"Natural " Miracles CAN Count

[David Sklansky]

Regular readers of this forum should see by now that there are quite a few posters here who are much more adamantly atheistic than I am. Still, I get most of the heat. To alleviate that, I want to address a point that some of the religious folks could have right.

In order for a miracle to be persuasive as to the existence of some higher power it is NOT actually necessary that one of the laws of physics be broken. Some religious people say that God uses natural means to do miraculous events. Atheists don't buy that and assume that if there is a natural cause, then it isn't a miracle from God. For instance if the walls of Jericho tumbled down due to an earthquake, there is no miracle. Baye's Theorem or Occam's Razor applies. But not so fast.

See if you are going to invoke Baye's Theorem, you have to start raising your eyebrow if the event has a miniscule chance to happen randomly. And you must measure the chance with the realization of the PARLAY involved. If there is no parlay it is a different story. Someone finding a picture of Jesus on their grilled cheese sandwich means nothing. But if the Pope found it on the day after he was elected it would (assuming it wasn't a hoax or plant). Someone making 25 passes in a row at the craps table means nothing. A lady who does it right after getting on TV and pleading and praying for donations for the hospital she runs for cancer stricken kids in Pakistan, does.

If the stories in the Bible are all true and scientists could come up with explanations by invoking natural but rare events, you still are stupid if you don't believe in the biblical God. Because for all these rare natural events to happen JUST AT THE RIGHT TIME is so ridiculously improbable, that Baye's Theorem demands that you believe. Even if Jericho was cause by an earthquke, the tenth plague was caused by Andy Fox's dung heap, and manna came from a weird plant that blossoms every thousand years.

And yes even, if it could be shown that Jesus was resurrected because he hadn't quite died.

The point is that because all these biblical miracles happened at such opportune times, their occurrence, even through rare natural events, "breaks" the laws of probability in as convincing a way as if they broke the laws of physics. (Notice however, that miracles like finding a statue that cries are not the same parlay type situation.)

Keep in mind though that this post is pointing out that naturally caused miraculous events are probably God's hand ONLY if the other criteria are met. They firstly must have almost all actually happened. They must also have actually happened right at the critical time they were needed. And finally the "natural" explanation has to be nature caused, not man caused. If Moses knew that he had poisoned the food supply of the Egyptians, I obviously don't count that as a natural explanation.