Inventing your own special facts or definitions cannot erase the Jesus miracles from history.
If a miracle is defined as 'inexplicable', then any event we can explain as having a god as a cause is by definition not a miracle. Either that, or the existence of miracles proves that the concept of god has no explanatory value.
Either way, theism is contraindicated.
Unless you see it from the angle that the word "miracle", was used to express a simple contextual term ,...
before the
defined description became "later" defined and refined, as you've described in your quote.
So, unless the things people called 'miracles' in the past were not, in fact, miracles?
But YOU DON'T KNOW they were not in fact miracles.
If you're not prejudiced against everyone in the past, and are willing to grant that some of them were not inferior imbeciles who knew nothing at all, then you have to allow that sometimes they were right, even if other times they were mistaken, and you have to take each claim they made one at a time, rather than condemning everything they said which contained a "miracle" word. You don't know that every such claim they made had to be false. You don't have infallible omniscience to be able to condemn every statement from the past you don't like. In some cases their description of what happened is probably true.
You don't prove your superiority over them by claiming you know all the truth and they knew nothing because of their ignorant culture. In some cases they may have witnessed something, or known someone else who did, which was contrary to your prejudice about what they should have experienced, in which case it might be your prejudice which is mistaken rather than their perception of what happened.
I agree entirely. They called lots of things miracles, but they were wrong.
Who was wrong? You still have to look at the facts of each case, or each claim they made. In some cases they may have been wrong, if we can see what their mistake was, in view of later knowledge/science they didn't have, but in other cases they were right, or we don't know for sure what happened and cannot rule out the possibility that they were right to think a "miracle" happened. There are plenty of unexplained events, meaning no one knows what caused it, even now centuries later, with our increased knowledge.
So in some cases they were right, and in other cases they were wrong -- we have to judge from the evidence in each case. Anything else is prejudice and bigotry.
Either they were wrong about what happened; Or wrong to call it miraculous.
No, you can't just impose your either-or onto everything based on your ideology and bigoted definition of what everything has to be. You cannot prove someone wrong just by redefining the terminology to conform to your prejudice. You can't wipe out facts of history by defining them as "impossible" based on the semantics you impose in order to advance your prejudice.
You can
conjecture that this or that claim is unlikely and that there's probably a better explanation they weren't aware of, but that's only a conjecture. Most of our explanations today, about ancient "miracle" claims, have no more credibility than those of 500 or 1000 or 2000 years ago. Your conjecture about what happened is just as likely to be wrong as their claim that a "miracle" happened.
Stuff like a guy being crucified -- which is deliberately intended to be a long, slow and painful death over many days -- passing out after a day or so, being mistakenly declared dead, and then recovering after a few days lying down out of the direct sun.
But that's all conjecture only, based on no facts, and contradicting the written accounts we have. There are reasons they would not take him down by mistake, with him still alive. You can imagine this and a million other hypothetical scenarios of what happened, but the probability is low. The Romans would not make such a mistake. Rather, they would insist on leaving the victim up longer if there was any doubt, because the intent was for the condemned one to die, and even to rot on the cross for many days -- never to allow any chance of him surviving. So in any case where a body was taken down, there had to be certainty first that he was dead.
Obviously one can conjecture that our accounts are mistaken about what happened, as you can conjecture about any ancient written record of the events, casting doubt on any historical fact. But we need evidence, not just a premise that no such thing as a resurrection could ever happen. The narrative that he was taken down prematurely is based on the premise that the whole story has to be false, somehow, and so we must concoct something which makes the report (evidence) false. Of course you can conjecture this about some evidence you don't like, and thus expunge it from the record, to sanitize it and make it agree with your prejudice, but that's not history or facts. You can't give any reason why others should conjecture the same as you, but can only claim that this deletion of evidence from the record makes you feel good, and maybe some others sharing your prejudice might choose to do the same conjecture and delete the offending evidence.
Believing the evidence of the written record from the time
vs
Believing ideological doctrines about what should or should not happen in history
But what's more reasonable is to assume that the reports are true, about what happened generally, with no other accounts contradicting it, or to leave it in the doubtful category as to the miracle element. And, the Resurrection might be rightly disbelieved if we also had an account contradicting it, such as a claim that he didn't really die but was taken down prematurely. Trying to be skeptical, we could give more credibility to such evidence contradicting the miracle claim,
if any existed. But there is no such account contradicting it, so we can either believe the evidence we do have, or we can reject the only evidence and rely on conjecture based on an ideological premise that no "miracle" event can ever happen.
It's more reasonable to believe the evidence we actually have, with nothing anywhere contradicting it.
We have accounts by Josephus and later by Lucian, of this general period, which contradict miracle claims of this or that wacko cult, or ridiculing the "messiah" charlatans here and there. There was an intelligent rational skepticism toward such claims and denunciation of them in written accounts which survived. So the reported Resurrection of Jesus could have been doubted and contradicted in some written account somewhere, if it didn't really happen. But with nothing denying it and all the evidence affirming this event, it's reasonable to believe it really happened. There is only conjecture to suggest otherwise, without any evidence from the existing written accounts. It's reasonable to accept what we're told in the only evidence, coming from multiple sources.
Of course you can conjecture that somehow he was still alive and was taken down prematurely, but this requires disregarding all the evidence and relying on prejudice only, driven by an ideology impulse which insists that the "miracle" is not possible and has to be ruled out no matter what, regardless of the evidence.
A reasonable conjecture would be that he was taken down later than the biblical account says, rather than in only a few hours. The risk of him still being alive might require a special inspection. Rather than that, the Romans more likely would insist that he had to remain there for 2 or 3 days. There is no reason to insist that it happened the same day, after only a few hours. The chronology of the Gospel writers is ambiguous, and some symbolism gets mixed in with the real facts. So getting bogged down in the details of the exact times and chronology is a needless exercise leading to no definite conclusions.
But the general report in all the accounts is that he died and was buried but later seen alive, and the tomb found empty -- all agreed to by the different accounts and thus probable, while the rest is more doubtful, because of confusion about the details. That some details become dubious need not detract from the general fact of the actual death and later resurrection, as this is agreed to by all the accounts.
It's not particularly implausible; Certainly it's not miraculous.
But it's highly unlikely that he was taken down prematurely, while still alive, and then recovered after a few days or weeks. You can say it's not implausible, but it's unlikely, and so one can reasonably disbelieve this is what happened, as being very unlikely, and as contradicting what all the accounts say happened. It's reasonable to believe the written reports, from several sources, saying what happened, and disbelieve a conjecture with no evidence and contradicting all the written accounts from the time.
And if the Resurrection did happen as the accounts claim, then it is "miraculous" as being an event which is unexplained by our known science, and regardless of the historical period when it happened. So the "miracle" element has nothing to do with anything we know today which was not known by those of the 1st century. We today have no more reason to doubt the truth of the claim than they did back then, when a resurrection from the dead was just as unlikely as it is today, and
was known by people of that time to be unlikely. People back then did not believe such events happened anymore than we do today. That it's claimed to have happened in this one case only, reported in multiple accounts of the period, sets this reported event apart from normal events, and also from ancient legends containing miracle stories which evolved over many centuries.
If resurrection hoaxes/fictions were possible back then, widely believed and reported as true, because the people were superstitious and unscientific, then we would have other cases of reported resurrections from the time, and yet we have no other examples of it. There are no other cases of someone, an historical person, reported as rising from the dead in written accounts near to the time of the alleged event. There are other cases? Where? Where is the written account of it? Don't just regurgitate a laundry list of meaningless names spoon-fed to you by your favorite Jesus-debunker-guru-pundit. Quote from the written text source, dated from the time of the alleged event. There are no other cases. If there were, you could quote the ancient text relating the event, which you cannot do.
But in the context of a pre-medical age, when a weak heartbeat and shallow breath could easily be mistaken for death, it could certainly be mistaken for a miracle.
No more so than today. We have no evidence that live bodies were mistaken for dead, at that time, anymore than today.
In war time and other cases of widespread death and mayhem, there are such mistakes, including in modern history. But it's not due to lack of medical knowledge, but rather to the large number of bodies, which cannot explain this case in 30 AD where there were 3 crucified victims, or only a few, in contrast to the cases when hundreds were crucified at one time. So there's nothing about the Jesus death showing similarity to cases where live bodies were mistaken for dead.
His followers, mainly the Galileans who came with him to Jerusalem, would want him taken down, but not because they thought he was still alive, but rather because they wanted to give him a proper burial. So the narrative of him being taken down -- after he was dead -- makes sense, whereas usually the crucified victims were left for many days or weeks.
Miracles don't happen. Never have, never will.
That has a certain "ring" to it -- Grab a banjo and put it to music.
Yee-haw!
There's no possible mechanism for them --
"possible mechanism"? There are many unexplained events. We don't need to know how it was possible in order to know that some unusual event happened, because it's reported in the written accounts saying that it happened. You don't prove that an unusual event did not happen simply by saying we don't know the "mechanism" to make it possible.
What is the "mechanism" to make matter possible in the universe, or space, or electrons? How does anything exist? We don't know the "mechanism" for everything that ever happened -- we just know things happen, because we experience them one way or another, and events in the past are reported by others who experienced them. Just because we can't identify the "mechanism" which made it possible does not mean a reported event did not happen.
-- and no phenomenon that cannot be understood without them.
It doesn't matter whether they can be "understood" -- all that matters is whether they happened. I.e., whether certain alleged "miracle" events did or did not happen, and also how important it is, or what is the significance if it's true that it happened. Perhaps the Jesus miracle acts did all happen, and perhaps they can all be "understood" if we have enough information about them, about his power source. One can believe the Jesus miracles are real, i.e., facts of history, or real historical facts in the 1st century, without any claim about whether they can be "understood" by someone somewhere.
We can believe reported events without understanding everything about them, or being able to explain them, and even allowing that maybe someone does understand them even if we don't ourselves. Who understands them, or whether they might be understood by someone somewhere having more knowledge than ourselves, etc., is not essential to the question of whether the events actually happened. If it happened, there obviously has to be some explanation, or some source behind it, or some power existing somewhere to make it possible or cause it to happen.
Being not "understood" or unexplainable or a "mystery" etc. is not the point. The point is that some power source existed to make those things happen, and it's "good news" that this power does exist, whether someone somewhere understands it or not, or might understand it some time in the future. If the evidence is that it happened, then there is reason to believe it, regardless whether or not it can be "understood" somehow. One could be "amazed" or "astonished" at it, etc., or be overjoyed to hear this "good news" or be perplexed, scratch their head, and so on, but none of that tells us whether the event really happened. Those who believe it can be "religious" about it or have "visions" or a "blessing" and so on, but all that matters is whether it happened or not, and what the significance is if such a power exists to make eternal life possible.
Miracles are make-believe.
Probably most of them are. MOST miracle claims, not all. It's purely a dogmatic outburst to demand that NO miracle claims can ever be true. To disregard the evidence in individual cases is based on prejudice, not on science or truth-seeking.
Grownups don't think that they are real.
translation: Miracle claims must always be rejected as false, even in cases where a miracle really did happen, because it's unwholesome and immature to believe such claims even when they're true. Any evidence that a miracle happened must be suppressed, because it's unhealthy for people to believe it, regardless whether it's true. The appropriate experts know what's healthy for us to believe and not to believe, regardless of the facts, and these experts should shape our beliefs, for the good of society, regardless of any facts or evidence. Ideology about what's healthy for people to think must take priority over the facts.
