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I'm not sure what you're asking. We know that some things just don't happen. If someone regrows a limb after prayer, and there hasn't been some massive discovery about biology, then that's a miracle.
If you are asking "couldn't they have healed normally?" that's TA's point: "miracles" happen in ways that are hard to scientifically corroborate. It's always healing something that naturally heals in 10% of patients or otherwise could happen, not regrowing a limb. Then yes, the CAT scan doesn't prove it's miraculous, but that's not because it never could for any miracle, that's because the miracles are conveniently hard to corroborate.
If you are asking "how does that 100% absolutely prove a miracle, the answer is that pretty much everything science "proves" is just shown to be very very likely, and the miracle can meet that standard, even if it can't meet a standard of absolute 100% proof.
If you mean "how do we tell between a miracle and aliens shooting their heal ray at us, or some other explanation that's weird but doesn't involve God", the answer is that saying "it's either a miracle or aliens" is a really good start and drastically increases the credibility of religion, even if aliens can't be ruled out yet. Once that happens, we can proceed from there.
Except of course, it doesn't happen.
See, this is a catch-22. If things "don't just happen" then we know they aren't real. If things that shouldn't happen happen (such as dementia patients recovering their cognizance) than it's just a random mystery of the universe, but not a miracle. If someone regrew a limb after prayer, which a minute of Googling shows has in fact allegedly happened! people would be like "wow, there must be a good scientific explanation for this!" or "oh, clearly an elaborate fraud!"
Which I don't even think is necessarily a bad attitude - in my opinion there needs to be a nonzero amount of healthy skepticism in the world. I can think of plausible materialistic mechanisms for terminal lucidity. I'm sure with ten minutes of research I could do the same for the regrowth of limbs. Shoot, I can also think of plausible scientific mechanisms for pretty much any miracle you can think of, including regrown limbs, if you posit Sufficiently Advanced Science (which was Clark points out is indistinguishable from magic). If you posit a world where entities indistinguishable from angels were scientifically verified to exist, a nonzero number of people would just be like "woah its The Entities up to their advanced science again" instead of becoming religious converts (and in fact this describes a lot of the UFO community, particularly the more "out there" parts).
I'm sorry, I guess I am rambling. My point is that I don't think there's a single standard from skeptics at large here, as a general rule, just some very mobile goalposts. If you disagree, and want to post the specific evidence you'd need to believe in something miraculous, as well as what you would define "miraculous" as, maybe we could investigate whether your criteria have been fulfilled.
One obvious problem is that scientists (and doctors) are so incompetent that any attempt to prove a miracle medically or scientifically can easily be dismissed as incompetence or fraud. And in fact this is what happens, there are plenty of allegedly scientific attempts to probe paranormal topics and the accusation hurled at the experimenters is always that they are frauds or that their study designs suck. Which is probably true! Probably most study designs suck! So any time you bring up a study or a "medically verified miracle" it is very easy to dismiss it on the basis of "fraudulence and/or incompetence."
I'm not Catholic, so I don't have a good perspective on their methodology (and miracles are not really my jam anyway, so I don't good sources or really strong opinions on the famously reported ones) but my understanding is that the Catholic church actually does scientifically investigate miracles as part of their canonization process. Maybe some other Mottizens can point out some specific compelling cases. But I doubt anyone who is not already sympathetic will find them persuasive since "well they are motivated to find miracles," which again goes to a catch-22, since few people who are not so motivated bother to go looking for them.
The long and short of it is, though, as I understand it, is that there have been scientific investigations of miracles, they do convince some people, and other people remain unconvinced.
Well, actually, things impossible according to the known laws of physics do happen. And when they are proven to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, scientists literally invent
magican invisible practically unfalsifiable mystery substance to explain them. But I don't particularly think this increases the credibility of religion, it just decreases the credibility of scientists. Which is much the same reaction skeptics of "woo" have when research that seems to validate "woo" comes out.Saying that X counts as a miracle doesn't mean that if you claim X, it automatically counts. It means that you managed to get over one hurdle--you managed to claim something that, if it happened, would be a miracle. Getting past the "if it happened" part is a separate hurdle.
The reason such things are dismissed as incompetence or fraud is that they are incompetence or fraud.
There are plenty of cases where science has noticed a lot of incompetence and fraud in something, and yet determined that some of it is real. (High temnperature superconductors come to mind.) Miracles aren't dismissed because scientists dismiss everything, miracles are dismissed because they have particularly bad claims and evidence, just like psychic powers, space aliens, and non-Christian miracles.
No they don't. Actually, I have no idea what you're talking about, except maybe ether, which you'll notice modern scientists don't believe in.
Sure.
It's not scientists and doctors I am worried about dismissing everything. Plenty of scientists and doctors believe in miracles, psychic powers, space aliens, and other woo.
My layman's understanding is that dark matter was invented to explain the otherwise unusual expansion of the universe, has never been observed, and conveniently (like miracles) is believed by its nature to be difficult to observe because of the way it does (or doesn't) interact with regular matter.
Yes, that's how it works. When something works in a way that doesn't fit the rules we've observed so far, we can put forth new hypothetical sets of rules that would explain the observations and can also be hypothetically tested.
I bet the "invention" of gravity has attracted similar comments once upon a time. It's so convenient that gravity can make things both go down and spin around other things, isn't it?
The difference between "scientists invent things" and "priests invent things" appears to my layman's understanding to be that while scientists put forth a considerable amount of effort to hypothesize the things they invent, priests already have a ready-made Source (God) of all things that they defer to without any insight into the mechanisms.
So if something cannot be experimentally tested, is it an invalid hypothesis? What is science supposed to do for "one-offs"?
Well ~everyone agrees that "gravity" is real in the sense that if you jump off of a tall building it will be extremely painful. But the theory of gravity and actual observations of the universe are at odds. That's the reason dark matter exists (in the mind of scientists, anyway), because the theory of gravity was insufficient to explain why the observed mass of the universe behaved the way that it did.
This wasn't necessarily true historically, I don't think, but as society specialized priests deferred more and more to scientists on the mechanisms.
I'm told that's what the principle of falsefiability is, but again, I'm a layman. All hypotheses I create in daily life could be tested by attempting to write code and seeing if it works.
Shrug, say "that's very cool but can we make use of it again?" and continue on? At least we spare the energy and time of praying that way.
As for the rest, I'm not sure we even are at a disagreement, I've lost track of the argument.
Theories prove themselves insufficient and new theories are created to fill the gap. "God did it" proves itself insufficient compared to scientific (or rather, materialist) theories, and retreats to ever-shrinking gaps.
Hmm. I think this is a very inhuman response. Humans are curious, we want to discover things. Want to discover the truth. I think we're interested in more than just utility.
I tend to think this is a simplistic view of history (and, perhaps ironically – a sort of reverse-polarity fundamentalist-Christian view of the world) but I understand where you are coming from.
So am I, yet religions are notoriously opaque to truth-discovery. "The ways of God are inscrutable" and all that. If you are saying they are inscrutable, why would I bother searching for the truth the way you told me, rather than my way (which tells me you are likely to just be a meme carrier)? It appears to me that for most people religion's function is to stop curiosity at certain points where it can't actually explain things further, not foster it. Meanwhile the "religious scientists", the way I see it, just do science the regular materialist way and resort to God when outside of their sphere of knowledge.
I mean, a lot of searching for truth had been prompted by one-off events. But searching for truth doesn't mean one must accept the religious premise ("it was a divine miracle") on face when one begins.
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