I don't believe in God, I believe in Gravity

The more general point is that there's nothing in the bible that wasn't known at the time it was written.

If belief rested on evidence, it wouldn't be belief, it would be fact. It can and it does stand alone - that's all it is; subjective. But it's not evidence of anything other than a psychological condition.

Surely you can? How about a missing limb regrowing immediately on being touched by a 'healer'.Such a thing could be measurable by science but properly described as miraculous as we understand enough about how cells divide and differentiate for it to be impossible by natural means.

Then you're using a different language than the rest of us. (Or more likely, just being cussed)

he's already answered that, But he doesn't really mean it; he's just painted himself into a corner.The problem, of course, is that there's no such thing as 'supernatural' so it's just a word with no substance or meaning.

g'luck ;-)

Of course you do. If a Christian 'healer' walked up to a congenitally armless man, touched him and two arms immediately sprouted out of his shoulders, you'd be calling it a miracle like the rest of us. You're just being an arse, for being an arse's sake.

Yes you are. So there.

.....and the difference is? Why make it more difficult than it has to be? This is your everyday human, 21st century healer bloke. There's no tricks, no alien technology; two real, fully functional human arms suddenly pop onto the shoulders of a previously armless man at the touch of the healer's hand. ( And a muttered prayer, obviously.)All fully witnessed and accredited by the James Randi foundation and 100 sceptics of your choosing. The miracle to be performed once a week until you can't think of anything else to test.

If either actually existed, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Nevertheless, since when was a miracle not supernatural? As the supernatural doesn't exist, the ONLY way they can be discussed is hypothetically.I find the reluctance to accept - by both believers and skeptics - an obvious supernatural/miraculous event, strange, to say the least.What are both sides of the argument frightened of here?

I think you and others here are simply having a semantic argument for the sake of it; tying yourself in knots by torturing words and meanings and avoiding some simple facts.I don't believe any of you - yourself, Az and Jar - would say that the armless man scenario was not a miraculous/supernatural event (and yes, the words do have the same meaning in normal use) if it actually happened in the way I described.It's ludicrously easy to invent hypotheticals where the only possible rational conclusion is supernatural intervention. The only problem here is that the supernatural doesn't exist so we're dealing with a description of the impossible and the absurd.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Well anyone can say anything about this stuff because there's no evidence for any of it - and I'm certainly not interested in pseudo-philosophising.I'm mildly interested in why people here can't accept a hypothetical example of an obvious miracle though.

It absolutely wouldn't be. We know how cells replicate and differentiate. We know that limbs do not spontaneously and immediately regenerate. It wouldn't just be something we don't know about yet, it would be something we know enough about to know that it couldn't possibly happen.But why worry about only limbs. Let's have a man with a severed head walk around normally for a month - or anything else you can think of that we KNOW is impossible.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

I suppose there's nothing too stupidly off-planet for a true pedant.Look we KNOW that a man with a severed head can not walk around as normal for a month. You know it and science knows it. It breaks god knows how many medical certainties that it's not open to sane debate.

Well, so long as it's not only you and the headless guy has stuck around long enough for science to have a good enough look and declare it real, then we re- think everything we thought we knew about everything.Or dance, whichever you prefer.