> Bill Hamilton wrote:
> >In part, the discussion of miracles is difficult because we have different
> >views of just what a miracle is. Here's Walt Whitman's view:
>
> >Miracles
>
> > WHY! who makes much of a miracle?
> > As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,
> > etc....
>
> IMHO, you are confusing providence with miracles. It's a matter of
> definition, of course, but I think it is an important distinction to make in
> *this* discussion. It may not be important or even desirable in other contexts.
>
> Steve Clark wrote, concerning my Chesterton quote,
> >You can take the worst of materialism and compare it to the best of theism
> >and reach the above conclusion. But it ignores those places where the best
> >of materialism confronts the worst of theism.
>
> I suppose you're saying here that the best of materialism is TE theism, i.e.
> that we see the hand of Providence in origins, but not miracles. Though I
> think your logic is in order, I'm not sure it is faithful to the Scriptures.
>
> SC
> >I posed a question earlier that you skipped. In the natural world, how do
> >we know when materialism will be insufficient to explain a phenomenon? Or
> >put differently, how do we distinguish miracles from natural events. Let's
> >take the parting of the Red Sea. Was this a miracle or an event explainable
> >by natural causes?
>
> A miracle is when the materialistic cause is insufficient to explain the effect.
> Often it is difficult to know all the materialistic causes, so we can't say
> whether a certain person's recovery in our church was a miracle. But when
> the Bible calls something a miracle (in so many words), then we should
> accept it.
>
> The parting of the Red sea is both a miracle and an event explainable by
> natural causes.
>
> Ex. 14:21-22 "Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that
> night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into
> dry land. The waters were divided, and the Israelites went through the sea
> on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left."
>
> The wind is the natural cause; the fact that it came in response to Moses
> stretching out his hand is the miracle. (BTW, I've heard that someone worked
> out how the wind could do such a thing. Does this make sense? Could the wind
> really make a wall of water without an extra push by God? Help me out here.)
>
> Another example that comes to mind of a "miracle" being explanable via
> natural causes is the Israelite crossing of the Jordan river in Joshua 3.
>
> Joshua 3:15-16 "Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during harvest. Yet as
> soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet
> touched the water's edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled
> up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam"
>
> Here again, we see both a miracle and (I assume) natural causes together.
> Perhaps the Jordan's banks caved in upstream precisely at the time the
> priests put their feet into the water. The miracle was that the priests feet
> touching the water caused the banks to cave in several miles (as I remember)
> upstream.
>
> Let me repeat my request for a third time. I'm still awaiting that list of
> miracles TEs believe are a part of origins.
>
> Jim
How do you know that any of these were, in fact, what a modern person
would have to acknowledge as being a miracle? It seems to me that you are
operating with a modern notion of miracle and reading the scriptures
through tha lens. But the scripture writers were pre-moderns, for whom
the notions of natural and supernatural were, no doubt, quite differet
from present-day notions. (And the present-day notions themselves seem to
me to be highly confused.) How do you know that if you had a videotape of
what happened then, for example, and looked at the tape now, you would
have to conclude that there was a supernatural event?
More generally, why does anyone have to hold to supernaturalism, in the
anti-naturalsm sense of that term, in order to have an accurate or
adequate interpretation of Scripture or an accurate or adequate
apprehension of divine will and action? If I understand you accurately,
you seem to hold that this is necessary. But I'm not convinced that it is.
BTW, you can't solve this problem by appealing to tradition. It's
entirely possible that tradition is mistaken here.
Lloyd Eby
leby@nova.umuc.edu