove it" would it make any sense to continue programming since god could place a bug in your code at any time?
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