Thursday, April 3, 2014

Clarification on "I Believe in Miracles."

Recently, I wrote a post in which I sought out to address a common objection to miracles.

Tildeb, the commenter to whom the post was originally directed, was good enough to respond in the comments section here:

http://questionablemotives.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/what-does-honesty-from-coal-producers-sound-like

However, given the misunderstandings which have cropped up in that thread, I feel it necessary to make some clarifications.

My argument isn't meant to show:
a. That the Resurrection occured.
b. That any other miracles have occured.

It is meant to show that:

A common objection, “If we consider miracles as a possible explanation, then doing science will become impossible, because it’s always possible that God might be miraculously interfering with the results of the experiments.” is false.

In my first reply to tildeb, I noted "The rest of your reply states various reasons why a particular miracle claim might be unlikely. I agree that if these things (e.g. the alleged absurdity of masturbation being sinful, the untrustworthiness of the historical data etc.) really are compelling, this would be a good reason not to believe in this claim. However, despite my use of the Resurrection in my post, I wasn’t actually wanting to discuss any particular example."

This is why I originally wrote:

“I’d like to cordially invite tildeb to show (in the comments section of this post) what he thinks the implicit contradiction(s) between these two propositions are.

As opposed to:

“I’d like tildeb to give me his best arguments about how he thinks the historical evidence for the Resurrection isn’t reliable etc.”

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