Thank you for reminding me that Luke (ours, not the bible’s) saw miracles when he was a Christian and then deconverted anyway.
My own atheism follows deconversion as best i can recall at about the age of 9 or 10. There was one day i was afraid for my soul having been told once again that not believing in god would put me in hell and all of the sudden it struck me that the fact that you are afraid of something does not make it more or less reliably true. So believing because i was afraid simply stopped making sense and honestly I could not think of any other good reason to believe. Clearly there is some sort of very large change of state that occurs between belief and disbelief, even more so than between Republican and Democrat (two American political parties that hate each other).
Since then I have realized that all the evidence from miracles or from logical “proofs of god’s existence” may prove something exists that we don’t understand, but it does not prove that a vengeful god who recited chapter and verse to Moses, who parted the red sea and flooded the world, who created Adam without a belly button, and who wants me to go to church each sunday or else who will throw me in eternal hell fire because he loves me so much, none of these proofs show all this theology is true. So suppose you saw a young virgin girl stand there in front of a statue of mary and you saw her with your own eyes start to bleed from her hands and her side. You could be reliably sure something was happening that you did not understand. You would have learned NOTHING about whether this means God will burn you in hell for eternity if you say “fuck god” or that Mary was taken bodily into heaven as a virgin at the end of her life (as the Roman Catholics believe) or that the blessed Eucharist is merely a symbol and is not actually the flesh of Jesus Christ (as many protestants believe but not the Catholics).
So one thing you can be sure, you can witness miracles yourself and believe the accounts you hear of miracles, and it does not tell you one iota about dogma. It doesn’t even tell you that there is an omniscient and omnipotent being, or who created the universe, or whether or not it is OK to use birth control devices. So no matter how many miracles you see or hear of, you must still wonder, do the thousands of years old texts attributed to moses actually reflect what moses said god told him, and even if they do, was moses correct in concluding that the voices he heard were god? Was the miraculous life of Jesus really a warning to us about all the things we must believe and do in order to avoid an eternity of hellfire, or was Jesus some other form of very special being who had great, but not necessarily perfect moral knowledge?
From there we can talk more about miracles. Science creates models of the world that predict what we would expect. When we get the prediction wrong, we know the model is wrong. So far, whenever that has happened we have not had to resort to “OK the only way to explain THAT is that there is a really smart powerful guy who is invisible and is secretly, but not too secretly, pulling the strings.” But suppose there is a “miracle,” all that means it is something that science can’t explain at the moment. Most likely it means science hasn’t figured it out yet. Weather used to be a miracle, eclipses were miracles, asteroids hitting the earth were miracles. Getting sick used to be a miracle, and getting well used to be a miracle. We learn more, we explain more without appealing to the man behind the curtain. Guess what, we are only half way there to explaining everything, and we will ALWAYS be only half way there. But everything we do explain, we don’t wind up seeing the man behind the curtain, the trend is not looking good for god.
Thank you for reminding me that Luke (ours, not the bible’s) saw miracles when he was a Christian and then deconverted anyway.
My own atheism follows deconversion as best i can recall at about the age of 9 or 10. There was one day i was afraid for my soul having been told once again that not believing in god would put me in hell and all of the sudden it struck me that the fact that you are afraid of something does not make it more or less reliably true. So believing because i was afraid simply stopped making sense and honestly I could not think of any other good reason to believe. Clearly there is some sort of very large change of state that occurs between belief and disbelief, even more so than between Republican and Democrat (two American political parties that hate each other).
Since then I have realized that all the evidence from miracles or from logical “proofs of god’s existence” may prove something exists that we don’t understand, but it does not prove that a vengeful god who recited chapter and verse to Moses, who parted the red sea and flooded the world, who created Adam without a belly button, and who wants me to go to church each sunday or else who will throw me in eternal hell fire because he loves me so much, none of these proofs show all this theology is true. So suppose you saw a young virgin girl stand there in front of a statue of mary and you saw her with your own eyes start to bleed from her hands and her side. You could be reliably sure something was happening that you did not understand. You would have learned NOTHING about whether this means God will burn you in hell for eternity if you say “fuck god” or that Mary was taken bodily into heaven as a virgin at the end of her life (as the Roman Catholics believe) or that the blessed Eucharist is merely a symbol and is not actually the flesh of Jesus Christ (as many protestants believe but not the Catholics).
So one thing you can be sure, you can witness miracles yourself and believe the accounts you hear of miracles, and it does not tell you one iota about dogma. It doesn’t even tell you that there is an omniscient and omnipotent being, or who created the universe, or whether or not it is OK to use birth control devices. So no matter how many miracles you see or hear of, you must still wonder, do the thousands of years old texts attributed to moses actually reflect what moses said god told him, and even if they do, was moses correct in concluding that the voices he heard were god? Was the miraculous life of Jesus really a warning to us about all the things we must believe and do in order to avoid an eternity of hellfire, or was Jesus some other form of very special being who had great, but not necessarily perfect moral knowledge?
From there we can talk more about miracles. Science creates models of the world that predict what we would expect. When we get the prediction wrong, we know the model is wrong. So far, whenever that has happened we have not had to resort to “OK the only way to explain THAT is that there is a really smart powerful guy who is invisible and is secretly, but not too secretly, pulling the strings.” But suppose there is a “miracle,” all that means it is something that science can’t explain at the moment. Most likely it means science hasn’t figured it out yet. Weather used to be a miracle, eclipses were miracles, asteroids hitting the earth were miracles. Getting sick used to be a miracle, and getting well used to be a miracle. We learn more, we explain more without appealing to the man behind the curtain. Guess what, we are only half way there to explaining everything, and we will ALWAYS be only half way there. But everything we do explain, we don’t wind up seeing the man behind the curtain, the trend is not looking good for god.
Good luck with this!