Freaking out about what we really can "know" here...

[1137]

• Angels
• Giants
• Talking Animals
• Burning Bushes which speak audibly
• Zombies
• Planets which stop rotating and then start again in a single "day"
• Global 40-day Deluges
• People being turned into blocks of salt
• Flaming lips and tongues flying through the air
• Seas parting so old people can walk across them
• Walking sticks turning into snakes
• Angels of Death taking children from their homes
• Fireballs raining down from "heaven"
• Teleportation
• Shapeshifting
• Magic spit
• People living inside fish
• etc, etc.

For the most part you're naming a bunch of things that aren't even events and some that could easily happen without divine intervention, like a meteor shower.

Why we are arguing miracles I'm not sure.

 

[jonathan180iq]

For the most part you're naming a bunch of things that aren't even events and some that could easily happen without divine intervention, like a meteor shower.

Why we are arguing miracles I'm not sure.

Which of those things "aren't even events"?
They all occur in the Bible at different times and I find each of them, along with many others, to be absolutely absurd if taken as factually happening. How modern thinking people can find ways to become apologists for such obviously mythological scenarios is mind-blowing.

We are talking about it because my original point was completely ignored and I was directly challenged to address which Biblical miracles I think defy natural laws:

Which Miracle in the Bible do you consider a violation of natural law.

 

[1137]

Which of those things "aren't even events"?
They all occur in the Bible at different times and I find each of them, along with many others, to be absolutely absurd if taken as factually happening. How modern thinking people can find ways to become apologists for such obviously mythological scenarios is mind-blowing.

For example, angels aren't miracles, they're supposed to be entities. An entity is not a miracle, an event is. Further, something like "fire from the sky" is completely explainable, such as through a meteor shower.

We are talking about it because my original point was completely ignored and I was directly challenged to address which Biblical miracles I think defy natural laws:

That's dandy. The original point, made my me, couldn't care less about arguing miracles. You pick a fight with miracles instead of addressing the question posed about knowledge and it makes me suspicious. Especially when you define miracles as 1 in 8 bullion chance. Did you not pay attention to Manhattan's monologue explaining why this idea of miracles is redundAnt?

 

[outhouse]

Further, something like "fire from the sky" is completely explainable, such as through a meteor shower.

Then it was never a miracle.


We know miracles are perceived. Buy many are claiming credibility to divine intervention which is unsubstantiated rhetoric.

 

[outhouse]

You pick a fight with miracles

There is no fight here.


Either provide credible evidence the are real, or you will have to deal with the current status of unsubstantiated rhetoric.

 

[ether-ore]

The title of this thread is: "Freaking out about what we really can "know" here..." With this, I was under the impression that the topic was about how we know things... as in epistemology. Since we cannot "know" the operations of how so called miracles are manifest, I'm not sure how a discussion of them started. The only thing I think that can be said of miracles is that they must operate under some set of laws we do not understand and which are not a permanent part of the "normal" set of physical laws here where entropy exists.

 

[Thanda]

Ok - then please cite evidence of a creature not from this planet... You're still in the same hole regardless of the song and dance.

Daniel 10:2-6
2 At that time I, Daniel, mourned for three weeks. 3 I ate no choice food; no meat or wine touched my lips; and I used no lotions at all until the three weeks were over. 4 On the twenty-fourth day of the first month, as I was standing on the bank of the great river, the Tigris, 5 I looked up and there before me was a man dressed in linen, with a belt of the finest gold around his waist.
6 His body was like chrysolite, his face like lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze, and his voice like the sound of a multitude.

Similes are lost on you aren't they?

Furthermore, please stop asking me to provide evidence - that is not what our discussion is about. It is you who needs to provide evidence of natural laws that are broken by the miracles I have asked you about.

6ft tall women are supposed to impress me? I work with 6 feet tall women everyday. I've dated women taller than that... Are the fantastic tales of giants in the Bible referring to woman who are an unimpressive 6 feet tall? Is that what the word "giant" is supposed to mean?

There are, literally, millions of specimens that have been found from that time period and earlier. So, again, within those millions of specimens is there any evidence for the "giants" of the Bible?

Yes for a people to have women with an average height of more than six feet is extremely unusual. That you have seen some women who are more than six feet tall women doesn't change that fact.

And again, the question remains the same - what natural law would was broken by there being unusually tall people?

Cite me a study showing animal cognition and use of language being on par with homo sapiens, and you'll totally have a point. (I will let you know, however, that there is no such finding and as such you're going to be barking up a limbless tree, but knock yourself out.)

Are you going to seriously argue that not only can a snake speak human language but that it can plan malicious intent and has the ability to trick a human woman into eating a forbidden fruit by using her own language and thoughts against her? That's the argument that you have to make in order for there to be any validity to the story of the snake in the garden of Eden.

I need not cite such study. It is you who needs to prove there is a natural law which would prevent a being with advanced technology couldn't help an animal say certain words or sentences.

Nowhere in any of the scriptures is there an indication of whether the donkey or the snake spoke their own words with understanding. All we know is that both these animals were able to produce sounds that mimicked human speech so well that humans were able to understand them. It is now up to you to prove that a natural law would prevent this from ever happening.

Please cite evidence of an other-worldly realm where any of this can actually happen and you'll have a point.

I'm getting tired of saying this: I am not the one who is required to provide any proof. You must prove some natural law prevents beings that live in some other part of the universe from having power to do things we can't currently comprehend.

 

[Thanda]

What you may have absolutely no clue about, is that bones were being found from dinosaurs and their explanations were giant men described in mythology because they had no clue where ar what these bones were.

How do you know this is how all the stories came about?

 

[Thanda]

Moses has no historicity as ever existing.

The mythology of the exodus is called the charter myth of Israel wiki.

It factually never happened as written as it is an impossibility.


Israelites DID evolve from displaced Canaanites and other Semitic peoples after the bronze age collapse. its not up for debate because you refuse it.

Shame you really want to have this conversation don't you? Tell you what, why don't start a thread where you can preach long sermons about how no one in the bible ever existed - I might join you there later on.

 

[outhouse]

How do you know this is how all the stories came about?

The anthropology you know nothing about.

 

[outhouse]

The only thing I think that can be said of miracles is that they must operate under some set of laws we do not understand and which are not a permanent part of the "normal" set of physical laws here where entropy exists.

No, people understand mythology and imagination and rhetorical prose pretty well.

many events claimed as miracles have perfectly natural explanations. The problem is your not always going to find truth in mythology.


But one thing is factual. Apologetic rhetoric from ignorance and faith is not how we define what has taken place.


When you threw out academia, you threw out any credibility you could ever possess. Snubbing academia is how they define fanaticism, and fanaticism defines nothing credible.

 

[outhouse]

you really want to have this conversation don't you?

Its not about me. Its about the academic knowledge you don't understand here.

Tell you what, why don't start a thread where you can preach long sermons about how no one in the bible ever existed - I

I have never stated that. I just have a deeper passion for the bible then you do. I search the truth you seem to hide from.

 

[Thanda]

Its not about me. Its about the academic knowledge you don't understand here.



I have never stated that. I just have a deeper passion for the bible then you do. I search the truth you seem to hide from.

Well I guess I'm just tired of you persisting with the same line of out of topic attack. This thread is not about whether certain people existed or not. But you seem to want to force it to be about that.

 

[outhouse]

This thread is not about

Is about what we can know.


Imagination and guessing and faith and mythology are not tools for what we know

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

I'm assuming that by saying testing anthropology "mathematically"... what is meant is using the rules of logic which follows formulaic like rules.

1) There are no rules of logic, because there are logics. 3-valued logics, fuzzy logic, etc., necessarily lead to and allow results that are prohibited in classical logic.
2) The most common method of testing hypotheses in the sciences is NHST (null hypothesis significance testing). According to the "rules of logic", it can tell us virtually nothing, but scientists frequently claim things to be true despite the inability of the underlying logic of their research to entail or imply their conclusions. This is not true merely of sciences like psychology or sociology, but also of climate science, the medical sciences, etc.

 

[ether-ore]

1) There are no rules of logic, because there are logics. 3-valued logics, fuzzy logic, etc., necessarily lead to and allow results that are prohibited in classical logic.
2) The most common method of testing hypotheses in the sciences is NHST (null hypothesis significance testing). According to the "rules of logic", it can tell us virtually nothing, but scientists frequently claim things to be true despite the inability of the underlying logic of their research to entail or imply their conclusions. This is not true merely of sciences like psychology or sociology, but also of climate science, the medical sciences, etc.

When I took a logic course in college, one exercise was to take a truth claim (proposition "p")and break it down into symbols such as are indicated at this web site. The point is that it was a kind of shorthand with an algebraic structure to it and which was supposed to allow the logician to evaluate the truth claim easier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_logic_symbols

 

[outhouse]

When I took a logic course in college, one exercise was to take a truth claim (proposition "p")and break it down into symbols such as are indicated at this web site. The point is that it was a kind of shorthand with an algebraic structure to it and which was supposed to allow the logician to evaluate the truth claim easier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_logic_symbols

That's doe snot mean that is the standard way of determining anything.

There is a rogue laughable historian who is using the Bayesian methodology for Jesus historicity but he is literally laughed at.

 

[JoStories]

Jesus walking on water, Moses parting the Red Sea, I could go on. Basically every miracle recorded in the Bible is sufficiently credible to me and many others.

You keep appealing to science. What does science say about turning water into wine? Does science say it is impossible? Does science say it is impossible to make blind men see or deaf men hear?

What exactly do you understand about science that makes you think miracles are not credible?

For a very large group of people, aliens are real. Does that mean they are? No. Many people follow Scientology. Does that mean that not treating mental illness is the correct means of combating it? No. And science has made blind men see and deaf people hear so that point is really moot. What of the alleged miracles of other faiths? Do you consider them credible or is your view of what is credible based solely on the Bible? Seems rather selective to me.

 

[Laika]

Let’s take the example of depression. When people with depression get the proper anti-depressant it can seriously aid with the disorder. This would suggest that depression is something chemically based which can be addressed with medication. Our senses and knowledge of the universe as we experience it tell us then that depression is a physical/chemical illness which can be treated by physical pills and chemicals. However, what if there is actually an invisible imp pounding on people’s brains causing their depression, and the imps happen to be put to sleep by serotonin and other such drugs? Many will laugh, but the sad fact is there is no way to address this. All we can ever do is make claims based on statistics and the assumption that humans are seeing the whole picture.

I have depression and have found that you can change it overtime incrementally. [there is no on/off swtich for it; if I were to speculate, I'd say its because you have to form new neural connections in your brain and that places a physical limit on the speed at which the brain can change.] I'm obviously relying on my own inner "sense" of what is going on and by trial and error have changed it and recover.the inner experience is a sense of "pressure" in your head, and when its bad, you feel like your banging your head against a brick wall or that your brain is being tightly wrapped in some kind of cloth. at the moment, it feels like I'm in a large open space, with little stress or pressure. [the mood I'd compare it with is of being by the sea side on a warm day with the sound of waves rolling up a beach.]

Because of the problems you stated, I think this might actually be pretty rare. psychologists simply don't "know" much about mental problems as we're still a long way away from a scientific understanding of the mind. [what will be of interest is I assume that it is possible, but have no firm basis for doing so beyond a materialist assumption that all consciousness is a product of the brain. so if we study the (physical) brain, we can study the subjective experience of the mind too.] I can't make any absolute knowledge cliams, but just see "what works" and have arrived at the conclusion that I was "conditioned" to being depressed and am therefore having to learn new habits overtime to see how it goes. As long as it works, its good enough for me to do and to try. I'm never going to be 100% sure and I can live with that.

Often it is the absolute cliams to knowledge, to right and wrong that makes depression worse for me. learning to handle controversial ideas is useful because alot of the depressions stems from thinking other people's opinion of you were the same as physical barriers and are "real". or perhaps that something is "impossible" because everyone else says so. overtime, I feel more is possible and my mind "opens up" more and feels less stressed. it sounds crazy, but everything sounds crazy when your dealing with the brain. letting go helps. The puzzle for me, is that I am a determinist, but have no evidence for rejecting free will; its two interpretations of the same thing, but determinism is the more useful of the two (as it means you can look for specific causes of mental problems and change to see what happens).

 

[JoStories]

Peter wrote, James wrote... Paul wrote. These were apostles. It does not matter to me if they had scribes working for them, the words were theirs.

An assertion such as this, posted as fact, requires a credible source for your 'facts'. Can you prove this?