[quote]forlife wrote:
[quote]mertdawg wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]forlife wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]mertdawg wrote:
[quote]forlife wrote:
[quote]mertdawg wrote:
[quote]saveski wrote:
Still no answer to my post - why has God never healed an amputee?
I see all kinds of other mumbo-jumbo but no ANSWERs.[/quote]
IF one accepted your (argument sake) premises that God performs explainable miracles like curing cancer and healing other diseases, but does not heal amputees, the obvious answer would be that he only performs miracles that could have another explanation. Or put another way he only performs miracles that don’t violate laws of physics, but that he only shifts or manipulates reality within the parameters of the probabalistic laws of physics.
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I thought god was supposed to be omnipotent. What you’re saying, essentially, is that miracles don’t exist and everything follows the laws of nature. If that is true, a supernatural god is both impossible and unnecessary.[/quote]
Define Omnipotent. IF God is truely omnipotent to the extreme definition then he can violate the constricts of logical argument. You can’t logically limit a OMNIPOTENT being.
Others have argued that God is omnipotent to the degree that he sets the laws and does but not break his own laws.
If he is the creator of natural laws, and desires not to violate them, then when he heals an amputee, he would do so by going back in time and keeping it from happening in the first place and we’d never know.
Or he would erase any inconsistency from the history of the universe and we’d never know.
Or if he wanted to change something that would be unexplainable, he’d change the laws of physics and then we wouldn’t consider it to be unexplainable anymore.
Lastly, all that my statement requires is that a god would chose not to perform miracles by violating the lmits of physics, but only by manipulating reality within probabilistic constraints. If its a choice then it does not limit omnipotence.
But “some god” could still steer the universe within probability limits, and he actually does this through our unexplainable free will ability to affect the universe within the limits of probability. Some “god” whatever you call it, only need to be the last step beyond the edge of scientific explanation, and that science itself requires. Science can never completely describe reality because science is a creature of reality. It is part of it and a map can never contain the territory that it is mapping, unless the map is greater than the territory.
So as far as God being possible or necessary, that does not require that he perform unexplainable mysteries, except the one unexplainable mystery of non-determinism, which allows the ability for “probabalistic miracles”. Would it be explainable if you flipped a coin and it cam up heads 50 straight times? A god could avoid violating laws, and still basically dtermine the coin flip for every binary quantum event.
“Everytihing” does not follow the laws of physics anyway. The laws of physics are non-deterministic. They only set limits so that part is a misunderstanding too.
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Very good post. [/quote]
Damn right! mertdowg, well done.[/quote]
I’m surprised you agree with this, since I thought your position was that the laws of nature are deterministic, which is the opposite of what he said.
On the post itself, the problem is that “god” doesn’t do anything beyond what would be expected anyway, without divine intervention. If a priest could flip a coin and have it come up heads 50 straight times, consistently and in a controlled setting, it would be the headline of the millennium. The problem is they can’t do this. Religious claims never bear out, beyond what would be expected by chance alone.
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I do disagree with the last sentence, but the over all post is good. The essence that possibilities are endless. Limits are a controlling factor and therefore determinatory ← (I think I invented a new word! But I like it so I am going to use it)
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I still don’t fully understand this. Do you agree that there are multiple but limited possibilities? Like you can walk anywhere inside your house but not through the walls?
That’s basically the essence of teh argument that debunks the amputee paradox. God acts within his nature which is manifest in the laws of physics, and regrowing amputated limbs are inherently different than flipping a coin 50 times heads, which would be equivalent to the curing cancer miracle.
Now the argument against this is that regrowing a limb would still be a probabilistic occurrance, just highly improbably, like flipping a million straight coins. I thought that would be the atheists answer.
I’m not sure one way or another. Growing limbs has thermodynamic implications, while probabalistically healing cancer does not (the coins flips permutations are all energetically equivalent, but a healed or severed limb is not because they have different states of entropy, though locally entropy can decrease probabalistically). So they are different, but are they different enough?[/quote]
For claims of divine intervention to be real rather than a cherry picked sample of events that would have occurred naturally anyway, you must demonstrate either 1) an event that cannot be naturally explained (e.g., the amputee example) or 2) an event that occurs more frequently than would already occur in nature.
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As for 2, if healing by intervention are part of all healings then they would affect the rate of occurrance in nature.
I think that you are on track, but would you agree that a more accurate description would be that the event occurs more frequently than our best model would predict (though it still might be within the limits of probability?) I would agree. In fact, this is what the scientific theory of intelligent design says (as opposed to those who use the term to mean “special intervention”). When the real probability excedes the modeled probability, and the real measurements are accurate, and the model is complete, then we have evidence for intervention.
however the only perfect model of the universe is the universe. All models are basically limited maps of the best map which is what actually happens.
I’m not trying to defeat an argument, just thinkout out loud in bits and pieces.
By the way, what about the idea that the Universe needs an external (non-contingent) observer to make the wave function collapse from a superposition of states to the one state that we observe? We can’t really be the observers because we would have been in a superposition of states.
Or if we were the observers then maybe the universe really did begin when the first humans observed it even though the superpostiion of states has a 15 billion year history.
And I am not bound to the belief that quantum physics requires intelligence, but it does require “a special instance of irreversibility” to make the wave function break down and the only thing we can prove does this is an intelligent observation.