OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
14hr ago
Yeah, I don't really get the blood thing and I'm not the one who brought it up. When it comes to Catholic miracles, there are a few different types:
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Miracles of healing or protection, which are generally something we believe God bestows on many of His children regardless of their religious affiliation. Just done for the sake of benevolence, or because there was something else that person was supposed to do, to live their lives as a witness to others of God's goodness.
That said there are some particularly Catholic contexts for certain healings, like Lordes. Lordes is really the biggest healing miracle site in the world with the best before/after documentation by doctors. -
Miracles related to states of spiritual ecstasy - levitation, visions, trances, etc. A component of very deep prayer that is good for its own sake, the visible signs of which likely are to spur on others to greater commitments to meditation and contemplation.
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Stigmata - Wounds of Jesus signifying a closeness to Jesus, which is also joined to His suffering in a special way for the salvation of souls.
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Bilocation/Apparitions - Saints on Earth and in Heaven appear in locations far removed from their physical body. Just seems nifty I guess, helpful to send a message you couldn't otherwise and receive a prayer request or provide counsel.
Often apparitions of Saints in Heaven are tied to a specific message ("increase devotion to X," "A great calamaty will befall if people don't pray," "I am going to clarify a contentious part of doctrine.") Then the apparition works a sign in the Heavens or on Earth to back up the message. -
Incorruptibility - Saintly bodies don't decompose in the same conditions other bodies do. This points forward in joyful hope to the world to come. St. Januarius's blood might be something like this.
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Eucharistic Miracles - Someone doubts the presence of Jesus, suddenly a visible change occurs that demonstrates the truth.
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Miracles where the visible sign persists long after the initial reason for it disappears to history. St. Januarius's blood might be a sign of this.
Or it might not be a sign of anything. The Catholic Church uses miracles as a sign that it is ok to canonize saints. It doesn't actually like taking a strong position on any specific miracle lest someone's faith be built entirely on that miracle. People who convert to Catholicism on the force of having an experience at Medjugorje are weird and have difficulty becoming spiritually mature. Instead, the only miracle that the Church professes as necessary to defend as reason to believe is the Resurrection of Jesus.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
19hr ago
Yeah, I think a lot of atheists just don't really look into it, or assume religious people don't actually experience scientifically evaluated miracles in the modern age, because it would be really challenging to their worldview.
Scott Alexander did a review of Fatima recently where he almost started to get worried, but then decided that there are other less clear claims of similar "Sun-dancing" miracles, which makes the first, most widely-attested and most inexplicable natural somehow? Whatever he needs to do to stay sane I guess.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
The apostles had a very specific charisim of miracles happening all the time, but there are plenty of miracles that have happened since then and are still happening today. St. Padre Pio's life is a more modern example of someone who had "apostolic" things happen all the time around him. There's the guy who's leg grew back, the Life of Christina the Astonishing, St. Joan of Arc, that one guy who could fly, etc. Does dying after consuming the Eucharist for the first time count as a miracle? I don't know.
It seems to me that there has been no end of miracles and miracle claims in the Catholic Church, though of course the sum total might be large but each individual person might not see one in their lifetime.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
Catholic Answers Apologist Jimmy Akin has argued that the Church has declared the 73 books cannon, but that it has not closed the cannon, meaning that other books could still enter cannon if they picked up a following.
But also I think this is one area that no one really found too important to get 100% correct until the proliferation of Bibles with the printing press.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3d ago
A change means that something had a potential to be something else and that potential was actualized (brought into existence where before it did not exist.) It's the whole argument.
Once upon at time, a High School literature teacher was introducing his students to Shakespeare. One student skimmed through Hamlet and said, "This story sucks. It's boring and doesn't make sense."
The teacher rightly responded, "Hamlet is not on trial. You are."
If everyone who has ever made the cosmological argument says, "No, the universe is not an example of an uncaused cause, instead it's in the other category we refer to," then maybe you don't understand the argument at all and should avoid it until you do.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3d ago
An unchanging God is not the same as a "hands-off" God. Instead, a classical theistic God is at every moment the cause of the existence of everything.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3d ago
Except that in the next microsecond, the universe will be different.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3d ago
It just means that it is not a thing without potential. The hypothesized God has no potential, the universe does.
I am just answering your question about why God isn't an "exception" to the cosmological argument but rather the cosmological argument describes what would make God different from that which we observe.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
Why can't the universe just be without a beginning, but a supposed god can?
The Universe could be without a beginning, but it is still contingent because it is composed of parts and has potentials. The universe doesn't have to be what it is now, in fact it is constantly changing. That makes it contingent, unlike the proposed God.
This is why the proposed God would be perfectly simple, composed of no parts, etc. Its existence would need to be identical to its essence. The universe does not match any of these criteria.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
Yeah, I think Ethan Muse is one of the more recent ones that began to believe in God due to investigating miracle claims.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
If something can't come from nothing, why does God exist? And why does that answer not apply to the universe itself existing?
That's not the argument, that's an oversimplification of the argument. It's not that "nothing comes from nothing" like they sang in the Sound of Music. It's that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Or another way of saying it is that everything that is contingent has a reason for being the way it is instead of all the millions of ways it is not.
The argument then is not that God is an exception, but that God is not these things. God did not begin to exist, and God is not contingent, meaning He couldn't be anything other than what He is, or as the Philosophers call it, God is the/a Necessary Being - necessarily that which He is.
Most of the primary resources are not on the internet, so it wouldn't be an interesting discussion. I could say, "Giovanni Savino's eye was completely blown out in an explosion, Savino has an feeling of a Catholic Saint's presence, then his eye was back. This is attested to by contemporaneous medical records and interviews with witnesses." And then someone would want a scan of the medical records, which I do not have. And so it goes.
If you are a physician or scientist you can contact the Lourdes Medical Bureau. Its records are open to any physician or scientist who wants to make their own investigation or challenge any particular case recognized as “miraculous.” They have incredibly stringent criteria and throw out 95% of cases most others consider to be genuine healing miracles.
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