My painting and comment on Mikes post

Out Of The Ocean Into The Knowledge Of Good And Evil
54" by 40" Oil on canvas


I think Mike made some great points.

Miracles are nether faith building or believable (by definition they can't be posable). I would go as far as to say it makes the witness to the miracle look even less credible than if they had not rehearsed the story at all.

Any how, I choose to believe in God and I choose to believe in revelation. At the same time I recognize it is not real unless proven. So admittedly I believe in a story about one type of God among many stories of many types of gods, and my choice to believe it is not based in any type of scientific process or miraculous experience.

of miracles summary

okay, as a really late response to most of the religious posts, i have an interjection. i'm not going to pretend to be educated in philosophy and to have just stumbled across this in my elaborate quest for understanding. so, david hume wrote "an enquiry concerning human understanding" and within focuses on miracles.

many of his ideas have been kicking around in my head but not fully developed and as well structured as his but... we receive miracles from the testimony of other. as such, we should treat them as second hand and be critical of them. when we analyze things we use evidence to prove them. when we have evidence for two sides we use the dominating one. when miracles are inserted into this we find the two sides being the testimony of witnesses vs the laws of nature. both sides are founded in experience. for miracles to be the victor they must have the testimony more dominating then the contradiction of the laws of nature. he then gives four reasons for not believing.

1 there are not enough people of trust that support the testimony to prove it true. 2 man is infatuated with wonder and mystery and has the tendency to reject the consistent history for gratification. 3 those who believe and perpetuate miracle are of ignorant consciences. and my favorite 4 anyone of one faith rejects other faiths miracles because of their opposition in theology. therefore miracles disprove miracles.

keep in mind this is just a regurgitation so i might be missing pivotal premisses. in response to these i am of experience to agree with hume. while serving a 2 year mission in canada i developed some rough versions of these concepts. jackD has some very intriguing ideas on this concept as well. I ran into people almost every day that would tell me they were of a certain faith and that they had seen an angle or god had spoken to them. i have recently decided that i won't believe something until i can reproduce the experience myself. that's obviously flawed but i use variance depending on the circumstances. there is way too much to get into about this article but i do want to quote a section.

"With what greediness are the miraculous accounts of travellers received, their descriptions of sea and land monsters, their relations of wonderful adventures, strange men, and uncouth manners? But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense; and human testimony, in these circumstances, loses all pretensions to authority. A religionist may be an enthusiast, and imagine he sees what has no reality: he may know his narrative to be false, and yet persevere in it, with the best intentions in the world, for the sake of promoting so holy a cause: or even where this delusion has not place, vanity, excited by so strong a temptation, operates on him more powerfully than on the rest of mankind in any other circumstances; and self-interest with equal force. His auditors may not have, and commonly have not, sufficient judgement to canvass his evidence: what judgement they have, they renounce by principle, in these sublime and mysterious subjects: or if they were ever so willing to employ it, passion and a heated imagination disturb the regularity of its operations. Their credulity increases his impudence: and his impudence overpowers their credulity."

i often wonder as to what promotes religionist to believe and preach what they do. for my personal experience of full dedication to christianity for two years, after being on the fence my entire life previous, and not getting one portion of evidence following. don't misunderstand. i'm approaching the theology and general "truth" of any religion. as i read this the only thing that was going through my head is the leaders of the mormon church.

so i thought about the extraction, which is available online legally free here, and realized this can be a criticism of man made religion . religion is the belief in the unnatural. man tends to need to explain the unknown. man also tends to enjoy the gratification of embellishing ideas. as hume closes he mentions that he believes as man becomes more sophisticated we will move on beyond these primitive ideals and realize the logic and experience are the only trustworthy beliefs.

"Hume asserts that no testimony can ever count as a probability, let alone a proof, of the existence of miracles. All testimony in favor of miracles is based in experience, and this same experience opposes this testimony with contrary testimony and with the laws of nature. While God may be all-powerful and could contradict the laws of nature, we cannot ascribe any attributes or actions to him except for those that experience teaches us."-sparknotes (too much to care to summarize myself)

if nature hasn't done it, god hasn't willed it, and man never experienced it.