Sunday, August 21, 2016

Swinburne Defends the Possibility of miracles

Here. 

8 comments:

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

The Evidence for miracles at Lourdes is very rigorously scientific, here's a journal article from a medical journal on a report by a team of medical historians examining Lourdes miracles, they say they still unexplained.


medical historians examine Lourdes


see also my blog piece for Monday, against Infinite causal regression in cosmology

Against ICR

SteveK said...

Another way to ask this question is: Is it possible for the historical pattern of natural regularity to cease being regular?

If yes, then why hasn't it happened yet?
If no, then what force is making that change impossible?

Gyan said...

Joe Hinman,
Of course, the Protestants are embarrassed by Lourdes and ignore it or dismiss it in the off-hand way. Precisely the way atheists use when faced with biblical miracles.

Ilíon said...

SteveK: "Another way to ask this question is: Is it possible for the historical pattern of natural regularity to cease being regular?"

According to 'Science!' fetishists, the answer is "Yes!" and, furthermore: anyone who says, "No" is an ignoramus who will "be forever closed to some of the major findings on the rules that govern the Universe"

SteveK: "If yes, then why hasn't it happened yet?"

According to 'Science!' fetishists, the answer is that the "average waiting time per stochastic ooze is much longer than the age of the Universe since the Big Bang. But, however improbable, in principle it might happen tomorrow."

====
As I keep pointing out, it's not the "Breaking the Laws Of Nature" aspect of miracles to which the God-deniers object -- for, after all, they themselves assert that there are, in fact, no such things as "Laws Of Nature" -- but it is rather that, definitionally, a miracle is intentional, and, consequently, points to God.

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

Blogger Gyan said...
Joe Hinman,
Of course, the Protestants are embarrassed by Lourdes and ignore it or dismiss it in the off-hand way. Precisely the way atheists use when faced with biblical miracles.

I'm a protestant and I use Lourdes as evidence

David Brightly said...

Reading this piece I was struck by three paragraphs about halfway through:

"But behind Hume's excessively stringent demands...
"Flew's contrast is, however, mistaken...
"What Hume seems to suppose...


Swinburne is at pains to put evidence for singular, unrepeatable events on the same footing as Flew's 'general nomologicals'. In the third paragraph he says,

The evidence that the event E occurred can go on mounting up in the way that evidence that L is a law of nature can do.

He doesn't give any examples. Considering all the unsolved police cases and historical investigations that run into the sands, this seems to me like wishful thinking. What do people think?

Ilíon said...

^ David Brightly, *gasp* are you "anti-science" *gasp*?

How is it that you don't grasp that according to 'Science!' there are no such things as 'general nomologicals'?

How is it that you don't grasp that according to Hume, even if there are such things as 'general nomologicals', they cannot be known to us?

David Brightly said...

Well, I don't know about Science!, but plain old science is full of them, no? Boyle's Law, perhaps.