Considering Every Miracle at Once

Question from Jacob:
Hello, so it’s me again, got some more questions for ya. Throughout history, there have been many reports of supernatural phenomena. Most of them usually have a religious undertone, for example, some people levitate others do healings, sometimes divine or demonic figures appear. In any case, these reports range from various cultures and time periods seen by hundreds of thousands of people which continues to this day. How could someone have imagined all this?

Answer by SmartLX:
“Someone” didn’t. Millions of people across the globe imagined it all cumulatively over a period of millennia. That’s a lot of imagination.

To say it’s all pure imagination is an oversimplification, of course. Here are some more specific sources.
– Unexplained phenomena will be rationalised in terms of whatever faith-based supernatural concepts people hold, simply because it’s in the right category. It looks like magic, my god is magic, therefore my god did it. This is a formal logical fallacy, but it’s as far as many people’s thinking goes.
– When religion holds social or political power, it affects the historical record. If priests claim an occurrence, or claim credit for an event on behalf of the ruling god, few dare dispute them.
– Any supernatural effect which is faked, or exploited for material gain whether faked or mistaken, is far more effective when linked to the majority religion. It goes from a curiosity to a possible call to action, and compels believers to consider it very carefully. They must think, “Why did my god do this, and how should I react?” This gives it a much bigger profile in the public consciousness.

Similarly to my approach to prophecies, each claim of a supernatural event has more possibilities than the false dilemma that it was either genuinely supernatural or it was made up from nothing. Once you consider a few of your favourite stories from the standpoint of just how many different ways they could have come about, the sheer number of supernatural claims throughout history is severely tempered by the high probability that any given event was something other than an act of God.

2 thoughts on “Considering Every Miracle at Once”

  1. jacob, i suggest that you google LOGICAL FALLACIES and you will find them all there on a list. then you may, if you want to educate yourself about how human brain makes logical mistakes, read them all, and find which one is that one, that smrxl mentioned, which is probably the one in which we, from not knowing something deduce it is god’s deed.

  2. Jacob, all it would take is for one miracle to be conclusively proven to have occurred because a god (your god or another one, doesn’t matter) became directly involved in an event on Earth. Prove that, and you can prove that miracles do exist. Or just even prove that a god exists, even if you can’t prove that it does miracles as part of its godly day.

    It’s a simple task, yet no one has ever been able to do it. Billions of people over thousands of years claiming all sorts of god behaviors, and not scrap of evidence for any of it.

    Lot’s of claims doesn’t make it true. If it did, we would all have to accept UFOs and Sasquatch as real too…

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