Posted: Wed Sep 12, 2007 1:17 am
It is pretty common for Christians to attribute as miraculous things that can be more reasonably explained by coincidence. It's partly a question of what your probabilistic threshold is. There are folks who think every time the bus comes late on the same day they do, it's a miracle and God did it just for them. And then there are folks who will brush off Daniel 8 as a lucky guess. It's my opinion that the rational path is neither superstition nor skeptecism, but understanding when the probabilities well exceed the expectations.Foil wrote:Seemingly everyone had stories of what they saw as super-natural events. But I still remember as a younger person, realizing that in the majority of those stories, the miracle wasn't something unexplainable... the miracle was that someone acted in a way that went against the norm and followed the example of Christ. (E.g. It wasn't the coincidence that a church member received some assistance on the exact day they needed it; the miracle was that another person recognized the need, and took their own time/money/skills to fill it.)
There are people all over the theological map on this front, as I'm sure you well know. Some folks deny that miracles can occur at all today, while others say that certain miraculous signs are essential marks of salvation. I disagree with both views.
Contrary to the first, my opinion is that the lack of supernatural involvement in the daily lives of Christians is a sign of our spiritual impoverishment. To quote A.W. Tozer,
I don't think this is how we were meant to be--slogging along in secular lives, serving a physically impotent God and waiting for a hope far in the future. It is right to emphasize that our salvation is spiritual, but it is wrong to confine our interaction with God to that. Richard J. Foster writes of his study of prayer this way:A.W.Tozer wrote:If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95% of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95% of what they did would stop and everybody would know the difference.
He goes on to detail his experiments, concluding that our poor prayers result from our childish maturity. I agree wholeheartedly.Richard J. Foster, in 'Celebration of Discipline' wrote:I took the Gospels and cut out every reference to prayer and pasted them onto sheets of paper. When I could read Jesus' teaching on prayer at one sitting, I was shocked. Either the excuses and rationalizations for unanswered prayer I had been taught were wrong or Jesus' words were wrong. I determined to learn to pray so that my experience conformed to the words of Jesus rather than try to make his words conform to my impoverished experience.
Contrary to the second, some people develop an indecent fascination with all things supernatural and see them as the ultimate in spiritual experience. But they are not. When this happened to the Corinthians in Paul's day, and they esteemed speaking in tongues beyond all reason, Paul rebuked them and told them to practice love. A single act of charity is worth more than all visions and all knowledge; we are not called to be magicians, but to be righteous and to be free. I do think your emphasis on personal transformation as the true miracle is the right one.
But I really don't see how people can hold the first position at all. You simply cannot read very far in the Christian devotional masters--even the modern ones--and deny the existence of miracles. It's simply too common and too broadly attested.
Testiculese, I don't really want to argue the validity of specific anecdotally reported miracles. You can't share my experiences, and you shouldn't accept my reports since you can't independantly examine them. My point was that miracles don't have the effect on faith that people would expect--using myself as an example. Whether what I observe is real is irrelevant to that point--since I think it's real, it's valid to share my self-reflections on the impact to my faith.
That said, I'll give a brief outline of why I don't think your explanations work in my particular case--just so that you don't feel I've evaded your points.
I think what you intend to describe is a selection effect sometimes refered to as publication bias. The idea is that only interesting results are published, and sometimes noise is coincidentally interesting. When someone reading the literature sees only the lucky cases, it looks like there's a result when there really isn't.Testiculese wrote:Either *everything* is a miracle, or nothing is. There no more miracle in childbirth than eating food and going to the bathroom.
Praise God that little Amy was cured of her disease, and praise God that 10,000 people starved to death a few thousand miles away. Praise Jesus your house was spared in the fire that ravaged the town, so praise Jesus the other 29 burned, right?
Miracles everywhere. Or maybe, only the ones you want to see.
Here are the features of anecdotal miracles that do not match a publication bias hypothesis:
- For publication bias to work, the more unlikely an event was, the more frequently it should be repeated. In my experience, miracles are only rarely reported publicly, and people generally forget about them quickly. It is not as though the same examples are trotted out again and again--for instance, that story about the lady from high school? To my knowledge, this is the first time I've ever told it. Ever.
- For publication bias to work, things have to be reported in the first place. People are very shy about reporting miracles. They're often highly personal, sacred moments, and on top of that, people are just afraid they'll sound like freaks. At least, where I hang out that's true--there are places where people have the opposite problem.
- Christians are not shy about talking about unanswered prayer. They'll rationalize it, they'll moan about it, and some will say, "Why, God, Why??!" three times an hour.
- With publication bias, we expect many more near misses than hits--and that they get reported to bolster the case. I don't see a lot of near misses at all. You can put this down to exaggeration (plausible from your perspective, but laughable from mine). This is what I was talking about with the bi-modal distribution.
Heh, well the obvious implication is that I think the first 50 aren't really hearing from God . There's a lot of innocent tomfoolery out there, and not a little charlatanry either. But that's beside the point. What I was describing was an experience that looks bi-modal to me--lots of far misses and lots of dead on hits. You know as well as I do that chance successes don't generate a distribution like that.Testiculese wrote:50-50 seems a pretty abysmal success rate for Mr. All-Powerful.Drakona wrote:When a Christian begins a sentence with "God told me to . . . " they follow it either with something absurdly stupid or exactly, eerily, right.
Actually, given that it was a fairly obscure and specific request (I think even the colors came out right), even given your numbers, the ratio is still good. The critical concept here is one of probabilistic resources. If you win the lottery once and lose a hundred times, you're still probabilistically way, way, way ahead. You have to lose several million times before you're even again.Testiculese wrote:Your Pastor wanted Warhammers and got some. And last Christmas, 5000 kids prayed for a bike and didn't get one. Hmm...not a good ratio.
But your numbers are frankly wrong--and this is where my experience will diverge from yours. If I saw one or two spectacular requests answered a year, a few near misses, a lot of "I guess I can make that mean something"s, and a vast ocean of nonsense and nothingness, I'd be as skeptical as you are. And I understand that give your worldview, you have to believe this is what I'm seeing--and have to persuade yourself that I'm delusional or something. But the fact of the matter is, this is not what I see.
Let's run some numbers on the story I told from high school. Sandy and I had a year to hang out, and she called me once--in the few hours I needed a friend the most. In retrospect, that was the most dramatic moment of that school year, so let's say I'm not fudging the identifying circumstances. The odds on that are 356 to one. And actually, she called in the morning--afternoon wouldn't have been as good. Let's give her 500 to one.
And moreover, she claimed to have been praying and been told I needed to talk.
Had she called at the wrong time, we would have had the following conversation:
For the odds to even out, I would have had to have that conversation 500 times. Or, if not that specific event, similar events. For reference, 500 times between now and then is once every two weeks. So I would basically have to say it was constantly happening.Sandy: Hey . . . do you need to talk?
Me: Uh, no, not really. Why?
Sandy: Are you sure? Because I was praying and thought you really might need to talk.
Me: Hmm, that's odd. Well, let me think of something. <<Comes up with something, but it's hardly the event of the school year.>>
You know how often I've had a conversation like that?
Never. At least, not that I can remember. Certainly not anything like constantly.
On the contrary, it's the miracles I see once a month or so, and the false positives that stick out like rare sore thumbs. The numbers very, very, very quickly fail to add up.
I am sorry for your suffering and hers. I realize that figurines and phone calls must look like cheap plastic imitations of miracles when what you wish for is real healing.Testiculese wrote:My ex is a sweet girl who has cystinosis (extremely rare form of Cystic Fibrosis I think). She will die before 35. . . . She believes in God. God skipped over my ex's house to give your Pastor some plastic action figures, and you actually call that a miracle.
Nonetheless, I wish you could hear yourself. What you write reads to me like an argument from anger. There is rational content, but when you examine it, it's weak--it boils down to the idea that God doesn't do big miracles when, by your reckoning, he has every reason to. No one, not even the greatest saint, can tell God when he should act and when he should not; an argument from a reckoning of what he should do is extremely baseless. And in no way invalidates observed small miracles.
It reads to me like an argument from spite or anger. Your girlfriend is every bit as faithful and charitable as my pastor, and if God will give him toys and won't heal her, well then he just can't be any sort of God worth serving. I don't have the space to respond to that here, but in a nutshell, you don't understand how God works; the child may be angry with his parents' decision, but that doesn't mean his parents aren't real and aren't good.
I'm not quite sure where you're going at the end of the argument--I'm with you up until the last two sentences. But before that, it sounds like you're suggesting that the need for a greater, loving being is one imprinted on us in childhood, part of the same love we have for our parents--and something some of us fill with myth as we get older.Testiculese wrote:When we are born, we instinctively have a place in our brains for an "all-knowing, all-loving being". When we are young this being is called a parent, and children naturally and instinctively bond to their parents. What if a large number of people never outgrow this phase, and need to fill this place in their brains with something once they have left their real parents and moved on? In other words, what if this place in the brain remains into adulthood for many people, long after it has served its need, and people feel lonely unless they fill this place with something? Having an "all-knowing, all-loving" invisible friend would be an obvious thing to fill it with. They've been told that there is one to fill it their entire lives by priests and parents. They've all filled their hole with what they were told at 2 years old and up. God being god, should have a hole the he fills, and everyone should know what it feels like. Everyone. Let those that do dismiss it, but it would be there. For Mr. All-powerful, it should be there, and with ease. Mother Teresa should have never had to doubt it.Drakona wrote: From my perspective, the presence of God is indisputable. The experience is common--virtually universal--in the church. Across denominations and cultures, across maturities and moral backgrounds. 80 year old grandmas, brilliant engineers, and unconventional, skeptical hip hop artists describe the exact same thing. Indeed, its absence for one saint only highlights its reality: she knew what she was looking for, and she knew it was missing.
I don't mean to be derisive, but this sort of argument is a Just-So Story. I presented the fact that Christians all share a common experience of the presence of God, and you came up with a story that expains that bare fact. Of course, anyone can do that with anything--how the leapoard got his spots or how the elephant got his trunk. A long story to explain a simple fact--not a whole system of facts, and not a well-tested story--is just a spurious explanation. This is a poor tactic--it doesn't actually demonstrate that the presented fact is invalid; it just sets up a long chain of facts and counter-explanations all waiting to be knocked down like dominos.
But to deal with the story on its own terms, I was arguing that the existence of a common experience reinforces to me that it is real. "Not so," you say, "it could be something inherently human and genetic/psychological." Well, I suppose it could, but given the following common characteristics, that's one helluva subconscious we've all got.
- Unspeakable joy
- Deep peace
- Unusual rational insight: People often percieve answers to puzzling theological or personal problems in a flash.
- Inaccessible knowledge is revealed: The eerie "God told me to . . ." moments are almost always precipitated by prayer in this sense.
- Unusual ethical insight: People discover things they've been doing wrong they had previously been unaware of.
- Unusual self-honesty: People discover lies they have told themselves.
- Unusual ethical character: People stop wanting to do evil and are irrevokably changed in an instant.
- Occasionally accompanied by visions and voices.
No, you wouldn't. That was my original point. You think you would now, because it happened, but miracles are no different than any other sort of evidence. Honestly, if someone prayed over your ex and she got better? You'd explain it away. Or you wouldn't. You might be impressed for a day, you might show up at church that week. But months would go by and God would make demands of you, and the people in the world that suffer would still be suffering and the things that make God seem so impossible now would still be there. And in the end, nothing would change unless you wanted it to.Testiculese wrote:You show me a few people with amputated limbs that grow back and I'll meet you at church!
No, that's not unkind. I usually come out of these discussions with some sort combination of stupid/insane/lying, and I understand--given your viewpoint, you really don't have a choice. Of course, from my viewpoint, I have very good reasons to think your assessment is incorrect.Bettina wrote:I can't be as nice as Testi or Foil... forgive me.
To believe what you see as miracles that you directly attribute to God makes you one of three things. A liar, privileged, or religously delusional and I do not believe your a liar. So, do I think that a God has allowed you and your husband special privilges that he hasn't given to me, my dad, my priest, Mother Teresa, and everyone else I know? No, I do not so that leaves the latter. Your lucky in a way, you overcame a personal barrier and taken it to be the truth which gives you the comfort that I don't see from the people struggling in church.
In a roundabout way. It's evidence that what she experienced and called the presence of God earlier in her life is at least a real experience and not a pretention. The fact that she could identify it and was forced to find it missing--despite all expectation and with no explanation--is evidence that it is real. She didn't inherently have it, she couldn't conjure it, but she could identify it. Mental illness might have those characteristics, but at least make-believe doesn't.Bettina wrote:Oh, and do you really think that the absence that Mother Teresa felt for her entire adult life is evidence that God exists?
It's not a sufficient argument for the existence of God, but it does move religion from the "hogwash and baloney" category into the "mental illness" category. Which in my opinion is a good thing. "Mental Illness" is farther from the truth, but lies break down and move farther from the truth when they bump up against reality.
The gospel is inherently polarizing--a Christian is doing things right when everyone considers him an absolute angel or a vile demon or an insane fool. I start to worry when everyone considers him a reasonable, stable fellow of decent character who never says anything upsetting.