Theism vs. Atheism ... will it ever be settled?

^ I saw a programe about the acceptence of miracles once and the conclusion was at the end that God would have to physically move the stars in the night sky to spell out " A Miracle"

^ I would never forget!

^ That confused me for a few moments, but now I understand your reference.

Before the last Ice Age (which never happened because that was supposed to have happened 6,000 years before the world was created) Ireland wasn't an island.

Dean wrote: Before the last Ice Age (which never happened because that was supposed to have happened 6,000 years before the world was created) Ireland wasn't an island.

Edited by Snow Dog - December 09 2010 at 07:09

Ivan_Melgar_M wrote: Mr ProgFreak wrote:   How can a lawyer, of all people, make such a horrible mistake? Courts declare people "not guilty". The difference between "not guilty" and "innocent" is essentially the same as the one between "we don't know what caused the cure" and "god did it". You need positive evidence to convict someone of a crime, you need positive evidence to identify miracles. Now, who is being naive? When a client comes to me, I only have his word of innocence, in some cases not even all the evidence in the world can prove if A, B or C killed another person, in some cases all have the same interest, all have an alibi with 100 witnesses tha hey were 100 miles away from the scene of crime. . In the same way, the juries nor the judges can read minds, a the end they declare a person guilty or innocent because they believed more the arguments presented by the lawyer or the DA, science can only give an approach (in most cases) the rest is deduction.. Only on TV series you can get all the evidence, in most of he cases you  don't have a weapon (most criminals use illegal weapons without register and they dispose of them after a crime) or a single witness, you only have three or four suspects with similar possibilities too be the criminal, and still the Judge has to decide and give a ruling. In the same way, science don't tell us what is a miracle, it helps us to know which are not  miracles. Iván

Ah, no.

Edited by Dean - December 09 2010 at 10:09

^ Dean never said there was an "innocent" verdict. I can't find it anyway.

one reason  I don't study law is that the book is so huge, you need a year to plow your way through it

Dean wrote: Ivan_Melgar_M wrote: Not correct everywhere Dean, in USA and I believe in UK the only two veredicts are Guilty and Not Guilty, there's no innocent veredict  Juries never find defendants innocent. They cannot. Not only is it not their job, it is not within their power. They can only find them "not guilty." Hugh Duval  I believe only in Scottland they have a Non Proven verdict. Don't know about the rest of Europe. Iván At least you now acknowledge (in this thread) the difference between not guilty and innocent - which was the point Mike was making.

Paravion wrote: It would be a disaster to assert and accept that all unexplainable phenomena is ' a miracle'. Surely we need curiosity and further investigation.  In linguistics, explanations are in many cases impossible. (theorist speak of theories with varying degrees of explanatory force)   There's no explanation as to why English allows            Peter loves Mary  but not           *Peter love Mary  We can't explain why Greenlandic has only 3 phonemic vowels and Danish 9.     But it's highly likely that it's not because God wants it that way. A lot of 'phenomena' just has no reason - so it currently seems.  Also, it's presumptious to think that humanity (at present and future stages) is capable of explaining and grasping all the complexities of the world. But it's stupid, lazy and far worse to invent some fairy-tale like explanations involving Gods and miracles in order to make sense of the world.

This is (in a roundabout way) basically the point I was trying to make a few pages back. I've never asserted that unexplained phenomena are divine miracles. I only claim that unexplained phenomena happen. All too often I see atheists employing the logic that something can't have happened if we don't have an explanation for it. Pat quite rightly pointed out (although it was tongue in cheek) that it is foolish to say that something has happened which is impossible. I think in many cases it would be wiser to say "X is not impossible" rather than "X didn't happen."

Let's take the original example of the coworker whose wife had a vision of Jesus. If one of my loved ones who I trust completely swore that they had seen something like this, I would tend to believe them, rather than laugh at them and call them delusional or a liar. That doesn't mean that I would believe what they saw was a divine message, but I would believe they saw something. When this point was brought up here, those on the atheist side had a good chuckle at the poor ignorant people and their impossible beliefs. They instantly concluded that nothing extraordinary had happened.

You can admit the possibility of extraordinary events without being a theist. I hear the complaint that such claims cannot be verified in laboratory settings, which is fair enough, but if the vision was what it appeared to be, then wouldn't you expect it not to repeat itself on command? By it's very nature, such a vision would be reluctant to manifest itself on command.

Also, there was a time when many of the phenomena we now take for granted couldn't be verified in labs and had to be believed as hearsay. Would it be irrational for a stone age man living in the tropics to believe in snow, even if he;d never seen it, just taking the word of travelers he encountered? Such a person wouldn't possess the science to verify the claim.