Miracles

What Hacker News says

1. prometheus76Sep 2022
   You've asked some very big questions that would require some unpacking to even start to answer, because there are a lot of assumptions and presuppositions and hidden definitions just in the first question of wondering about evidence with regard to supernatural things.

   This might feel like a cop-out on my part (and it probably is, because I am at work), but the best response I can give to you is that if you really want to try to understand the issues you raise from a Christian perspective, "Miracles" by C.S. Lewis is probably the most succinct way I could answer your questions. He takes on the problems with nihilism and naturalism in a straightforward, but thorough manner.

   I didn't read it until far into my journey back to Christianity, but he addresses the issue better than anyone else I've read.

   I will leave you with one little thing that always goes around in my head when I'm talking with a nihilist or naturalist, however. "There is no absolute truth" is an absolute-truth claim, which means the whole foundation of that world view is based on a self-contradiction. That might not bother you, but it started bothering me when it was pointed out.

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2. twodaveFeb 2021
   I speak of reason and truth as human constructs. If we cannot be sure that we have free will, then, while truth exists in abundance, we have no ability to validate it. I say this all a bit tongue in cheek because I absolutely believe that we have free will. And in any case, to suggest otherwise to me would seem like a cop-out for the consequences of my own decisions.

   The first 3-4 chapters of the book Miracles by C.S. Lewis cover this topic pretty well in my opinion, even if you're not spiritual-minded.

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3. axlproseFeb 2019
   > I was raised atheist and I've always felt like a believe in the supernatural doesn't mix with an intellectual, scientific view on the world. This is of course completely due to my upbringing; there are plenty of great scientists who believe. I think this is an interesting inner conflict which I'm sure I share with many others.

   Yep, this was pretty much me up until a year ago when I started actually studying theology and the philosophy around it more rigorously. What I realized was that this notion of science being in opposition to religion I had, was effectively at least as much of a faith based position promoted to me by modern society, as theism was to religious people. Because when taking a hard honest look at myself, I saw that I had never actually bothered to really study any religious literature to justify coming to such a bold conclusion, in large part because I had prematurely dismissed such an endeavor as being an uninteresting waste of time. But in reality, I should've known my position was questionable ages ago from my long time fascination with the history of science and mathematics. I had conveniently rationalized or outright ignored the fact that the giants upon whose shoulders modern science rests, have all been rather disproportionately theists, because "things are different now"/"we've progressed beyond that". Yet the more I thought about those excuses, the more I realized they were completely unjustified hand waving, because I couldn't find any compelling arguments for why that should be the case, nor why such smart people of the past couldn't have come up with the relatively straightforward arguments for atheism the likes of Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al. came up with (as I had read most of the "4 horsemen of atheism" books already). None of the best arguments for atheism actually hinged on time or technological/scientific progress, so why did many smart people like Leibniz, Newton, and Darwin not only fail to discover such simple lines of thought, but instead often times went in the exact opposite direction and made arguments for theism? Note that I'm not making an argument appealing to past greats being theists, but rather describing my own thought process that led me to question "wtf is going on here?". John Lennox has a lot of interesting books and talks relevant to this particular line of inquiry[0].

   But anyways, long story short(er), the watershed moment didn't actually come for me until I stumbled upon a small pastor's YouTube channel [1], and gradually started working my way through several books, including:

   - Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl

   - Miracles - C. S. Lewis

   - The Abolition of Man - C. S. Lewis [2]

   - Heretics - G. K. Chesterton

   - Orthodoxy - G. K. Chesterton

   - Nihilism - Seraphim Rose

   - The Experience of God - David Bentley Hart

   - The Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant

   I'm still technically somewhat agnostic and unaffiliated with any particular religious denomination, but I couldn't reasonably go back to my previous atheism after that rabbit hole. I think it's ultimately this illusury distinction between "the natural" vs "the supernatural" that our materialist society has, which makes it so easy to fall into atheism/nihilism. It lulls us into a false sense of confidence about what we "know" as being "natural", as if it were a well-defined "solved problem", all while the purpose of science itself explicitly acknowledges it's not. What makes the illusive grand unifying theory of physics less "supernatural" than a deity, the hard problem of consciousness[3], or the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics[4], for example? The mere assumption that it's more within reach of our understanding? Seems a bit unsatisfying for a premise to form such a large dichotomy around. In that sense, you could argue theism is partially an analogy of Gödel's incompleteness theorems[5] applied to world views. We might be able to kinda/sorta work around such limitations, but it seems silly to just completely ignore they exist, much less turn around and use them as some form of justification against theism a'la "god-of-the-gaps" argument[6].

   [0] for example: https://youtu.be/v0AKUTHcI04

   [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/paulvanderklay

   [2] here's a good series distilling it, since the book itself is a bit dense: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlZfP0L6b41iCKzdQt-Gk...

   [3] http://scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...

   [4] https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.htm...

   [5] Gödel of course, was also a theist himself, and thought a lot about the implications of his discoveries. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/

   [6] here's a good rebuttal to such arguments which may resonate with HN people: https://youtu.be/CltwD0Ek9Kk

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4. DigorySep 2018
   I’d start with C.S. Lewis’s Miracles for a take by an educated theist. Tim Keller’s talks at Google about the reason for belief cover similar ground.
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5. jonstaabJul 2016
   It seems to me you're thinking of Christianity in terms of its popular atheist parody, in contrast to the respectful, thoughtful view of the OP. A number of things you've said are simply not true, others are not in proportion.

   There are a lot of problems to grapple with in epistemology and ontology, some of which you've identified. This isn't the place to debate them, though. A great book to start with though, is Miracles, by C.S. Lewis. It blows through a lot of shallow thinking about God and the nature of reality, as well as a number of things you've referenced: which god is the true one? Why is God so mean?

   Also, I'd like to point out that if God has revealed himself to us in history (via Jesus and the witnesses of his resurrection), we don't need to simply theorize about him. There's actual evidence, which we can weigh against our own personal experience.

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6. turing_completeApr 2022
   I recommend "Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?" by Ian Hutchinson, physicist and professor at MIT. It covers the rational arguments for Christianity and how to integrate a scientific and Christian view of the world.

   And C.S. Lewis, of course, but you're already reading him.

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