Atheism and miracles?

[NomAnor15]

Miracles isn't exactly the right word, but it was the best I could think of. For example, when someone that everyone thinks is going to die from a disease, but they have a sudden remission. Or Shackleton not losing a single person on his expedition, and making it to South Georgia Island in that tiny boat. That's the kind of thing I'm asking about. How do atheists look at things like this? Random chance? I'm not trying to start a debate about who's right and wrong, I'm just genuinely curious.

[SirNitram]

Random chance is not right. Even things based purely on chance are influenced by many things, so it's not true randomness.

Otherwise? It's something unexplained. It can be explained with enough legwork, but.

[Jaevric]

What makes you think those are miracles in the first place?

Unexplained by current medical science, in the case of spontaneous remission of cancer. Good fortune in the case of Shackleton.

But aren't miracles generally 1) very obviously performed by a "saint" or "messiah" figure or 2) very obviously a one-shot "gift" granted to an unusually deserving person by a diety?

Healing the lame and blind with a touch? That's fairly impressive (assuming it's not a scam). Calling on "God" to smite your enemies and having the walls of their city collapse? Also pretty impressive--unless it turns out you'd actually undermined the walls already and just timed pulling the supports for when you were shouting out for the favor of your diety. But the people who did that stuff were very important religious types who were performing specific services in the name of the diety.

How many of the people who have experienced "medical miracles" were particularly good, particularly religious, or generally wonderful human beings?

We're learning new things about medicine and how the human body works all the time. Just look at dietary directions over the last fifty years. Calling anything that happens, can't be explained, and is beneficial a miracle is the refuge of a lazy mind.

[Stark]

Describing something unlikely happening as a miracle is retarded. What about unlikely BAD things? I hear the Hood was destroyed with one hit - unlikely ... ... ... so it must be the Devil. Eh?

People having remission is a pretty funny example - there are so many variables that prediction is difficult, particularly long term, and doctors often err on the side of 'bad' to save families grief later. Clearly, then, if anyone recovers it's a miracle.

Jesus, I just realised what this reminds me of. Tabloid journalism. Their stock in trade is shit like this - zomg the doctors said she would die AND SHE DIDN'T kapow giant overturning of western medicine.

[Darth Wong]

Miracles isn't exactly the right word, but it was the best I could think of. For example, when someone that everyone thinks is going to die from a disease, but they have a sudden remission. Or Shackleton not losing a single person on his expedition, and making it to South Georgia Island in that tiny boat. That's the kind of thing I'm asking about. How do atheists look at things like this? Random chance? I'm not trying to start a debate about who's right and wrong, I'm just genuinely curious.

Two interesting assumptions here:

1) You assume that atheists would have a certain prescribed way of looking at it, the way Christians do.

2) You assume that atheists would have some particular problem dealing with these events.

Personally, I just shrug and carry on. Nothing about those events screams "violation of the laws of nature" to me.

[Spyder]

If some devine entity was going around created these miracles you'd think there'd be more consistency.

When you have one person go into remission from a disease you're always going to have fifty more that don't. The obvious problem here is that there are no performance management goals applied to the miracle worker. He just does the first one or two and calls it a day.

[DPDarkPrimus]

How about shitty things happening to you that have a low statistical chance of happening? I suppose god is responsible for those, too?

[SirNitram]

More interesting would be a reaction to something that truly sodomizes our understanding of the world. Getting more energy than you put in would be a good start. That'd be pretty miraculous.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Miracles isn't exactly the right word, but it was the best I could think of. For example, when someone that everyone thinks is going to die from a disease, but they have a sudden remission. Or Shackleton not losing a single person on his expedition, and making it to South Georgia Island in that tiny boat. That's the kind of thing I'm asking about. How do atheists look at things like this? Random chance? I'm not trying to start a debate about who's right and wrong, I'm just genuinely curious.

Atheism is a lack of belief in God, which does not automatically imply a lack of belief in explained "miraculous" events. Rationalism would, however. Most atheists are also rationalists, but this is not automatically true.

[Darth Raptor]

Define "miracle". If a miracle is just a statistical unlikelihood then I'm entirely unimpressed. Most of the things people tell you are impossible are only so in practical terms. With the exception of a very few things (free energy, FTL travel, etc.) literally everything else is possible, albeit highly, highly unlikely. None of the medical "miracles" I've ever heard described are specifically precluded by our understanding of physics. In fact, their allegedly-miraculous nature hinges on what we don't know. We've only begun to understand the human body and brain, so it's a huge leap in logic to automatically assume that sorcery is afoot when things don't go the way we expect in those fields. These phenomena are not happening in controlled environments. Indeed, there are probably too many variables for any controlled experiment to be possible.

[Elaro]

But aren't miracles generally 1) very obviously performed by a "saint" or "messiah" figure or 2) very obviously a one-shot "gift" granted to an unusually deserving person by a diety?

"No, that's Publicity." -Austin, God Inc., episode 2

[Patrick Degan]

To quote the Doctor: "To the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable, only unexplained".

[NomAnor15]

OK, I didn't mean to offend anybody. I wasn't trying to generalize about atheists, I just couldn't think how else to ask the question. It just seems like the 'good' ones happen really rarely compared to shitty stuff. Maybe it's my imagination. Anyway, I'm not sure how to phrase the question better, so I'll drop it. Sorry for the fadicha.

[Plekhanov]

Miracles isn't exactly the right word, but it was the best I could think of. For example, when someone that everyone thinks is going to die from a disease, but they have a sudden remission. Or Shackleton not losing a single person on his expedition, and making it to South Georgia Island in that tiny boat. That's the kind of thing I'm asking about. How do atheists look at things like this? Random chance? I'm not trying to start a debate about who's right and wrong, I'm just genuinely curious.

I wouldn't consider either of the examples you give to be 'miracles' which I would define as someone unexplainable by human effort or the forces of nature.

Given the huge numbers of people who contract potentially fatal diseases it's hardly surprising that some survive for a while longer than might be expected in a typical case even without the assistance or modern medical science.

Shackleton was a truly remarkable man and one of the greatest leaders of men in recent history, he and his men survived because he was a great man and because they were highly capable men.

[Darth Wong]

Something which cannot be explained is not necessarily a miracle. For something to be a miracle, it would have to grossly contradict that which we already know and understand. Otherwise you're just using the "God of the gaps" pseudo-logic.

[Gil Hamilton]

Miracles isn't exactly the right word, but it was the best I could think of. For example, when someone that everyone thinks is going to die from a disease, but they have a sudden remission. Or Shackleton not losing a single person on his expedition, and making it to South Georgia Island in that tiny boat. That's the kind of thing I'm asking about. How do atheists look at things like this? Random chance? I'm not trying to start a debate about who's right and wrong, I'm just genuinely curious.

The thing is that those things have nothing to do with religion or a lack there of at all. A miracle is by definition something that actually violates natural laws by way of magic or other divine hoohah. Cancer suddenly going into remission or no one managing to die on a boat aren't miracles, or necessarily even that unlikely.

[Darth Servo]

My first live debate with creationists, the issue of miracles came up as it must anytime they try to defend the nonsense of Genesis but when pressed to actually define a miracle, their definition was "something that doesn't happen very often" even though the specific example was having mornings on days 1-3 of creation before the sun is even created.

[Patrick Degan]

A miracle is by definition something that actually violates natural laws by way of magic or other divine hoohah. Cancer suddenly going into remission or no one managing to die on a boat aren't miracles, or necessarily even that unlikely.

In that vein, "miraculous" would involve such wholly unlikely and reality-busting events as the north polar icecap spontaneously refreezing tomorrow, or finding the island of Cuba serenely floating alongside the Goodyear blimp, or Karl Rove actually turning into a decent human being.

[NomAnor15]

Eh, ok, I see this was kind of a stupid question. Forget I asked.

[Faram]

Well if "God" could change PI to 3 that would get my attension.

But I am not holding my breath...

[Zor]

Long story short, Just because something is unlikely, but possible and does happen does not mean that that their is a divine help happening behind it.

Zor

[bz249]

[quote]
NomAnor15
PostPosted: Tue Apr 24, 2007 11:05 pm Post subject: Atheism and miracles?
Miracles isn't exactly the right word, but it was the best I could think of. For example, when someone that everyone thinks is going to die from a disease, but they have a sudden remission. Or Shackleton not losing a single person on his expedition, and making it to South Georgia Island in that tiny boat. That's the kind of thing I'm asking about. How do atheists look at things like this? Random chance? I'm not trying to start a debate about who's right and wrong, I'm just genuinely curious.
[/quote]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

Read the first paragraph of this and you will understand. In quantum physics every event have a certain probability and what we see as the macroscopic world is an averaging of these probababilities. For most events the law of large number holds ie. there is enough independent particle of the time frame is large enough. Thus the expected thing will happen, that's why things like the classical thermodinamics and Newtonian mechanics works quite well.
However if you haven't done enough experiments you couldn't apply the probability to the results. So a deviation from the expected results (ie. a 'miracle' may occur).

Think about the lottery, you should play it for millions of years to have an expected number of jackpots per play. On the other hand I heard about people who won it from quite few tries...

[Ted C]

Sometimes random chance operates in your favor. Further, with enough people in dire circumstances, it's pretty inevitable that a few "outliers" will end up beating awful odds. There's nothing supernatural going on; some people just get lucky.

[Darth Wong]

Is it a miracle every time someone wins the lottery? Because somebody wins every lottery at least once a month, and often several people win at once.

I don't know about the earlier claim that there are multiple people who have won multiple times, though.

[Surlethe]

I often find reports of miracles like miraculous healing, people surviving against the wild forces of nature, etc., funny, because of the context -- or, more appropriately, lack thereof. They just strike me as ironic because every time someone dies of disease or loses to nature, it's simply not held up as God caring. I mean, you might call the case of a baby who was born very prematurely and lived a miracle, but that ignores the context of all the babies who are born prematurely and die.

If there is a God and he does work in peoples' lives, he has to work with inside random chance, because we sure as hell can't objectively see his hand in these purported modern-day miracles.