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Dear Is Mise,

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If I may butt in on your conversation with David f, allow me to observe that religion has the advantage of disposing of the immense domain of all that remains beyond the knowledge, experience and comprehension of mankind.

To help put the question in perspective, according to the NOAA of the US, 95% of the oceans, which account for 71% of the earth’s volume, are unexplored and therefore unknown.

We also have no idea how big space is. The nearest star to our Sun is Proxima Centauri which is four light years away - about 38,624 trillion km. Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light years across. Even travelling at the speed of light it would take 100,000 years to fly from one side to the other. Scientists think there might be as many as 500 billion galaxies and that is just too big to think about. The most distant galaxy scientists have ever seen is 13 billion light years away, i.e., 125,529, 000,000,000,000,000,000 km away. What, if anything, is beyond that, we have no idea.

The infinitely small is also, at present, beyond our reach. Black holes, for example, are thought to contain the infinitely small and the infinitely dense but we are incapable of observing and analysing them in detail.

We are perfectly conscious that our present knowledge of the universe and all that it contains is extremely limited – including even the knowledge of ourselves.

The unknown, the incomprehensible, and the so-called occult are the domain of predilection of religion. It is in this infinite domain, where it cannot be contradicted by science, that religion thrives. It is here that its unique, universal explanation – God – finds its full and indisputable application.

Miracles are just one, almost negligible, phenomenon that constitutes this vast domain.

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Dear OzSpen,

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You continue to quote the bible as the sole evidence of the existence of a deity but, as I already explained clearly, OzSpen, I am not prepared to have blind faith in multi-generational copies of manuscripts – of which the exactitude is questionable – written (or dictated) more or less 2,000 years ago by devout religious individuals already gained to the cause.

Once again, I can only repeat that : I consider that the question of the existence of a deity is far too important to be treated so lightly.

I maintain that credible evidence, for a matter of this importance, should consist in a rate of concordance of at least 90% between the versions of two totally and indisputably independent, perfectly valid, non-religious sources. I consider that anything less than that is inconceivable and inadmissible as a reasonable standard of judgement.

I’m afraid I see no point in pursuing this dialog any further, OzSpen. We are turning in circles and getting nowhere.

I think I understand you and, hopefully, you understand me – despite your lack of response to my detailed explanations – apart from labelling me an atheist.

Naturally, you have a perfect right to label me as you wish. But, personally, I think it’s a bit silly for me to define myself by reference to theists who, in my view, believe in something that does not exist.

I prefer to define myself as “an ordinary person” of Christian cultural inheritance.

Perhaps I shall have the pleasure of discussing other subjects with you on this forum.

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Banjo,

"Miracles are just one, almost negligible, phenomenon that constitutes this vast domain."

and for that reason alone we should be exploring them to see what can be learned, bone regeneration beyond the power of medical explanation is one.

"He said the first cure was of a paralysed arm that regained function suddenly.

"Another classic example of that is a gentleman from Italy who had a tumour of the pelvis and although you can see the destruction of the pelvic bone on x-rays which are available for the public to view in Lourdes, the bone actually re-grew, both in the pelvis and the femur in an anatomically correct way that would be very hard to explain," he said.

Michael said miracles were just the "tip of the iceberg" at Lourdes.

"First of all it's a place where people can go on holiday when maybe they're terminally ill and couldn't otherwise get insurance," he said."

Never thought of Lourdes as a holiday spot but what he says makes sense.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26334964

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Dear Is Mise,

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Yes, miracles do occur. They are inexplicable. Hence their appropriation by the Church and attribution to deity.

Perhaps the greatest miracle of all is the genesis of life, the abiogenesis.

My understanding is that “everything in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity”, an idea attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus (460 BC – 370 BC). Jacques Monod, the French biologist, a 1965 Nobel Prize winner, later accredited and developed the idea in his book “Le hasard et la nécessité” (Chance and Necessity) published in 1970. From this, Monod deduced that “Life is a spontaneous, evolutive, sensitive and reproductive process triggered by the fortuitous encounter of complementary elements of matter and energy in a favourable environment” (chance meaning a “random variable” and necessity an “inevitable” event).

The biochemistry of life may have begun shortly after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, during a habitable epoch when the age of the universe was only 10 to 17 million years.

Scientists suggest that microscopic life might have been distributed to the early earth by space dust, meteoroids, asteroids and other small solar system bodies and that life may exist throughout the universe. But earth remains the only place in the universe known to harbour life.

The earliest known life-forms on Earth are putative fossilized microorganisms, found in hydrothermal vent precipitates, that may have lived as early as 4.28 billion years ago, relatively soon after the oceans formed 4.41 billion years ago, and not long after the formation of the Earth 4.54 billion years ago.

Abiogenesis is the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. While the details of this process are still unknown, the prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities was not a single event, but a gradual process of increasing complexity that involved molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes.

Not surprisingly, the bible opens with the proclamation :

« In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth » (Genesis 1:1).

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Banjo,

Lourdes was hardly appropriated by the Church and even if it were, we're talking about miracles that happened there after the Church's involvement.

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Dear Is Mise,

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Sorry if I misunderstood you. I thought the subject was miracles and you were citing Lourdes as a famous place where miracles were reported to have occurred.

Now I understand the subject is limited exclusively to Lourdes and more specifically the miracles that occurred there.

Lourdes is, of course, a small town in the south-west of France, near the Spanish border. It became famous in 1858 when a 14 year-old girl claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary in a grotto on the outskirts of the town on several occasions.

The Catholic Church bought the grotto and the land around it three years later, and commissioned a sculptor to create a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes based on the girl’s description. The property and grounds were confiscated by the State due to the law of separation of Church and State in 1905 and returned to the town. The Church rented it from the town until WW1 when it was allowed to buy it back again and has owned it ever since.

Today it is quite a big business. Thirty full-time chaplains work in the domain, from dioceses and religious communities worldwide. As of 2010 there were 292 full-time lay employees and a further 120 seasonal employees working in 63 different divisions, with an annual running budget of about $Aus30 million, 90% from donations.

So, yes, you could say the Church has appropriated the famous Lourdes pilgrimage site – but not the town itself though, naturally, the town also reaps the benefit of the 5 million visitors a year (on average).

In 2008, on the 150th anniversary of the girl’s visions, there were 9 million visitors.

It’s anybody’s guess just what the motor of the miracles is. Some say it’s the Virgin Mary. Some say it’s faith. Some say it’s the stimulation brought on by desperation, knowing that it’s the last chance after everything else has failed.

Whatever it is, it’s hope that brings the constant flow of pilgrims to the little town of Lourdes in and around Easter each year.

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