THE SUPERNATURAL SHOULD HAVE A PROBABLE AND IMPROBABLE OF ITS OWN - HOW THAT KILLS BELIEF IN MIRACLES

Christianity claims that Jesus rose from the dead after being killed by crucifixion and lying three days in a tomb. Islam teaches that God supernaturally revealed a book written by God to Muhammad. There are all kinds of examples of alleged miracles.  They are examples of supernatural events. 

Naturally Improbable and Supernaturally Improbable
 
For religion there is naturally probable and supernaturally probable.
 
For religion there is naturally improbable and supernaturally improbable.
 
We must assume that there is only naturally improbable and naturally probable. We have no experience of supernaturally improbable and probable.

Now all agree that any miracle is improbable but religion says evidence can make that insignificant.  For example, the evidence that Jesus rose is so good, we are told, that it deals with how unlikely it is for the dead to rise when all the dead we know stay dead.

That means then they assume that in the spirit world it was something probable.  But if it was improbable there and looks probable here then that cancels it out.

Bringing in the supernatural then only leads to contradictions and wrecks the case for the miracle which paradoxically can only happen if there is a supernatural to do it. 
 
Natural to assume it's not a miracle!
 
If there is wonderful evidence for a miracle, we still cannot believe. There are things we cannot be expected to believe. If miracles and magic don't fall into that category then nothing does. If we cannot be expected to believe in them, people must not promote belief in them. It demeans us.
 
The less good evidence there is, the more we cannot believe. And the more we insult ourselves and others by opposing our friend, reason.
 
Christianity commands faith in miracles and it has no right to do do that. Asking would be fine but it says its God commands it to command others to believe.

The view that it is most likely that a miracle report is down to a mistake or delusion and not a real miracle seems to forbid you from ever believing in a miracle.  The view that you can believe in the miracle or just equally believe it is a mistake forbids you from making your belief in the miracle serious.  It is not serious if you can legitimately just assume one or the other.

If you lost a finger and God gave it back to you, would you have to conclude that your belief that you lost it was a delusion? The finger is there so should you assume you never really lost it and the memory that you did is false?

Religion says, "No. That would be going too far. Something being unlikely doesn't make it impossible.  It's unlikely you really lost a finger and had it restored but it is not impossible."

We say, "It is easier for a miracle or supernatural event to make you think something happened when it did not rather than it really restore your finger.  Miracles do not give us confidence in ourselves."

So if it we should avoid assuming miracles then if we have to then we have to do the next best thing.  Assume the miracle is causing an illusion or making a false impression on your mind.

We talked about how religion says that something being very unlikely in theory can be shown likely after all if the evidence is good enough.  Religions that are ardent chasers after miracles do not put evidence above theory but use evidence to work out what the theory should be. For example, if six children claim that they see the Virgin Mary and she raises the whole graveyard from the dead as a sign, but the Virgin teaches absurdities, nobody will believe in the apparition.

So here the evidence cannot override the theoretical improbability.  David Hume said that a miracle might happen but the fact is that people make mistakes and lie so their saying a miracle happened is probably not correct.  Religion if it wants to say that the theoretical does override the solid and good evidence should just say David Hume was right and be done with it.  It should say it is okay to dismiss evidence for the supernatural.

This is not philosophy on the part of religion.  It is ideology.

One individual case like that is enough.  It means the evidence is saying theory comes first.  This is not in just the individual case.  It is in general.

The case is hypothetical as well meaning religion admits it can happen but does not.  That means that we can now admit that not only does logic say the theory comes first but they also, logic or not, are putting it first anyway.  Right or wrong that is their attitude.

Believers say that Hume was right to say that in his experience the way nature works makes a miracle story too unlikely to be believable but that does not give him the right to say that it is the same for anybody else. But most people are in Hume's position so most people should not believe in miracles!

There is nothing nonsensical in saying that an event that is intrinsically very very improbable becomes probable if the evidence says so.  But that is down to the fact that we know from other cases that there is evidence that such things happen.  Nothing tells us when something is a miracle or not.  Natural but unexplainable reasons could be why we think we see a miracle.  Perhaps the coincidence is not what we have seen but how our memories changed the truth.  We cannot call a hugely unlikely event a miracle even if it looks like one. That is just unnecessary and therefore ideological.

FINALLY

Miracle preachers are shown to be liars for how they limit probability to the natural.  But the supernatural realm should have its own probability to worry about too. If we could see what is going on in the spirit world, we might see that it has its evidences that a claimed miracle was improbable on the supernatural level.  Once a miracle is claimed you throw away any right to say that the evidence we have makes it probable no matter how improbable it is.  And millions witnessing a birds beak turning to gold for two minutes will mean we will dismiss the miracle so it is not true that we really care that a miracle happened.  We care about our religious ideology that we want it to slot in to and back up.



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