May 1, 2008
Miracles
How about some help in responding to a comment against miracles:
The problem with miracles is that you can’t ever really conclude that they are ’supernatural’. All you can conclude from them is that “we don’t understand how that happened… yet.” And even if you do have an explanation, you can’t be sure it’s the right one. There’s a possibly-apocryphal story of some French natural philosophers called to the countryside to examine a stone that had fallen from the sky. They confidently explained that rocks didn’t fall from the sky, of course, but the peasants had probably seen lightning striking the ground… and gee, here’s a metal rock right in the center of the damage.Others have made the mistake the other way, though, like J.B.S. Haldane who confidently asserted that no ‘mechanism’ could ever account for inheritance and cellular reproduction. Then, a few decades later, the structure of DNA was discovered.
I don’t see what accepting miracles as an ‘explanation’ could ever buy you. All it seems to me is a declaration that someone doesn’t want to understand something. When it comes to things like the origin of the universe, all I think we can say is, “We don’t know… yet.”













Confessing Evangelical » Blog Archive » Creation is complete, but not closed said,
May 5, 2008 @ 3:26 pm
[...] few days ago, Adam Omelianchuk on the BHT posted a query he’d read about how miracles can be distinguished from natural phenomena we are not yet able [...]