Too Many Replies on the Atheism Thread!

So I'll just stick with AEC since he's the guy I was responding to initially.

I thank Mark for his time and effort in taking part in this discussion, but remain unconvinced.

You're welcome!

I am glad that Mark and I agree that reason exists. Asserting that reason doesn't exist would undermine his own position as much as mine, so this is probably a good move. But it is also curious that he thinks reason's existence favors his viewpoint.

I get the distinct impression you still have not really understood me. You talk here as though I was initially asserting that reason does not exist, but have since thought better of that position due to your arguments and am now making the "good move" of admitting this.

Please read and pay attention to the following: I HAVE NEVER DENIED THAT REASON EXISTS. THAT WOULD BE SILLY. WHAT I ASSERT IS THAT MATERIALISM DOES A LOUSY JOB OF *ACCOUNTING* FOR REASON, FREEDOM AND MORALITY. IT SIMULTANEOUSLY ASSUMES THEIR EXISTENCE WHILE POSITING A UNIVERSE IN WHICH THEY DO NOT FIT VERY WELL.

Ahem. You continue:

He seems to have missed (or ignored) the point of my arguments about reason, which was that the existence of reason was discovered without reference to the Abrahamic God by various cultures, and thus has no bearing on the question of that God existing.

This is a common thread in several posts. There seems to be the notion afoot that Christians believe God to have helped humans "discover" reason, apparently in the pages of Genesis. I chalk this sort of argumentation up to the latent sola scriptura Protestantism that infects American culture. That's the only reason I can see why anybody would regard it as a stunning rebuttal to point out the fact that pagans were capable of reason without ever having heard of the God of Israel.

In fact, of course, everybody knows that Jews and Christians did not invent reason and they do no lay sole claim to it. Reason is as old as humanity.

The telling thing is that you speak of "discovering" reason. You are still laboring under the notion that the existence of reason is something you can prove--from reason. My point is that reason is something closer to an axiom about the human person. We accept it as a fact *without empirical proof*. And that means there is something absolutely crucial in your materialist system that you take on faith.

The claim that Jack Ruby shot Oswald is an ordinary claim - a claim about a type of criminal act that has happened, unfortunately, many times - for which there was extraordinary evidence. Mark forgets that in addition to the television viewers, the shooting occurred in the presence of trained police officers, and the murder weapon was recovered at the scene, so there was forensic evidence.

You're being overly literal. My point remains the same: you are trying to have it both ways. You try to pretend that diverging accounts of the experience of the supernatural (which come from the overwhelming majority of the human race) are unreliable because they diverge (just as accounts of Oswald's death diverge). When it is pointed out that all the witnesses agree that there is something supernatural afoot, you refuse to consider the possibility. And you do so by recourse to an incoherent dogma of materialism.

You write:

We regard miracles as extremely unlikely, becuase there have been numerous instances in history of phenomena alleged as miracles that are well understood scentifically now. Further, the miraculous claims contradict the known facts about nature, and the burden of evidence is thus on the theist to demonstrate that some not yet understood natural phenomenon is not the cause before appealing to the supernatural.

So, these miraculous claims, unlike the kind of claims made in criminal cases, are extraordinary claims, and require extraordinary evidence.

There are all sorts of incoherencies here. Your first point means: "Some things that were thought to be supernatural had natural explanations, therefore all the rest do too." Your second point means: "Nature has certain laws, therefore it is impossible that the Legislator of those laws could ever abrogate those laws for his own purposes." Your third point is: "Supernatural events are rare (you do not explain how you know this) therefore evidence for them can be safely dismissed."

Put in plain English, I don't see how any of your points makes sense. They are, though, admirable expressions of a dogmatic refusal to look at the evidence based on your materialist philosophy. The obvious thing to do with any claim of a miracle is to see if materialist explanations do it justice. In many cases, they will. But in many cases (for instance, Lourdes or Padre Pio) the obvious explanation is that we are looking at clear cases of supernatural powers at work. The appeal to "rarity" is bosh. The question, as you say, is evidence. But the question is also our willingness to really face what the evidence is saying. Here's a little passage from a book I've written that deals with, among other things, what Catholics call "private revelation" (those weird little supernatural events God does now and then for our benefit):

Nineteenth century France turned out splendid atheists. There was nothing half-baked about a nineteenth century French atheist. When he left the Catholic faith, he didn't shilly-shally around with Protestantism or the religious methadone treatment called Unitarianism. He went straight for hard-boiled materialism that declared the supernatural to be bunk.

One such hard-boiled atheist was Alexis Carrel, a doctor who, in 1912, won the Nobel prize in Medicine. Raised a Catholic, Carrel eventually rejected all supernatural belief and became a committed atheistic materialist. But he was also a man who believed in investigating facts rather than simply imposing ideology on things. So in 1902, he accompanied a doctor friend to the shrine at Lourdes where, it was said, the Blessed Virgin had appeared to a girl named Bernadette Soubirous in 1858. There were many stories of miraculous cures at the shrine as people washed in or drank from a spring that had been there dug by Bernadette. Carrel, profoundly skeptical, wanted to see for himself. So he boarded a train for Lourdes—and met Marie Bailly.

Marie Bailly was born in 1878. Both her father. . . and her mother died of tuberculosis. Of her five siblings only one was free of that disease. She was twenty when she first showed symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis. A year later she was diagnosed with tuberculous meningitis, from which she suddenly recovered when she used Lourdes water. In two more years, in 1901, she came down with tubercular peritonitis. Soon she could not retain food. In March 1902 doctors in Lyons refused to operate on her for fear that she would die on the operating table.

On May 25, 1902, she begged her friends to smuggle her onto a train that carried sick people to Lourdes. She had to be smuggled because, as a rule, such trains were forbidden to carry dying people. The train left Lyons at noon. At two o'clock next morning she was found dying. Carrel was called. He gave her morphine by the light of a kerosene lamp and stayed with her. Three hours later he diagnosed her case as tuberculous peritonitis and said half aloud that she would not arrive in Lourdes alive. The immediate diagnosis at that time largely depended on the procedure known as palpation.

In Lourdes Marie Bailly was examined by several doctors. On May 27 she insisted on being carried to the Grotto, although the doctors were afraid that she would die on the way there. Carrel himself took such a grim view of her condition that he vowed to become a monk if she reached the Grotto alive, a mere quarter of a mile from the hospital.

The rest is medical history. It is found in Dossier 54 of the Archives of the Medical Bureau of Lourdes. The Dossier contains the immediate depositions by three doctors, including Carrel, and Marie Bailly's own account, which she wrote in November and gave to Carrel, who then duly forwarded it to the Medical Bureau in Lourdes.

The highlights of Marie Bailly's own account are as follows: On arriving at the baths adjoining the Grotto, she was not allowed to be immersed. She asked that some water from the baths be poured on her abdomen. It caused her searing pain all over her body. Still she asked for the same again. This time she felt much less pain. When the water was poured on her abdomen the third time, it gave her a very pleasant sensation.

Meanwhile Carrel stood behind her, with a notepad in his hands. He marked the time, the pulse, the facial expression and other clinical details as he witnessed under his very eyes the following: The enormously distended and very hard abdomen began to flatten and within 30 minutes it had completely disappeared. No discharge whatsoever was observed from the body.

She was first carried to the Basilica, then to the Medical Bureau, where she was again examined by several doctors, among them Carrel. In the evening she sat up in her bed and had a dinner without vomiting. Early next morning she got up on her own and was already dressed when Carrel saw her again.

Carrel could not help registering that she was cured. What will you do with your life now? Carrel asked her. I will join the Sisters of Charity to spend my life caring for the sick, was the answer. The next day she boarded the train on her own, and after a 24-hour trip on hard benches, she arrived refreshed in Lyons. There she took the streetcar and went to the family home, where she had to prove that she was Marie Bailly indeed, who only five days earlier had left Lyons in a critical condition.

Carrel continued to take a great interest in her. He asked a psychiatrist to test her every two weeks, which was done for four months. She was regularly tested for traces of tuberculosis. In late November she was declared to be in good health both physically and mentally. In December she entered the novitiate in Paris. Without ever having a relapse she lived the arduous life of a Sister of Charity until 1937, when she died at the age of 58.

Carrel was caught between two worlds. As an atheistic materialist, he didn't want to be identified with what he regarded as the gullible hoi polloi who believed this stunning cure to be a miracle from Heaven. But as an honest man, Carrel simply couldn't ignore what he saw, as many in the French medical establishment insisted he should do. For many years, Carrel tried to distance himself from both groups and tried to ascribe Marie's healing to gobbledygook about "psychic forces" and various other lame naturalistic explanations. But at the end of his life, Carrel finally received the sacraments of the Church and died reconciled to God.

Emile Zola was a contemporary of Carrel's. A famous novelist and literary figure, he too was an atheist and materialist, but unlike Carrel, he was not going to let any facts get in the way of that faith when he visited Lourdes.

Zola... accepted with simple faith the unproved and unprovable dogma that the natural world is a closed system, and that supernatural agencies do not exist. Zola's negative faith was proof against the stubborn fact of the two miracles which he himself witnessed at Lourdes, of which the first was the sudden cure of an advanced stage of lupus. Zola describes Marie Lemarchand's condition as he saw her on the way to Lourdes. "It was", writes Zola, "a case of lupus which had preyed upon the unhappy woman's nose and mouth. Ulceration had spread and was hourly spreading and devouring the membrane in its progress. The cartilage of the nose was almost eaten away, the mouth was drawn all on one side by the swollen condition of the upper lip. The whole was a frightful distorted mass of matter and oozing blood." Zola's account is incomplete, for the patient was coughing and spitting blood. The apices of both lungs were affected, and she had sores on her leg. Dr. d'Hombres saw her immediately before and immediately after she entered the bath. "Both her cheeks, the lower part of her nose, and her upper lip were covered with a tuberculous ulcer and secreted matter abundantly. On her return from the baths I at once followed her to the hospital. I recognized her quite well although her face was entirely changed. Instead of the horrible sore I had so lately seen, the surface was red, it is true, but dry and covered with a new skin. The other sores had also dried up in the piscina." The doctors who examined her could find nothing the matter with the lungs, and testified to the presence of the new skin on her face. Zola was there. He had said "I only want to see a cut finger dipped in water and come out healed". "Behold the case of your dreams, M. Zola," said the President, presenting the girl whose hideous disease had made such an impression on the novelist before the cure. "Ah no!" said Zola, "I do not want to look at her. She is still too ugly", alluding to the red color of the new skin. Before he left Lourdes Zola recited his credo to the President of the Medical Bureau. "Were I to see all the sick at Lourdes cured, I would not believe in a miracle."

Roughly speaking, Carrel and Zola represent two basic worldviews: supernaturalism and naturalism. Supernaturalism, the view held by the overwhelming majority of the human race throughout history, says there is Something beyond and outside of nature and that this Something may, from time to time, intervene in nature. Naturalism says the universe of time, space, matter and energy is all there is or ever was or ever will be and there is nothing beyond it. The question that immediately arises when considering stories like these healings at Lourdes is: "Do miracles—intervention in nature by some Power beyond nature—ever really happen?"

A relatively small but significant number of modern people answer this question with Zola's firm negative. This is due, not to "the facts" but to their faith—come hell or high water—in a rigid and unthinking naturalism. The atheistic materialist, like Zola, rejects the possibility of Marian apparitions, divine healing and such things because he rejects the possibility of all supernatural occurrences, no matter what evidence is presented to his senses. The hilarious thing about this is that the atheistic materialist with the invincible immunity to facts in front of his very eyes almost invariably pats himself on the back for his scientific open-mindedness while condemning the supernaturalist as the rigid dogmatist.

You continue:

Theists rarely wish to see their claims subjected to evidence, and resort to the sort of special pleading we see here.

A remarkably evidence-free claim. Are you familiar with the processes by which the claims of miracles at Lourdes are verified? They are actually quite rigorous. Do you know anything about how claims of miracles are verified in the case of canonizations? Again, pretty darn thorough. Have you ever noticed that people who go around claiming to see Mary water stains and freeway underpasses are seldom welcomed with open arms by the pastors of the Catholic Church. In short, are you aware of the fact that, when it comes to claims of the miraculous, few people are more skeptical than a Catholic bishop or priest?

But I'll see your bet: put your money where your mouth is and do a serious investigation of Lourdes, of the Eucharistic Miracle at Betania, of the long strange career of Padre Pio. Show me you've really looked at the evidence and not simply brushed it off.

In addition, Mark dismisses the fact that these alleged supernatural experiences vary wildly across different religious and cultural groups as insignificant. But it isn't. It indicates that there is probably a more parsimonious explanation that is valid across cultures, such as human neurophysiology and psychology.

No doubt these things play a role. But it is mere a priori materialist dogma to maintain, in advance of the evidence, that a materialist explanation covers everything. Your prejudice is showing.

And it indeed leaves the question of "which supernatural experience is valid, if any ?" unaddressed.

As a rough rule of thumb, I'd say, "The experience which has no natural explanation."

"99.99%" of people have probably believed in the existence of trolls, pixies, djinn, ghosts, animistic deities, etc. So what ? The claims are meaningless if not supported by evidence.

Right. Which is why you should stop reciting materialist dogmatic creedal statements and go found out if there is anything to the accounts of miracles at Lourdes and at the hands of Padre Pio.

99.99% of people can indeed be wrong, or ignorant.

Yes, but the odds generally favor the fact that 99.99% of people are normal, including their accounts of experience of the supernatural.

The objective evidence is what matters.

Feel free to start examining it. There is, as Chesterton said, a choking cataract of testimony in favor of the supernatural. I've limited myself to two fairly prominent points: Lourdes and Padre Pio. Knock yourself out.