Viti

They even sound like made up stories...all those minute details "little small village..." are usually signs of a tall tale! I would ask "What is Kyles last name and what church did this happen in? Can we go there?

I had plantars warts on my feet and legs as as kid (tomboy...went without shoes everywhere all the time in the summer...don't let your kids do that BTW)....had em frozen and they still didn't go away, then a year later I woke up and they were gone...big deal, warts are caused by a virus and tend to go into remission or simply disappear quite often

Autonemesis

Alemannisch? Bairisch-Österreichisch? Perhaps Schwäbisch?

[ June 21, 2002: Message edited by: Kind Bud ]</p>

Matt Arnold

Thank you for your responses. Thanks to Koyaanisqatsi especially for your comments.

Tim (my brother-in-law) has known Kyle since college, and sees him every weekday since they are co-workers. Katie also works in their office. I left out their last names for their privacy, because this is the internet and I don't have their permission.

Tim has offered to arrange for me to cross-question them. I intend to do so, although since they live in another state, it will have to be over the phone. I need to think up a list of questions.

Any suggestions? And remember: Tim is a nice guy who has treated my atheism with respect. He does not deserve any guff.

Viti

Hey Matt...these types of stories as proof are the most difficult if you respect your adversary because they question the very nature of belief and that hurts people.

Basically it comes down to this: Those that believe that God can and does intervene in his followers lives ascribe various normal things to the divine, those that do not believe ascribe coincidence or natural explanations.

There is no way to prove the "tongues" story one way or the other and the "miracle" cannot be duplicated in front of witnesses (people, even nice ones, lie all the time to feel important or jusitfy their silly handwaving and other charismatic behavior. A true miracle would be if she started speaking perfect swahili or an obscure dialect of backwater China)

I am also sure any Doctor can tell you that warts go away by themselves at times.

There is no way for either side to win when the evidence presented is this sketchy so you may not want to bother.

Coragyps

Second to Lady Shea's testimony: I once had about 20 warts on my hands, and woke up one day to find them gone without a trace. Maybe Katie's mother prayed for me, but no one at my house did. QoS: ya think maybe the Big Guy could hear better thirty years ago?

beausoleil

The probability of any particular unusual and remarkable thing happening is low. The probability of at least one unusual thing happening is considerable. Neither event strikes me as needing a specific explanation - they're just part of the daily backdrop of inevitable coincidences.

Mageth

She just said, "What a beautiful language!"

German? "Beautiful" is not an adjective I've ever heard associated with the German language.

copernicus

Matt,
The German story does sound apocryphal, and it could still be that Kyle is making it up. If you know German, it would be interesting to test Kyle's alleged fluency in that language. In any case, you don't have access to the person that allegedly spoke the German dialect, and that person could have been either a native speaker or someone who had practiced reciting (or been coached to recite) the German text in order to impress her church friends. Glossolalia has been studied quite a bit by linguists, and it is normally comprised of nonsense syllables with a limited number of sounds that are typical of what English speakers expect to hear in foreign languages--e.g. trilled "r", palatal sibilants before "t", and the like.

In the wart case, it is possible that the woman was a lucky victim of the "placebo" effect, brought on by the expectation of a miraculous cure. There is also the mystery of why God didn't have the time for Katie's brother. Perhaps he had been naughty. Perhaps Katie's Mom did something naughty between her prayerful cure of Katie and her attempted prayerful cure of the brother. Then again, it occurs to me that she began praying for Katie's brother after she cured little Katie. Perhaps God realized that she didn't love Katie's brother as much and decided to hold off on his cure. Anyway, half a miracle is better than none. It's interesting that the son's lack of a cure is the event that remains "unexplained".

[ June 21, 2002: Message edited by: copernicus ]</p>

Matt Arnold

What is truly remarkable: Far from making headway to demonstrate that his concept of God is accurate, the two of us are really pushed back to a desperate expedient: whether anything supernatural at all is real. These stories are the best that could be done so far.

The story about praying to Frejya, although fun, is off of the current topic because Tim did not send me these stories to validate his specific religious beliefs. Rather, they are a response to a challenge from me, to invalidate my insistence that the supernatural does not exist because if it did, we would be having experiences that we need it to provide an explanation for.

Also it could be argued that Satan can work miracles in the name of Frejya, to fit it into that worldview.

Vorkosigan

One of the most effective arguments against the supernatural and ESP was developed by Pynch and Collins in one of their books. Let's imagine that the mysterious Kyle really did have this experience....once you concede the possibility of the supernatural, anything is possible....:

• K saw the woman (hereafter W) actually learning German
• W controlled K's mind so he only thought he was hearing German
• K controlled the woman unconsciously and projected German into her.
• A third party controlled both their minds
• K had a vision sent by a malevolent demon
• There's no W and no German. The world is a fantasy of K and exists only in his mind.
  

There's simply no limit to possible explanations, once you suspend the rules. Ironically, there's no argument for god in here, since even an experience of god could simply be an unknown psychic power.

Vorkosigan