Tuesday, January 8, 2019

IS IT IRRATIONAL TO BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?




According to the inventor Thomas A. Edison, belief in miracles violate reason:

  • My guide must be my reason, and at the thought of miracles my reason is rebellious. Personally, I do not believe that Christ laid claim to doing miracles, or asserted that he had miraculous power . . . There is no supernatural.

I just want to focus on Edison’s claim that “There is no supernatural.” Here are some problems that arise with this claim:

·       NO EVIDENCE: There is absolutely no evidence upon which to base such a claim.

·       NO EVIDENCE that anything was ever derived or caused naturally without intelligence.

·       FREEWILL transcends mere naturalistic deterministic causation.

·       THE SUPERNATURAL IS NECESSARY: To explain how something can come out of nothing requires a pre-natural explanation. Even if the laws of physics are “natural,” we still must resort to the supernatural to explain the existence of the “natural.”

·       THE LAWS ARE TRANSCENDENT: They are beyond the natural, since they are not subject to change as is everything in the universe. They are also elegant and reveal ID. They operate universally, transcending the boundaries of time and space.

·       MATTER ALSO DISPLAYS INTELLIGENT DESIGN: Even the basic building blocks display elegance. Even if eternal laws had always existed, laws merely act upon matter. They don’t create it.

·       FINE-TUNING of the universe points to the supernatural and design in the our various laws are calibrated just right for existence. So too the fine-tuning necessary for life.

In conclusion, it is not supernaturalism that is irrational but the belief that everything is natural and undersigned.

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