Simply describing the incident does not demonstrate that it was not a chance event.
This question is a basic scientific one, with practical implications. We have a new drug that is supposed to treat a condition, and we want to know if, when someone takes the drug and gets better, this was just chance or if the drug was really responsible.
The way this question is answered is not by telling endless pointless anecdotes about some of the people who got better. It is answered with math.
Once upon a time. LoL.
I was out in Winnipeg going to school. At the end of the school year since I was in a choir, there was a tour attached to that and so we were singing across Canada from Manitoba to the East coast and a couple churches in Main. There is two miracles in this one, one with my transmission breaking, I will leave that one aside, and one about a ring.
…
So as we traveled I drove my car behind the tour bus. Anyways they decided to stop to play soccer in a football field and a girl lost a ring, it was given to her by her grandmother. So we all joined hands and we walked the field to find it. No luck but I was mad why wouldn’t at least a 4th year student or teacher/adult pray and ask God for help. So in a mood I just closed my eyes and said God you lead me by your holy spirit and started walking. And I listened to my conscience, like that voice that tells you to check to see if you left the stove on when you are leaving the house which most times turns out being nothing. That. So I turned left and right and left and left and left so I looked like a idiot going in circles then I heard Look down. More of a thought than a voice.
So I looked down and there was the ring in the grass. So I picked it up and brought it to the girl who was standing there. She looked at me with a strange look like i had stolen it. It was weird. But I just went on and never thought about it till my buddy peter from Woodstock asked me to look for his wife’s emerald that fell out of her ring when they were playing volley ball. I appeased him and went to look but told him that I was no magic magnet. I said I would look but I have no expectation of finding it but I will ask. And we did not find it. Its not a super power or a blessing to have Gods blessing at times. If it was that cut and dried there would be no question and God would be our slave. And its not like that.
Excellent it even has implications for a experiment I am working on. The Idea of permeability of objects is important.
I will have to listen to it a few time so my brain can soak in what he is saying. I did think I thought that he skipped past proof that there was no permeability problem to limit the speed of light but maybe I missed it. It seems to me more of a Just cause… statement. I will listen again.
Thought experiments do save money. I know that for a fact. material can be very expensive. Platinum for example isn’t cheap. I think many things are not invented simply because inventors don’t have the materials to play with. What I wouldn’t do for a lab/warehouse with a million dollars of equipment and a couple million worth of materials.
The shear number of different possible million-to-one occurrences is so large (potentially infinite), that a large number of them in all probability happen to everybody every day. It’s just that most of the time people simply don’t notice them.It therefore becomes a case of (i) the person actually noticing the occurrence, and (ii) them attributing this occurrence to some external cause (be it Divine Intervention, a conspiracy, bad luck due to having walked under a ladder, or whatever) rather than coincidence.
Unless you specify the specific improbable occurrence in advance, trying to calculate the probability that an unspecified something improbable will happen would appear to be meaningless from a statistical viewpoint.
I do see Confirmation bias as a Serious issue. I am working on a experiment that is a direct example of it. Literally coincidentally it seems something changes but to determine if it was caused by the effect of my experiment is hard to do. Sort of like drinking orange juice and your cold feels like its going away. Was it from drinking a liquid or from Vit C. or was your body just doing its work. nailing down the cause and effect when a experiment has other factors affecting the results makes it very difficult cause you might assume results that have no tie to the experiment. Oh look this drug works on Covid. well. Maybe it does or maybe it doesn’t.
Wavelength depends on the particular reaction, but gamma rays seem a popular product. The equation seems to work pretty well in fission and fusion reactions. But of course you know better.
We need to bring in human perception at this point.
Our perception is very good at picking out those coincidences that we can use to our advantage. This idea of divine intervention really comes from the effectiveness with which our perceptual systems achieve this.
Indeed. His anecdotes remind me of the late Norm MacDonald, who would go on talk shows and re-tell these ancient jokes which he would renew by adding loads of extraneous details. His goal was solely to be funny, of course.
No. I am not smart enough to know what most know. Still It doesn’t mean I should stay out of life. Everyone at some point should realize that others have something to contribute and that it take a village to forward Ideas not one person.
I will say that I did end up in the wrong profession and should have pursued a life in the area of physics. While I have a sinus infection, I think related to a past covid infection, and so I have trouble thinking past the fog, generally I don’t have that problem and if you dig deep into something I can usually grasp it in a 3 dimensional way.
Light is not a wave. It is measured by a scope that plots energy on a graph through time and when you draw the lines between these results it looks like a wave.
So I see light as pearls of magnetic potential creating a totally different way of looking at it. Trying to relate how that affects the physics of a atom to create the energy represented on the other side of the equation is beyond me.
Not too long ago, I was walking along the street from a shopping plaza back to my car parked on the street.
A little kid about 5 years old was playing with the toy from inside a Kinder Surprise while also walking, in the same direction as me, with his family, presumably also back to his family’s car.
As he was playing, there was a tiny hole in a lid in the pavement on the ground.
It was, apparently, just big enough that when the boy dropped the Kinder Surprise, the toy fell in a perfect swish through the hole.
I looked around the pavement for the rest of the trip, and on future trips there.
It was the one and only hole in the ground between where I was parked and the plaza.
I guess God just really wanted the kid to lose the toy, right?
If that is the story. Sure. what if that was a little nudge to the kids brain to drop the toy into that hole. So what.
You already know what the options could have been. There is a scripture that comes to mind:
Hebrews 1:14 Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?
Its out of context but, A angel could have flicked that out of his hands because the kid was going to be a christian and within a few minutes that kid would have swallowed that toy and died of suffocation. And maybe God simply said, This one I am going to save. Flick.
Death has basically a 100% success rate. Some times God without your permission says, hey, Im saving this one. Just hope you are the one… Me. I couldn’t care less. Not that I wouldn’t be afraid hanging from a 40 storey building. the climb in the bozeman chair proves it. I feel the fear. Not sure why… but you do… But if I fell, I would be singing on the way down. I might even pose.
A rather famous atheist was Christian when he was young.
His mother got cancer, and so he did earnestly as a Christian child pray to God to save her.
She died, and he concluded there was no God.
Maybe God said this one is the one He chose for dishonourable purposes and demonstrate God’s sovereignty, ala Romans 9:21-22, right?
The key point is this. If you can argue that you are Christian because of xxx what God has done in your life, then a non Christian can also legitimately argue they are not Christian for what God has NOT done in their life.
Otherwise you are just cherrypicking.
If you can say thankyou God for helping you find the ring, you can also blame God for giving people cancer, and giving us covid.
Back, many years ago, I had the same kind of experiences as @Evolution_is_a_Hoax and I used to think of them as divine intervention. So I do understand where Scott is coming from. But then I dropped out of Christianity – there was too much that I was finding that I couldn’t believe.
After dropping out, those divine interventions continued at about the same rate as before. So perhaps that already refutes the idea that the Christian God is the one true God.
After some pondering, I began to realize that if those were divine intervention, then lots of other things are divine intervention. For example, it should follow that COVID is due to a divine intervention. Likewise, it should follow that those recent tornadoes that did so much damage Kentucky were a divine intervention.
I gave up on the idea of divine intervention, and went with the scientific explanations. And the world makes far more sense that way.
I don’t expect to persuade Scott to change his viewpoint. And I suppose it could be said make some sense that God was punishing the people of Kentucky for electing Rand Paul as their senator.
Well, if you had read what I had said upfront… These events do encourage, but they are not “proofs” I need to convince myself. And God punishing you is as much a proof of God as God rewarding you.
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18 Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.
19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?
20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?
21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?
22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:
23 And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory,
My mother died 22 years ago and she was 59. everyone dies. She died of Cancer. They operated but it was around the spine area and the artery there. So she lived with the remaining part of the cancer for a year after fixing her bowel and then she died. Everyone does.