PPS
I doubt we could agree on a definition of a miracle. I can’t come up with one that doesn’t involve the subjunctive.
I’m not even sure what conversation you’re trying to have with me right now. 
Can I politely walk away? Or perhaps you can tell me why it’s important that we define what a miracle is? Which particular miracle are we discussing?
That’s my problem. No report of an alleged miracle bears scrutiny so there’s no example to discuss. I’m never at my best with hypotheticals. Feel free to walk away.
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Jesus’ resurrection does.
My working definition of a miracle is an event that verifiably occurs but cannot be ascribed to a natural cause.
Assume Jesus turned the water into wine at Cana: we could verify that it was water before the miracle and wine afterward, but could not find a cause within natural law for the transformation.
I haven’t personally observed any miracles, and I think many things described as miracles do actually have natural explanations, but it’s a reasonable in-principle definition to be getting on with, I think.
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I simply disagree. There is no way to establish whether the report of the event is factual. The bigger question for me is why it has any bearing on the validity of Jesus’ teaching.
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I’ve proposed a simple explanation for “water to wine” before. Jesus sent servants to buy more wine but, to save embarrassing the hosts and their lack of funds, invented a cover story. It had to be hasty, hence the implausibility.
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Not at all. You do not bring any divine attributes to the table. You are clearly human, not divine. You are alive today but with no certainties about tomorrow. If you do shuffle off this mortal coil, we will never hear from you again. On and on.
You are not divine. So we just simply ignore your baseless mockery of real divinity and your failed attempt at personal divinity. No threat.
Perfect. I thought so. So Allah is pushed off the cliff along with the other so-called gods, leaving the God of the Hebrews preeminent and sole possessor of divinity.
That’s much better encapsulated as the Parable of the dragon in Carl Sagan’s garage, and it’s the quintessential behavior of religious people when asked for why God refuses to reveal himself in ways that can be verified in the present. We are being told there’s a God and we should believe this because it says in an old book that there is, and it says he once got himself crucified and tortured to death, and then resurrected himself. All we have is the book and the fact that lots of people believe it. When we ask for something more substantive than just “but it says so right here in the book”, we’re fed endless excuses. We are being accused of being shut off to the “evidence”(read: claim in book-form), and we are fed excuses about why we shouldn’t expect there to be the kind of evidence it would take to persuade us.
Why can’t God just come back and reveal himself again, and do some more miracles? Excuses.
Why does God supposedly choose to communicate with us in indirect ways that can’t be tested? Excuses.
Why does God allow all sorts of gratuitous evils and suffering? Excuses.
And so on ad infinitum.
So you see it’s actually YOU who is playing the part of the “Silly Skeptic” in your video. You are the person claiming to have an invisible fire breathing dragon in your garage, and every time we ask you for some way to demonstrate that this is true so we don’t have to just take your word (or some book’s word) for it, we’re fed some bs excuse. God can’t be seen because he’s invisible. God can’t be touched because he’s incorporeal. God refuses to talk to you because you’ve closed yourself to him. Bla bla bla bla. But you should believe anyway, because… well because it says these things are true in this book. Why aren’t you convinced already?
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I am very mortal. But you stated one criterion, and I met it. Then you started introducing additional criteria, like immortality. Your thinking is not internally logically consistent.
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Faizall and I quoted the Quran where Allah, in the first person, makes precisely the claim you claimed he never makes.
If I am not God, then certainly Allah is.
At least, if you’re willing to stick to your guns.
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Yeah sorry I’m just not persuaded by claims of miracles in old books. God could supposedly just come back and do it again. It’s not like he doesn’t have time for it, or that it would be “a lot to ask” for an omnipotent being.
So, what is your excuse?
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God speaks in the first person and “self declares”. The criterion you set out was met. You’re on your way to the nearest mosque, right?
14 Lo! I, even I, am Allah. There is no God save Me. So serve Me and establish worship for My remembrance.
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Not quite. I am saying that if you rule out an unlikely rumour because it is, well, unlikely, you cannot then turn around and accept as a fact something that is not just unlikely but, as far as we know, is physically impossible. That is logically incoherent.
It’s like saying “We’ve ruled out that a horse made those hoofprints, and it’s really unlikely that a zebra made them because zebras are very rare here in Ontario. Therefore, they were made by a purple unicorn.”
Can you spot the logical flaw there?
I should point out that I am just stating this rumour is never-before-seen just for the sake of argument, and that such rumours are in fact commonplace. That said, if it were so unlikely as to be “miraculous”, then that just means you have another explanation that is just as plausible as a resurrection. So what do you do? Your solution is to just believe whatever you want. Well, if that’s your final answer, you’ve basically conceded this argument.
No, that is not the definition of “faith” in this context.
Yes. Are you seriously saying this does not happen? And you’re writing this at our particular point in history, no less, when one of the major problems up for discussion is the spread of fake rumours via the internet? At a time when, unlike the situation 2000 years ago, the facts could be checked with the click of a mouse?
Please, get out our your house occasionally and pay attention to what is happening in the world.
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I see it now. Thanks. But the dilemma is only apparent and not real.
God is not confused, nor is he at war with himself. Therefore, it is clear that only one of these Gods is authentic and the other is a fraud.
The identification of the authentic God should be easy since Allah is known to be a derivative of the Hebrew God. Also, the revelation of the Hebrew God to men and prophets predates the revelation of Allah to Muhammad by millennia.
The clear conclusion is that the God of the Hebrews is the one and only, the true and preeminent God. There is no God but him.
What is your criteria for ascribing a natural cause? For instance would the origin of new biological information resulting in a biological innovation such as flight be a miracle? Would the origin of matter be a miracle?
Bill what is your criteria for ascribing a non-natural cause? Seems like any natural phenomena you personally don’t understand you acribe to a God created miracle. Why is that?
I am not sure you can do this until you have a solid definition of a natural cause.
What definition of natural cause did you use in your post #377?
From post 365.