The Ubiquitous Miracles Of Our Existence
Posted by William J Murray
In another thread, I asked daveS why he was an atheist. He responded:
The proposition “there is no god” also appears to me to be consistent with what I observe in the world.
When asked what that meant, he expanded:
Well, I don’t know of any inconsistencies between this proposition and my observations. For example, I’m not aware of a god blatantly intervening in the world, as some people say happens.
I’ve addressed this in the other thread, but this comment is reflective of what a lot of atheists say is a convincing lack of evidence for god: the supposed lack of observed miracles. Atheists think we live in a world that looks like a world without a god. Of course, that’s circular reasoning based upon a groundless assumption; the assumption that what we experience is what we would be experiencing if there were no god and no supernatural commodities – a world dictated by more-or-less predictable cause-and-effect sequences of matter interacting according to intrinsic properties and orderly patterns.
Unrecognized by atheists, however is that therein lies what I call the ubiquitous miracles of our existence. We don’t consider them miraculous because we take them so utterly for granted that we, for the most part, aren’t even consciously aware of these miracles. We’re blind to the miraculous because the nature of our very existence is miraculous.
1. The miracle of an orderly, predictable experiential context. What if the universe was not orderly? What if the constants and properties that guide matter into patterned behaviors were not constant at all? What if they fluctuated randomly? Why should matter have any consistent properties at all? What holds these properties and forces at certain values? Without an orderly universe, how would we have any rational thoughts? Nothing would be coherent. How would we even come into existence unless something was keeping activity in the universe orderly?
2. The miracle of an individual conscious existence. Why should interacting matter become conscious and have individualistic thoughts? How does such a thing even happen? Why should our thoughts be apparently controllable and orderly? How is it that we can seemingly create a virtually unlimited amount of highly complex, coherent ideas/information on demand?
3. The miracle of mind over matter. How is it that without any knowledge whatsoever of how any of it works, we can simply will an action and cause the correct sequences of countless microscopic physical interactions to properly occur to achieve body movement? I was playing with my year-old great granddaughter the other day and she saw me wiggle my eyebrows, then immediately wiggled hers. Okay, she had no idea how to do that, and couldn’t even see herself doing it. How did she wiggle her eyebrows in response? It can’t be anything other than her, in whatever conscious state she has developed at this point, seeing me do a thing and then willing her body to do the same thing, and the her body immediately and correctly translating a pre-language, entirely uneducated intent into countless physico-chemical events that ended up being her wiggling her eyebrows.
I honestly don’t know how anything gets any more miraculous than that which we take for granted every moment of our existence. IMO, the existence of an orderly, predictable world where conscious entities exist and have intentional control (to a large degree) over their physical bodies and thoughts, and the existence of logic and mathematics as functionally valid correspondences to that experience is far, far more profoundly miraculous than if I saw somebody flying or solving a super-complex problem or parting an inland sea. Frankly, I’ve seen “miraculous” faith healings and all kinds of “miraculous” things that most people would simply not believe unless they experience them (and perhaps not even then), and none of it even remotely compares to the ubiquitous, every-day miracles that allow all of us this incredible experience of being deliberate, conscious entities in an orderly, lawfully predictable universe.
Posted by William J Murray
In another thread, I asked daveS why he was an atheist. He responded:
The proposition “there is no god” also appears to me to be consistent with what I observe in the world.
When asked what that meant, he expanded:
Well, I don’t know of any inconsistencies between this proposition and my observations. For example, I’m not aware of a god blatantly intervening in the world, as some people say happens.
I’ve addressed this in the other thread, but this comment is reflective of what a lot of atheists say is a convincing lack of evidence for god: the supposed lack of observed miracles. Atheists think we live in a world that looks like a world without a god. Of course, that’s circular reasoning based upon a groundless assumption; the assumption that what we experience is what we would be experiencing if there were no god and no supernatural commodities – a world dictated by more-or-less predictable cause-and-effect sequences of matter interacting according to intrinsic properties and orderly patterns.
Unrecognized by atheists, however is that therein lies what I call the ubiquitous miracles of our existence. We don’t consider them miraculous because we take them so utterly for granted that we, for the most part, aren’t even consciously aware of these miracles. We’re blind to the miraculous because the nature of our very existence is miraculous.
1. The miracle of an orderly, predictable experiential context. What if the universe was not orderly? What if the constants and properties that guide matter into patterned behaviors were not constant at all? What if they fluctuated randomly? Why should matter have any consistent properties at all? What holds these properties and forces at certain values? Without an orderly universe, how would we have any rational thoughts? Nothing would be coherent. How would we even come into existence unless something was keeping activity in the universe orderly?
2. The miracle of an individual conscious existence. Why should interacting matter become conscious and have individualistic thoughts? How does such a thing even happen? Why should our thoughts be apparently controllable and orderly? How is it that we can seemingly create a virtually unlimited amount of highly complex, coherent ideas/information on demand?
3. The miracle of mind over matter. How is it that without any knowledge whatsoever of how any of it works, we can simply will an action and cause the correct sequences of countless microscopic physical interactions to properly occur to achieve body movement? I was playing with my year-old great granddaughter the other day and she saw me wiggle my eyebrows, then immediately wiggled hers. Okay, she had no idea how to do that, and couldn’t even see herself doing it. How did she wiggle her eyebrows in response? It can’t be anything other than her, in whatever conscious state she has developed at this point, seeing me do a thing and then willing her body to do the same thing, and the her body immediately and correctly translating a pre-language, entirely uneducated intent into countless physico-chemical events that ended up being her wiggling her eyebrows.
I honestly don’t know how anything gets any more miraculous than that which we take for granted every moment of our existence. IMO, the existence of an orderly, predictable world where conscious entities exist and have intentional control (to a large degree) over their physical bodies and thoughts, and the existence of logic and mathematics as functionally valid correspondences to that experience is far, far more profoundly miraculous than if I saw somebody flying or solving a super-complex problem or parting an inland sea. Frankly, I’ve seen “miraculous” faith healings and all kinds of “miraculous” things that most people would simply not believe unless they experience them (and perhaps not even then), and none of it even remotely compares to the ubiquitous, every-day miracles that allow all of us this incredible experience of being deliberate, conscious entities in an orderly, lawfully predictable universe.
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