R C Macaulay wrote:
Miracles are by definition "miracles" and as such are not subject to "tests".
And therefore they do not exist in the real world. Anything which exist is subject to test, at least in principle. In some cases the tests would be too complicated or expensive to perform. In any case, it is obvious to me that all previous reports of miracles were in fact natural occurrences that seemed miraculous to people at the time; or imaginary, mythological, or based upon misunderstandings. To take two well known examples, there is not the slightest chance that a dead person came back to life, or that a virgin had a baby. The latter myth arose from a simple mistranslation of a Hebrew word similar to the English "maiden" which means a young woman but not necessarily who has not had sex. (The Hebrew almah was translated into parthenos. Let this be a lesson to all translators!)
Ask surgeons that has performed a lifetime of operations and they will admit they never really know when their skills leave off and when miracles begin.
As I said, doctors can be as wrong as anyone. The fact that they believe in miracles has no bearing on whether miracles exist or not. In fact, doctors resemble baseball players, actors and sailors in that a successful outcome in their jobs are often largely a matter of luck (random events, or events beyond their control). Such people tend to be superstitious or religious. Programmers, physicists and especially biologists tend to be atheists and firmly of the opinion that miracles never happen. Perhaps the type of person gravitates to the job, or perhaps the job shapes the beliefs. It is interesting that doctors and biologists are so different in this, even though they both deal with living creatures.
I did not make that up, by the way. There have been numerous studies showing the tendency of one group or the other to believe in supernatural events. Belief is not distributed randomly. It correlates with various well-defined parameters such as education, wealth, profession and so on. And of course it depends a great deal on national origin and culture.
Or as a sage once wrote.. " to those that believe, they are true, to those that don't, they are not." elementary
Discussions based on opinions alone without objective evidence cannot be true or false. It is like discussing the morality or capitalism, or Hamlet's motivations. These are worthwhile subjects that should be taken seriously, but in no sense can they "exist" in the same sense that coffee exists, and in no sense are they real the way the Second Law is real.
- Jed
