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Who exactly is doing this "divine intervention"? YOUR "god" or someone else's? And would you believe it if someone else's "god" is doing it?
That's more a question for the Religion forums, I think. Probably raise the mod's ire here. But all good questions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by karen_in_nh_2012
(Sorry, Mark S., I don't mean to pick on you -- but this is the same kind of thing I see in the Religion forums -- people believe so strongly in THEIR religion without acknowledging the very basic, very simple fact that OTHER people believe in THEIR religion just as strongly ... and it likely contradicts the original person's religion. But oh, no, THEIRS is "true," all others are false ... and of course the OTHER person believes the same thing about THEIR religion. )
I'm not arguing for the validity of any one religion over another here. Nor did my comment do any such thing. I was simply pointing out the logical fallacy often used to discredit miracles.
A miracle is when something happens for which we have no logical or scientific explanation. We aren't discounting the laws of physics. On the contrary! We are affirming them. We know that the world behaves in X fashion. But someone or lots of someones report Y, which contradicts X. Our sole bit of reasoning simply cannot be, "Y contradicts X; therefore it didn't happen."
That's not only bad science, it's bad reasoning on every level. It's making up your mind and drawing a conclusion before examining the evidence. When presented with evidence that contradicts your pre-determined conclusion, you simply discount the evidence.
In the example of Fatima --- brought up by someone else, not me --- we have thousands of witnesses reporting something that science tells us cannot happen. Those witnesses would be the first to tell you, "What we saw defies everything we know about the way the world works." So simply discounting their testimony isn't reasonable or scientific. It appeals only to elitism of the worst sort.
A miracle is when something happens for which we have no logical or scientific explanation. We aren't discounting the laws of physics. On the contrary! We are affirming them. We know that the world behaves in X fashion.
Um, be careful with this "we" business, there are plenty of truly ignorant people and people susceptible to "science" that fits their world view (in this case "woo").
It's worth reading the Wikipedia entry on criticisms of the Fatima story. Surely you can understand that if the sun was in fact changing color and darting around in the sky it would have been visible to everyone on earth, observed in all the observatories, and would, of course, caused floods, earthquakes, and other cataclysms that we would all know about in the unlikely event that life on earth continued to exist after such an event.
Um, be careful with this "we" business, there are plenty of truly ignorant people and people susceptible to "science" that fits their world view (in this case "woo").
Imagine a posh accent and substitute the collective "one" for the collective "we" if it makes you feel better.
Surely, anyone with an ounce of sense, can see that there are people who report events which are unbelievable to most people. reports of cryptids, lights, ufos, ghosts, aliens, etc
OK, so of all these reports, SOME are probably what actually happened and were experienced by the people themselves. Many have been witnessed by multiple people at the same time.
This must suggest that something is going on which cannot be described by our standard model of science. So we have the 'paranormal' which is outside of science as we know it at the moment. This means we have to come up with hypotheses to explain these events and then science can do what it does and test those. So...these are our hypotheses, now go and test them with science.
The US government has been caught experimenting on people without their knowledge with LSD and other cocktails of drugs. So, why not the Indian, Chinese, Russian,etc governments are doing the same thing. This Fatima thing could have been an experiment with an airbourne chemical, or a mass hallucination test.
There is a theory that certain places are like windows into other realities and these places are both static and movable. Ancient people have known about these places and called them sacred or evil places. What if one of these windows opened up where all these people were, who witnessed the sun falling into the Earth?
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