Miracle

Right so my friends and I are pretty much, to some level, socially inept (as they read this they will acknowledge the fact). We can not have a conversation without it turning into some really deep discussion about religion/politics/religion/religion or religion, I have decided it is time to share our collective view, which often is quite similar, this conversation started off as a discussion on miracles and digressed to other things along the way, so without further ado, the collective view of yesterdays double 'study period' chat.

The problem with miracles is our knowledge and understanding has progressed so much from what we knew in the bronze ages, obviously otherwise we'd still be hitting each other with bendy swords and putting toads on boils, but because of this we can now rationalise and work out how or why something happened. So by believing in miracles we are taking accounts from a time long passed and trying to preach them in our current state in time, progression has made us sceptics but in this case I think this is perfectly acceptable. However recently a nun in Australia is said to be 'on the path' to becoming the nations first saint. She supposedly cured a woman of cancer who wore a relic from this 18th century nun and prayed to her regularly, the Catholic Archbishop has said that praying 'obviously' cures cancer, he did go on to say that it is a long shot, but it is still unbelievable that in this day and age people can still eat this superstitious nonsense (a bit strong I know but it makes me a little upset). This is supposedly the second miracle to be attributed to Mother Mary Mackillop since her death over a hundred years ago. The problem I have with this is that all the advances in medicine, everything doctors do to save lives, are completely forgotten the moment 'God' decides to step into the breach.

Moving on before I make myself too angry. One of the things we talked about was how babies are born today, and always have, with huge disabilities, some born without skin, blind, deaf, die no matter what anyone does, after birth or from cot deaths, but if one survives this, if say the parents were told it was unlikely they would have children, or after a long line of miscarriages, then God had to have a hand in it. What we couldn't see is why if one thing causes thousands, millions to die, why God is in no way to blame for that, but if one thing good happens, and the odds are that it has to happen at some point, then people loose all their common sense and say that it was the cause of supernatural intervention, and forget the doctors, nurses and medicine which have been helping them the whole time.

At this point J started name dropping, one philosopher mentioned was Richard Swinburne, he says something along the lines of, humans are naturally honest and therefore if one says that they witnessed a miracle they should be believed... so if one of my friends came up to me a week after her great aunt died and said that they had seen her, I would believe that they had seen something, maybe not a ghost, or the aunt raised from the dead, but something. After all humans are not by any means perfect creatures, we have defects, this I suppose could at this point be called the imagination, however it is because of this we can convince ourselves that so called miracles exist. However there is one view, that you can not say God exists and say it is a truth, because it is not known, everyone has their own opinion on it, however if you say that an elephant is red this can be denied without a doubt. Saying this, that view has been put down because it itself can not be said to be definitely true.

One of the problems is that people over complicate things, a 'why choose the obvious answer when there is something far more convoluted to turn to', like with the miracle babies, it could have just been a lucky sperm, why does the praise have to go up to something no one understands. As William Ockham said a very long time ago, 'The most productive and most efficient form of philosophical inquiry is the simplest' perhaps it's because he said it so long ago that people seem to have forgotten it.

Now of course in Christianity we come across the problem of Jesus, there is actual evidence that there was a man called Jesus, more evidence than for some of the Roman emperors, but whether he was the son of God, a doctor, a psychopath or history's greatest con artist is still unknown, and we are constantly told what he did and said, never what he thought. We also come across the problem of his birth, I mean Virgin Birth? It's the oldest trick in the book!!! "I'm sorry my love, I know we aren't married yet, but I am pregnant, it is a gift from *insert deity* " Surly if we discredit Heracles then we discredit Jesus in the same breath. Saying this, the one convincing thing about Jesus is of course his Resurrection, which this eighteen year old feels is a concept she is not entirely sure she is capable of discussing. We have to question faith, people who believe blindly don't really believe, questioning faith has been done for millennia, however at this time we are in transition, some clinging desperately to the old beliefs, others telling us it is all lies. As in the Handmaids Tale those in transition find it the hardest, as a group the majority of us hope that in the future there is no religion. Apart from this taking away our only topic of conversation and giving the rest of the common room a break, it would stop a lot of conflict. And it does seem to be heading that way, or is that my wishful thinking, as, with increasing birth-rates, the amount of Christian believers is proportionally decreasing, I am not sure of what is happening with other religions, but if the decrease in Christians or any other religion causes a deacrese in extreemist or homophibic acts, it is from my point of view, a reasonably good thing.

We are in no way atheist, as we all believe there is something, but we can only see that if God created the world, he was either incredibly creative, sadistic, or an exceptional scientist, which if the later was true would raise question to why the church fears progression so much and prosecuted scientists in years back, and probably will again in years to come.

One of the things J wrote for me is 'It can be argued that our definition of natural laws can preclude the possibility of anything being termed a miracle. John Hick defines natural law as "Generalisations formulated retrospectively to cover whatever has in fact happened" Bearing in mind that a miracle is defined as a breach of natural law, "We can declare a priori that there are no miracles"' So the apple falling may in itself have been a miracle, however now it is called a law, so a miracle is as likely as gravity stopping for moment.

Quite honestly the only miracle here is the fact that I have remembered to write this all down, so goodbye until I get round to writing what other people say again.

Thais
xxx