Postby AnthonyByakko » Thu Jan 04, 2007 6:03 am
Well alright! Now that casual interest has died down, let's get down to business.
There seems to be a great deal of intellectual onanism going on, moreso than usual for a Pweb thread. This in itself is not interesting, but the lack of scholarship and any semblance of a material discussion makes the thread read like a 9th grade Philosophy class.
Now, I'm not exactly the model of philosophical academia - this I readily understand. With anarcho-capitalist ideals in politics and ethics, objectivist leanings in epistemology, and a crude mishmash of a Northern Baptist upbringing and vague Buddhist tenets in metaphysics, all the branches of philosophy for me are, to say the least, conflicted. But I believe this offers me a unique (if schizophrenic) understanding of the seemingly opposing universes we are discussing here - the world of the knowable, tenable "rules", and the world of the spiritual, incorporeal, and "miraculous."
The problem I believe that we are having is that we once again fall into a Great Disconnect (a name I've stolen from Rand). We disconnect our brains from our hearts when we enter these kinds of discussions. I believe all parties are guilty of this. Instead of a rational, reasonable discussion on how certain, seemingly impossible events could have occured (and subsequently, why they happened and who caused them), we have a linguistic circle-jerk, a semantic pissing contest, and a closed-minded rejection of debate - which is the only reason to have the discussion in the first place.
Let's try, at least once, to look at the issue singularly; in the kind of philosophical vaccuum that topics like this can only really be explored in. Some people have touched on the answer; that impossible is possible if you happen to be the Person defining "impossible." But even this is too broad. Let's break it down further. There are, in my mind, two kinds of "miracles." First, we define "miracle" as something that cannot be performed, attained or set into motion by any current act of human volition. Secondly, we divide the common notion of "miracle" from the truly "miraculous" - this means seperating "merely improbable" events like spontaneous recovery from the "universally impossible" like the stoppage of time (sun standing still, etc).
In the former, we must acknowledge and accept, first and foremost, whatever scientific conclusions can be drawn - I believe it would be blasphemous for us to use the brains God gave us to reject what we can understand with them. In the former, we understand that our bodies, our brains and indeed the universe we live in are all amazing, not-yet-understood realities that can perform seemingly miraculous activities. Even if something happening has a statistically irrelevant chance, like a man's brain spontaneously shrinking a cancerous tumor(s), it does not have to mean that some ineffable entity forced his tumour to magically become smaller. A tiny woman lifting a car wreck up off of victim is not automatically some divine strength imparted to her by God.
This reminds me of something I saw recently in a rare TV watching; I don't know how many Star Trek fans we have out here, but at one point on Star Trek: Voyager, the ship is sent back in time (as all of them seem to be at some point). Two of the crew are captured by people around our time. The ship's doctor (a holographic projection that can be materialised into physical reality) is sent to retrieve them. When he arrives and is seen by the captors, they unload with a barrage of gunshots - which all pass right through him and into the wall. The men are taken aback, and one of them whispers in awe, "God help us." The doctor smirks subtely, and states "Divine intervention is unlikely" right before phasering them. What seemed like a miraculous, impossible occurance to these people was really not a miracle at all. Though their minds couldn't comprehend something like a manifested hologram, or a hand-held phaser, or a Star Trek-esque transporter device, it didn't render those things "divine." Now this is all conjecture, as we don't know if any of those Star Trek or Star Wars type gadgets will ever materialize for us in the future, but not all things we don't understand are in the realm of physics - we don't have nearly the handle on the biological, medical, anotomic realities that shape our universe that we might have in the future.
Just because a "miraculous" healing isn't understood now, doesn't mean it's a manifestation of "divine" power. I happen to believe that God's interaction with this world is a lot more subtle than most other people like to believe. Our power of volition is what makes us "in His image", and it is the rules he created combined with our free will that mandates what happens here - not hope or "miracles."
For those "truly impossible" acts, such as ascending to heaven while still living, the sun stopping in the sky, or resurrection from the dead, we also must acknowledge that these acts have not occured thousands of years. And while I'm not entirely brushing them off as tales-that-get-retold, we can be sure that mankind's understanding of reality was much more limited at that time, and that God could easily interact with that population without tearing our world apart in confusion. If a "true miracle" occured today - such a dead person coming to life - what kind of impact do you think that would have on our society? Mass chaos? Probably. An agonizing period of rapid change for our cultures? Most likely. God may have chosen to interact more directly in the past for the precise reason that human beings were even more superstitious and sheepish (in the "following" sense) than we are now. Throughout history, mankind has shown itself to act contrary to its own best interest. I believe that is the purpose of religion - to provide a check-and-balance for mankind, to provide him with some ground rules, if you will, and to show him (however vaguely) that there were consequences beyond the mortal life to think about. So the "truly miraculous" acts, at a time when man was prone to believe, acted to get man to 'fall in line' so to speak with the religious guidelines He understood would help keep us from tearing our world apart.
Of course, as man is a capricious being full of guile and deceit, we have perverted and distorted a great deal of that old faith - and some have, throughout history, used the "guidelines" to "guide" man to act for their glory, rather than what is in the rational self-interest of mankind. I personally believe that God didn't create us to sit around Earth waiting for the end - be it His return or a cataclysmic comet or whatever might happen. I personally think that as science progress, religion as we know it must become obsolete - this is a Buddhist tradition that I hope comes to pass. It is said, in Buddhism, that your religious beliefs are such as this: you come across a wide river - too deep to ford and too long to swim. You construct a small raft of whatever you can find on your side of the banks that will float. So you sail across to the other side - do you throw the raft on your back, and carry it with you on the rest of your journey? Of course not - you discard it when it's usefullness is gone. I realize I have gotten off on a tangent, but hopefully this will infuse the thread with a little life.
