Have Miracles Ever Happened?

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Depends which of the gospels you're reading. They can't even agree on whether it was three days or two, who was at the tomb, whether the tomb was open when the witnesses arrived or what happened to Judas.



Because it is indefensible. There's no evidence to confirm or deny it - just a bunch of written accounts, which weren't even written at the time and have been copied and recopied and translated once or twice, not to mention edited to fit the needs of the church (such as at the Council of Nicea). It wouldn't be acceptable evidence in a court of law ("this man was the murderer, as my great aunt knew a guy whose brother wrote about the murder in his journal twenty years after it happened; of course, that was in Swahili, so we've had a translation produced...")

Well, given that the largest organization on the planet that still deals actively in miracles talks in these terms I think you are the one engaging in sophistry by insisting upon a notion of, "what counts as a proper miracle."

Look at the miracles attributed to just about any saint canonized by the Roman Catholic church in the last century, and you will probably find that they are, by and large, cures and recoveries that physicians were at a loss to explain. Did they occur? Yes. Are they unexplained? Probably most of them are. Are they miracles? Well the Roman Catholics believe that they are.

In a world where the term is as watered down as that, why are we diving into the fantasies of the sun stopping in the sky, the walls falling down or men rising from the dead (there was more than one, remember)?

They predate Jesus too. Ezekiel was trying to build an army of skeletons way back in the OT days, and that would be a much better trick than the recent dead.

Everybody sing along now... The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone...