Johnny Skeptic

Consider the following from another thread:

How do you judge claims of miracles regarding all ancient sources?

Please be advised that most skeptics would be quite happy if miracles were available to help people with their needs. Such being the case, why do you suppose that skeptics question ancient claims of miracles in the Bible and other religious books?

Toto

Roger Pearse is trying to claim that ancient texts are evidence of miracles. But the reason that skeptics reject this evidence is not "begging the question" (petitio pricipi) - it is that miracles have never been observed to happen under controlled conditions, while reports of miracles are common. It is much more likely that someone wrote a story about a miracle that was mistaken or false than it is likely that the story is an accurate report of a miracle.

Johnny Skeptic

We are still waiting for you to tell us how you evaluate ancient claims of miracles regarding the Bible and other writings.

gstafleu

Correct, plus another important thing. There is a good, well-working theory (it is called "science") that tells us exactly why miracles do not happen. For example, the principle of conservation of energy is well established, hence perpetual motion doesn't work. It is this convergence of observations (nobody has ever seen a miracle under controlled circumstances) and theory (we know exactly why miracles don't happen) that allows us to reject the possibility that miracles could have happened at any time or place.

Gerard Stafleu

Ben C Smith

Science is a theory?

Ben.

vijeno

What exactly do you mean by "good"?

If the fact that it is well-working was the only reason, you'd find me on the side of those who will constantly challenge this theory. Why? Because there may be better theories, and they might explain miracles as well, and then we would be a little bit wiser.

bacht

What's to explain? "Miracle" is just shorthand for "some process we don't understand yet". Are you nostalgic for a pre-scientific world of ignorance and unnecessary suffering? Where is the wisdom in abandoning a tool (science) that has served us extremely well?

Chili

But metaphysic precedes physics and that is why science is an extrapolation from omnicience as is shown in the last paragraph of Aristotles "Posterior Analytics" where the primary premiss of all imaginative demonstration (we call it science to justify a bigger paycheck) is ours by revelation, inspiration or even accident . . . and in the end is exhillerationg is if we surprised ourself. This kind of tells me that we are smarter than we thought we were before the expiriment began which was only needed to prove that which we did not really knew as fact (remember here how Thomas was called a doubter as the twin of faith).

Now it is not exactly true that I want to call science the ambition for dummies but if metaphysics is from a different plain that continues to baffle the scientific community it is also wrong to go there for answers regarding Johnny's queery, who would readily agree that you should not got to a plumber to get your tire fixed.

Here is the last paragraph by Aristotle on this topic:

Thus it is clear that we must get to know the primary premisses by induction; for the method by which even sense-perception implants the universal is inductive. Now of the thinking states by which we grasp truth, some are unfailingly true, others admit of error-opinion, for instance, and calculation, whereas scientific knowing and intuition are always true: further, no other kind of thought except intuition is more accurate than scientific knowledge, whereas primary premisses are more knowable than demonstrations, and all scientific knowledge is discursive. From these considerations it follows that there will be no scientific knowledge of the primary premisses, and since except intuition nothing can be truer than scientific knowledge, it will be intuition that apprehends the primary premisses-a result which also follows from the fact that demonstration cannot be the originative source of demonstration, nor, consequently, scientific knowledge of scientific knowledge.If, therefore, it is the only other kind of true thinking except scientific knowing, intuition will be the originative source of scientific knowledge. And the originative source of science grasps the original basic premiss, while science as a whole is similarly related as originative source to the whole body of fact.

Clivedurdle

http://www.lasersol.com/art/turrell/rc_intro.html

gstafleu

I was wondering if someone would pick up on that . Yes, science can be described as a theory--a scientific theory, that is, not a theory as in the apologists' "evolution is just a theory." You can of course also see it as a collection of theories, but then that would also go for e.g. physics.

Gerard Stafleu