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Tuesday, 10 December 2013

On Miracles and the Miraculous.II

Deuteronomy4:32-34ASV"For ask now of the days that are past,which were before thee,since the day that God created man upon the earth,and from the one end of heaven unto the other,whether there had been any such thing as this great thing is,or had been heard like it?Did ever a people here the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the fire,as thou has heard,and live?Or had God assayed to go and take him a nation from the midst of another nation,by trial,by signs,and by wonders,and by war,and by mighty hand,and by outstretched arm,and by great terrors,according to all that Jehovah your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes."

Jehovah God is the archetypal Philosopher,Scientist,Technologist,the Great Sage.The scriptures tell us,
Jeremiah10:12NASB"It is he who made the earth by his power,who established the world by his Wisdom;and by his Understanding He has stretched out the heavens."
Unsurprisingly then,the holy scriptures which are in part a historical record of his dealings with his Church/congregation here on earth contain examples of his transcendent technology.Some though,find fault with the Bible's reporting of miraculous phenomena,and would submit these reports as evidence that the Bible is nothing more than a collection of fairy tales.
It does not require much effort though to see this objection as the circular reasoning that it is.Basically the principle is that any report of the miraculous must be rejected out of hand simply because it reports the miraculous,and everyone knows miracles never happen(so much for linear logic).
What though is a miracle as defined by the bible;the N.T uses a number of words to refer to miraculous phenomena at John4:48 the Greek word "teras" is rendered"wonders"in a number of popular English language translations.At Luke6:19 the Greek word "dynamis"basically meaning power is used in connection with miraculous phenomena associated with Jesus.
The words and their context in the scriptures suggest phenomena that elicit wonder,even puzzlement or that fill one with reverence,suggesting as they do intervention by a superhuman power and intelligence.
Do scientists or philosophers really know enough about the continuity of the laws of nature to dismiss the the Bible's miracles as impossible?Can they authoritatively dismiss the possibility of an intelligence that can engineer,say,the splitting of the red sea or the resurrection of a dead individual?
Famous author/futurist Arthur.C.Clarke once made the observation that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from divinity.Technologies that would have been rejected as fanciful,or perhaps even as violations of the laws of physics by scientists living as little as a hundred years ago(not long at all in historical terms) are now part of our daily lives,but these are nothing compared to what is being discussed in all seriousness by technologists and futurists;the reverse engineering of the human brain,creating synthetic life,telekinesis,androids indistinguishable from humans complete with emotions.Perhaps persons who invoke modernity as a reason for rejecting the mere possibility of the miraculous aren't as well read as they think.
The fact is that Scientists whether they style themselves atheist or otherwise must acknowledge the existence of the miraculous.For they must all acknowledge the emergence of life from non-living matter,and the subsequent emergence of major new lifeforms in the planet's natural history.
The point is that to appeal to science or modernity as an excuse for rejecting the possibility of the miracles recorded in the Bible is to be philosophically inconsistent


PS
How strong the lens,how keen the eyes,to see what we
hypothesise,to watch so small a thing in motion,as what
we've christened the Higgs boson.A tiny,massive thing
that passes,for what best explains the masses of other things
we cannot see,but somehow nonetheless must be.

A thing so small is surely cute,though weirdly shaped,
perhaps hirsute,and just as real as any wraith,conjured
with the eyes of faith._Jay Curlin.



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