Two interesting phone conversations:
1. We have a very good friend, Jen Fitz. Her husband is a very hard working man, and he attends an evangelical faith community, so we do not know him as well as we know Jen, but he’s a great guy. If Jen had told me this, it would be one thing. However, *Jon* Fitz told me on the phone that he woke up early last Sunday morning, jumped up, and had an inspiration to pray for me, specifically.
A little later, they got up, and when his wife checked the computer, she had Mary’s e-mail about my aortic dissection (and my arterial bypass surgery which was going on at that point).
2. This evening, my best friend called me and talked to me for the first time extensively about my experiences of the past week (and his–the fact that we are best friends is indicated that even with what I’ve been through, he still knows he can talk to me about his own frustrations).
Anyway, he said that sometime recently he began praying specifically for Mary’s and my extended families, that we could heal some of our longtime wounds and that our families would be more active in helping us with our needs. He told me this after I’d shared to him both the wonderful Christmas visits we had with both sides of the family and the wonderful outreach that various family members have made this past week.
Good for you! So can we assume that the nine year old girl who was recently killed in Jared Loughner’s shooting spree was part of the wrong denomination, that she or her family didn’t pray hard enough, or what? What about the federal judge? Maybe Catholic or something?
Maybe God was just busy reengineering your family situation and couldn’t make it down to Tuscan.
I would usually try to be much nicer about this, but you posed your rhetorical question as a challenge on a day when the negative implications are unusually clear. If God is intervening to help you personally, and getting credit for the good things, then he logically bears responsibility for the many prayers he doesn’t answer and all of the bad things that result.
So to answer you directly, no. I don’t think that there is evidence for miracles. And on a day like today I can tell you with utter certainty that some prayers most definitely aren’t answered.
All prayers are answered. ALL. It is just that sometimes the answer is “no.” Why? It is human arrogance which demands the answers to such things. We may never know “why” a horrible tragedy happened or why God permitted it to happen due to the fact that human history is not finished and all the complex interactions between humans, at the macro- and micro- levels cannot be accounted for yet.
I find it humorous, and a bit sad and pathetic, that atheists determine that God doesn’t exist because they never got the pony or video game for Christmas that they asked for when they were 5. God is not a vending machine (or marionette as GodsGadfly mentions). We cannot expect that God will answer all of our prayers in the manner we wish them to be delivered. The obvious reason is that there are a few billion people praying, with countless prayers in opposition to each other. Not everyone can get what they want, the idea is ludicrous. Add to the fact that no prayer is answered “yes” if it doesn’t conform to God’s will for that person or humanity as a whole.
And there’s the rub: you infer that all the problems of the world descend from God not answering prayers, and therefore He is to blame. NO. Humans are to blame, not God, for the sorry state of the world.
The more I hear atheists rant, the more I feel that their concept of God stopped developing at the level of a 5 year old. You people pride yourself on “reason” and “logic” and yet you never apply those tools to the reasonableness and logic that God does exist, and His nature is far more complex than humans can conceive. Which is why He incarnated Himself in the human form of Jesus, to reach out to us and save us, in spite of ourselves..
1. Why is today worse than any day in the evils men do? Every day, thousands of poor children are aborted. Millions more are starved to death, shot, bombed, etc. This is not God’s fault. It’s ours. Every day is equally horrible for acts of violence. The age or celebrity status of the victims shouldn’t matter.
2. Should be noted that the shooter in Arizona was an atheist.
3. I didn’t say what good things God was getting credit for. You are definining “good things” on worldly grounds. I don’t care that I live or die. I care that people’s hearts are changed.
4. The evidence is that someone would have such a profound experience of the need to pray for me at such a crucial time, having the premonition that something was wrong with me when he had no earthly knowledge.
5. That little girl was killed by a horrible man, again, just like all the little girls who are killed by abortionists. But with atheists, rit’s always “Why did my grandma die of cancer?” “Why did that little girl die?” You don’t care about that little girl. If you did, you would, like the many Christian missionaries and volunteers around the world, be actively to stop violence against children, to stop violence, period.
Physical death is not a question of “desert”. We *all* deserve to die. There is no innocent person. We are all fallen creatures. When God chooses to allow someone to die–or allows a person to be a victim to another person–it has nothing to do with “how much prayer” the person has said or any bargaining system you atheists imagine.
I never understand why atheists are bothered by stuff like this. If there’s no God, there’s no morality. You’re not an atheist. You’re a blametheist. You imagine that God, “if He exists,” *HAS* to be a marionette machine. You want all responsibility for human decision taken away. You don’t want to believe in free will, which is why you’d rather believe human beings are nothing more than apes (“more, but not less,” as C. S. Lewis said). You want a God who’s a magic vending machine and not a loving father.
You want the luxury of saying that there’s “no objective morality” when it comes to saying that the evils *you* choose are wrong, but then you’ll talk about objective morality when it’s something you choose to see as wrong. It’s very hypocritical.
Remember, you’re talking to someone who is grateful to God for his aortic dissection and sees the dissection itself as a miracle.
I’m sorry, could you clarify? What precisely do you mean by miracle, and what precisely was the miracle that occurred? Thanks.
OK. Like most atheists, you’re apparently illiterate. A friend woke up last weekend in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, with the urge to pray specifically for me.
He had no idea, at that point in time, that I had suffered an aortic dissection. You don’t see the miraculous in that?
Longtime family feuds have mostly healed, and many personal spiritual problems that led to those feuds, have healed in the past year, just in time for me to suffer my dissection with a loving family to support me. You don’t see the miraculous in that?
Thank you for the reply, but you only partially answered my questions. This is the part you missed: What precisely do you mean by miracle?
Thanks.
A miracle is any clear intervention of God or the preternatural into the natural order.
OK.
Re-connecting with old friends is rather common during times of crisis. That is mundane, hardly miraculous.
Likewise, the alleged story of waking at night in a sweat is rather ordinary. Look up selection bias, in particular the phrase “remember the hits, forget the misses”.
You asked a question in your post title. Your evidence offered is feeble, and is readily explained by well described natural phenomena.
Thanks for the exchange. Have a nice day.
Idiot.
I didn’t say reconnecting with old friends *during* a crisis.
I said healing old family wounds *before* a crisis.
And it’s hardly selection bias. How often does one wake up in a cold sweat and feel the urge to pray for someone else? Where I come from, that’s a rare phenomenon, and usually comes before news that person has had something go wrong.
Your brain is feeble.
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To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.
It’s been said a million times, as it happens to be true. I think sometimes explaining situations like this is trying to explain why you love someone in minute detail. For the one who knows and loves God, your story is readily understood. For one who has no knowledge of the love of God or indeed any love at all, it is difficult to explain.
I laugh at the use of the word “mundane.” You must have a very wild life to call what has happened to us “mundane.”
I share Rob’s skepticism about this “miracle”. All it shows is that you see exactly what fits your faith-based worldview.
Idiot.
Actually it shows once again that atheists are idiots. You deny that prayer ‘works.’ I offer evidence of it (of course, the real pronlem is that you don’t have a clue what prayer is really about, and then you insist that it must be a bona fide miracle for you to accept it. Presented with bona fide miracles, you people come up with reasons to dismiss them, or you just say, ‘that proves God is cruel.’ You are not scientific or philosophical. You’re just whiney brats who are mad the universe doesn’t work the way you want.