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VanDisease

Is appealing to the Holy Spirit and Miracle a fallacy?

John: what is the evidence that there is God?
Peter: The Bible.
John: but it was just a group of men who made the Bible
Peter: those men were guided by God
John: how can we know that?
peter: because of the Holy Spirit and the Miracle. The miracle is the best evidence as said by some of history books.
asked on Wednesday, Sep 10, 2014 11:38:23 PM by VanDisease

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Bo Bennett, PhD
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This reminds me of magic. All throughout history, humankind has been inserting "magic" as the "best explanation" for things we don't yet understand. If we had reliable evidence that magic existed (any kind of magic including God's magic) then making this assumption might not be such an egregious error in reasoning, but it is, and here is why: Countless times when we attributed the unknown to magic a non-magical explanation was later found to be far greater in explanatory value-- never has the reverse been demonstrated . This fact alone undermines the whole idea of magic. We should not ignore the possibility of magic, but our standards for accepting such an explanation should be in proportion to the probability of such an explanation being true. The problem is, those who believe in magic have used fallacious reasoning in the past to continually affirm their belief in magic, making the probability of magic, from their perspective , irrationally high.

So to answer your question I would say, yes. In my opinion, until someone can empirically distinguish a miracle from magic, it would be an appeal to magical thinking. See Magical Thinking

answered on Thursday, Sep 11, 2014 04:53:41 AM by Bo Bennett, PhD

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Bo Bennett, PhD
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This reminds me of a straw man, although I'm sure you'll find people that merely answer "the bible" when it comes to evidence for a God, most people do not relegate evidence for God to solely being the Bible. They will cite personal transformation via the holy spirit among other things. No body can intelligently tell another person what they experienced in every situation without inserting a presupposition into the interpretation. Everyone thinks they have an explanation in some form. Only the personal experience of the person is what is valid? How you think they explain that experience is based on a bias, not mutual respect for another persons ability to understand what took place.
answered on Sunday, Sep 27, 2015 08:11:10 AM by Bo Bennett, PhD

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