Suddenly, almost miraculously (heh), he picks up a single book and a day layer decides to put away his childish things?

My ever burning skepticism makes me suspicious and whispers to me that someone might be playing both sides of the board. =D

This war seems to be between fundamental Christians and Atheists most of the time, but, it really galls me when Atheists start talking about magic, because if you haven't practiced it and you haven't seen it in action, then, you cannot talk about it intelligently.

I guess this means, "I don't mind when atheists attack beliefs I also disagree with, but when they point out that the same criticisms are applicable to my beliefs, well, that's just outrageous and rude."

Sorry, Stephanie, but all superstitions get the same treatment around here!

Magical thinking and ritualistic magic differ in the details, but they're both equally useless. What you're talking about seems to be the same nonsense I remember Scott Adams writing about years ago in one of his books. As I recall, he called it "affirmations", although there are doubtless many other names for it.

Believing something will happen, or having continuous thoughts about its occurrence, has no impact whatsoever on the likelihood of the event. This can and has been scientifically tested. You can prove it yourself very easily, though. Just set a goal that is well beyond your own individual power to achieve: say, becoming governor of your state.

Choosing a goal which is under your own power is subject to a nearly unlimited confirmation bias. For example, if you set the goal as learning Chinese -- anyone can do that, given enough time and patience. Affirming the goal has no meaning and certainly no magical powers. You should spend the time used to restate the goal toward actually achieving it.

On the other hand -- and this is where the confirmation bias comes full circle -- if you don't achieve a goal entirely within your own power to accomplish, then it's trivial to blame that on not actually wanting it to begin with. Such failures are all very easy to dismiss, and the sympathetic magic never gets the blame.

TLDR; wishing doesn't make it so.

Oh, and the root post was nearly five years old, by the way.

Miracles having a shyness effect is very apparent in the Bible, where the miracles become smaller and smaller as one continues along the timelines of each Testament.

In the OT, God creates the Universe, then causes a giant flood, makes people speak different languages, torments the Egyptians and rescues the Israelites, makes the Sun and the Moon stop for Joshua, sics some bears on some little children, and makes an ax head float. Notice how they get smaller and smaller.

The pace picks up a bit in the NT, however. Jesus Christ works lots of miracles; he conjures up food and drink, walks on water, drives out demons, and raises the dead, including himself. But the Holy Spook descends on the Apostles in fiery form, Ananias and Sapphira mysteriously drop dead, JC speaks to Paul from the sky, Paul raises someone from the dead, etc.

We can also see this pattern in Greco-Roman history. The earliest history, usually nowadays dismissed as "mythology", is full of miracles, with gods intervening in human affairs on a regular basis and even talking to people. But the better-documented later history has much smaller miracles, like Roman Emperor Vespasian's miraculous cures and Roman Emperor Augustus telling some frogs to shut up when he was a boy.

Medieval saints were described as working numerous miracles, but when we have good documentation of them, like for St. Francis Xavier, they get more and more miracles attributed to them as time goes on.

But the miracles recognized by the Vatican for some recent saints are a few cures here and there -- incredibly paltry by the standards of previous centuries.

adam: Miracles work outside the realm of science. How do you disprove something that you can't recreate no matter how you try.

This is a common stereotype of scientific method that does not fit observational and historical sciences very well, sciences like astronomy and geology.

For example, oxygen and potassium cumbust when they're combined. But we have the same chemicals in our body, yet they we do not combust.

That is because the potassium in our bodies is already burned, as it were -- it is present as potassium ions.

(analogy about a parent grabbing an egg...)

Should I have expected anything more than argument by analogy?

David Hume also noticed that the amount of miracles claimed declines as time goes on -- miracles have a shyness effect, much as psi phenomena do. And over the 250 years since his work, the decline has continued even further.

This person who wrote the article does not know anything. He or She has no knowledge of science or theology. It is shameful to read this article. Miracles and Magic is completely different. The argument is between science and miracles not magic and miracles. Please, if you want to argue against miracles, please atleast have a better argument. And since when is native american dancing miracles?!?!?

Lame arguement

I think this is one of those "picture says a thousand words" moments.

Lame arguement

How has miracles been contradicted?

This, of course, depends on what is meant by "miracle." The term "miracle" is commonly applied to any of the following:

*Events which are statistically improbable and (usually) desirable but entirely explicable by natural causes.
*Events which are attention-getting and whose natural cause is not precisely known, but which do not appear to in principle defy natural explanation.
*Events or experiences which are pure seem, in a purely subjective sense, to be welcome surprises, whatever the actual probability of their occurrence may be.
*Events or experiences which are emotionally powerful, moving, and not fully comprehensible at an intuitive level, but which are perfectly explicable by natural causes, including extremely common events such as the birth of a child.
*Events or experiences which are emotionally powerful, moving, and completely comprehensible, to which the describers wish to sell tickets.
*Salad dressing.

Certainly all of these occur. However, when the term "miracle" is used, as Ebon intends, and you probably intend assuming you've actually stopped to think about it, to mean "A spectacular event definitely inexplicable by natural causes, especially one which is visibly incongruous with the laws (note: a "law" in the scientific sense is close to an "if-then" statement than a "thou shalt") of nature as we understand them, caused by the deliberate actions of a supernatural entity for some ulterior purpose," the following hold:

*No such event has ever been observed or detected and reliably documented and there is no good reason to believe it ever will be.
*When people, objects, or sites who are claimed to be able to perform "miracles" or have "miraculous" effects, in this sense, are allowed to be evaluated by science at all (for some reason, they or their custodians almost never agree to this), the claimed effects utterly failed to be detected and in many cases the effects that were supposedly "miracles" were conclusively shown to be fraudulent, casting further doubt on such claims.

It has not, I agree, there are some events that have occured that can be disproved as not a miracle...

See my comment about failed demonstrations and fraud. Also note that it is not necessary to "disprove" something for which no compelling evidence has ever been provided.

But you cannot disprove the ones that are absolutely obvious. There are events that cannot be a trick or illusions. Science cannot even disprove it.

Such as? Again, note that it is not necessary to "disprove" something for which no compelling evidence has ever been provided - though, since your phrasing implies that such evidence exists, somewhere, it should be a simple matter to document it for us.

Nor does miracles violate natural laws. "a miracle is an event which is not producible by the natural causes that are operative at the time and place that the event occurs."

1) Make up your mind.
2) Such as?

Don't take the word miracles loosely. It is not for example (if i were a drug addict) to say that it is a miracle that I found the heroin. It isn't, that is purely luck, and depending on the conditions of how I found it.

[Aside] Come on, think it through... ...damn.

Miracles work outside the realm of science. How do you disprove something that you can't recreate no matter how you try.

How do you tell the difference between "something that you can't recreate no matter how you try that the person describing it to you witnessed" and "something that you can't recreate no matter how you try that the person describing it to you made up in order to get attention and/or money." Propose a test that would reliably distinguish between them and I'll consider taking you seriously.

For example, oxygen and potassium cumbust when they're combined. But we have the same chemicals in our body, yet they we do not combust. It depends on the idealized conditions right?

Elemental potassium combines with oxygen in a process called combustion that has been fairly well understood by science for well over a century. This occurs because the chemical properties of oxygen include a favorable electron affinity, and the chemical properties of potassium include a relatively low ionization energy, so that potassium and oxygen readily form an ionically bonded oxide. This does not occur in the body at a scale that produces the visibly destructive effects you seem to be confusing with "combustion" because the potassium and, generally, the oxygen, in the body are either ions dissolved in solution or chemically bonded to other atoms already. This is information that even a C- student would be hard-pressed not to absorb from a high-school level chemistry class. If you're going to try and make a point about the limits of scientific knowledge, I'd suggest you pick something that was within spitting distance of cutting-edge science at some point within living memory.

Now when we do have the idealized conditions, but nothing happens, then a supernatural agent is working and the idealized conditions described but the law are no longer in effect.

When conditions are such that we would expect an effect and it does not occur, we first see if the anomaly can be replicated and is not explicable by instrument error or the like. Next, we re-examine the conditions under which it was expected to occur and the actual conditions, including factors previously considered irrelevant, for discrepancies that may explain it. We develop hypotheses, test them, and eventually reformulate the law to account for the phenomenon we're studying, or, if that simply isn't feasible, discard the law and formulate a better one. This is how, and why, science works.

The law isn't violated because the law has this implicit provision that nothing is messing around with the conditions."

It is not an "implicit provision," "laws" in the scientific sense describe relationships between conditions and events, and resulting phenomena, that consistently hold true, especially those that can be proven mathematically. Cause and effect. "If-then" in computer logic.

...you really don't know what the hell you're talking about, do you?

Put another example to this: If a child were to drop an egg, the egg, by natual law of graivity would fall and break right? But what were to happen if the child drops the egg but a parent quickly reaches out and grabs the egg. The parent doesn't defy or violate the natural law, he or she steps in the idealized conditioned event and stops it from taking effect.

No. No, you don't.

The event you describe is entirely explicable by natural causes. The effects on the egg are precisely what we would expect given the conditions and behavior of the system in which it was operating. The existence of parents can be verified, the motivations of a parent for catching the egg are logical and obvious, the level of physical dexterity required to catch a falling egg as you describe is certainly above human average but well within human limits, the muscular and neural processes behind that action are not fully understood yet but are clearly natural, and the event of the egg falling and being caught can be replicated with reasonable success (and with clearly understood reasons for failure). None of this is true of "supernatural" entities.

There are events that we see in this natural world that we cannot describe.

Such as?

If it is something good that happened, and cannot be describe, think of it as a supernatural agent stepping in and and stopping the right conditions from taking effect.

What conceivable excuse is there for invoking a supernatural (do you even know what the term means?) agent, rather than checking to verify that the event is replicable (or that it can be shown to have actually occurred in the first place), and doing research to find the previously unknown natural phenomenon that caused it?

(No. No, you really, really don't.)