Category: Miracles
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Shroud of Turin’s Authenticity No Longer Disputable?
I report, you decide.
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Miracles: Some Preliminary Points
It can't hurt to back up a bit to examine some definitions, make some distinctions, nail down some terminology, and catalog some questions. See how much you agree with. 1) A little girl falls into a mine shaft but is pulled out three days later alive and well. People call it a 'miracle.' That is…
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Spinoza’s Epistemic Theory of Miracles
Chapter Six of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise is entitled, "Of Miracles." We do well to see what we can learn from it. Spinoza makes four main points in this chapter, but I will examine only two of them in this entry. We learned from our discussion of Augustine that there is a tension and possibly a contradiction between the…
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Bergoglio the Secularist on the Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes
Dr. Vito Caiati reports: Something that the Argentinian did this week really annoyed me. Specifically, in his homily on the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, Bergoglio continued his devious discouragement of belief in miracles, flagitiously denying the great nature miracle by which Christ fed a multitude with just five loaves of bread and two fish. As…
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Miracles and Resurrection
Thomas Beale writes, Quoting from your quote of Ian Hutchison: …Miracles are, by definition, abnormal and non-reproducible, so they cannot be proved by science’s methods. Today’s widespread materialist view that events contrary to the laws of science just can’t happen is a metaphysical doctrine, not a scientific fact. What’s more, the doctrine that the laws…
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Revelation and Miracles
The question I want to pose and to which I do not have a firm answer — Nescio ergo blogo! — is whether every case of divine revelation is a miraculous event, or whether there are or can be cases of divine revelation that are not miraculous. To treat this question properly we need some…
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Of Summertime in the Desert and Miracles
When cold water comes out of the 'hot' tap, and hot water out of the 'cold,' is it a miracle? No, it is summertime in the desert. (The pipe from the water heater runs through the air-conditioned house; the cold water line comes from outside where the temperature is in the triple Fahrenheit digits. So…
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More with Mason on Miracles
Franklin Mason e-mails (mid-June 2007): I'd meant to get back to a little point you'd made a few days ago. You said this: "I think of creation as an ongoing 'process': God sustains the world in being moment by moment. But at each moment, the totality of what exists is completely determinate: for each individual…
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Ceteris Paribus Laws and Miracles
Here is a passage from a paper by Nancy Cartwright, In Favor of Laws that are not Ceteris Paribus After All, for you to break your eager heads against: Turn now to what Earman, Roberts, and Smith call “special force laws”, like the law of universal gravitation (A system of mass M exerts a force…
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Possibility, Intelligibility, and Miracles
Dave Gudeman at my old blog commented forcefully and eloquently: I've always had difficulty with arguments like this: It is not easy to understand how God could add causal input to the space-time system. I'm aware that such arguments have a distinguished history, but I don't get it. Just because you don't understand how it works,…
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A Definition of ‘Miracle’ Examined
Franklin Mason, on my old blog, wrote: The definition of a miracle that I have in mind is this: event M is miraculous just if (i) M was brought about by an agency outside nature, and (ii) at the time and place at which event M occurred, there was no natural cause at work sufficient to bring…
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Is the Problem of Miracles a Special Case of the Interaction Problem?
1. The Ontological Problem of Miracles The ontological problem of miracles is the problem of explaining what miracles are and how they are possible. These questions are logically prior to the questions of whether any miracles have occurred or whether such-and-such an event is a miracle. You may believe, for example, that miracles have occurred,…
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Kant on Divine Concurrence and Miracles as Complementa ad Sufficientiam
The question concerning the possibility of miracles is connected to a wider question concerning the relation of secondary or natural causes and the causa prima, God. How do these two 'orders' of causation fit together? 1. One extreme position is occasionalism according to which all causal power is exercised by God. For the occasionalist, God…
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Kant on Miracles
Earlier posts uncovered epistemic as opposed to ontic conceptions of miracles in Augustine and in Spinoza; but Immanuel Kant too seems to favor an epistemic approach. "If one asks: What is to be understood by the word miracle? it may be explained . . . by saying that they are events in the world the…