Some denizen of Uncommon Descent who goes by vjtorley has collected several hundred articles giving proof of God’s existence, and commends the list to me and my skeptical readers. And, wouldn’t you know it, among them is the case of a Spanish amputee whose leg was restored by God.
The clincher:
Recordings also show that the restored leg was the same one as that which had been amputated two and a half years before, for it could be reidentified through some bruises and scars that were there before the amputation. Also, the hole in the cemetery of the hospital of Zaragoza in which the leg had been buried was excavated and found empty.
My only beef is that God stopped doing this kind of stuff in the seventeeth century.
I was just offering to help with a repeat experiment on the other tread…
Response to the web site that “gives proof of God’s existence”:
See http://www.talkorigins.org
But how can you possibly doubt the account of the “Flying Saint,” who in the 17th century would go into a state of ecstasy and literally float up in the air for hours at a time?
Like the referenced article says, “They were the phenomenon of the century. They were so sensational and so public that they attracted attention from curious people from all walks of life, Italians and foreigners, believers and unbelievers, simple folk, but also scholars, scientists, priests, bishops and cardinals. They continued to occur in every situation, in whatever church in which the saint prayed or celebrated Mass. It is impossible to doubt such a sensational and public phenomenon which repeated itself over time.”
Impossible to doubt, I tells ya!
And this one time, I saw a guy pull a rabbit out of a hat!
I’ve heard stories of surgeons pulling gerbils out of … well, you know how the urban legend goes.
Joseph’s ‘ecstatic flights’ took place at least 1,000 to 1,500 times in his lifetime
Yes well, nowadays we refer to this as “jumping up and down” but you know, back in the 17th century, before TV, folks were easily impressed.
Oh, but they do it still.
I will believe it when one flies across the English Channel…
Heck, there’s even video footage!
Why did it take God two and a half years to re-attach the leg? Was he busy giving infants smallpox?
God exists outside of time. Us other guys are in real life spacetime existence, which is only accessible from non-spacetime existence through goodness. Ergo god is not responsible for bad stuff, and how would He know what time to respond without time?
And when you think about it, what the fuck is a clock?
God/s didn’t make clocks, Paley did! Odd lady/fellow/s this/these god/s, eh?
Oh man, now I have to go watch that video again.
I still haven’t decided whether the original or the parody is funnier.
“There’s all kinds of magic up in this bitch!”
Maybe the leg was growing back very slowly? And god had to steal the original so he had a model to work with – that explains the disappearance of the buried amputated limb.
These stories must be true — after all, no other religion has stories of miraculous events witnessed by many, right?
The devil did those. Or perhaps witches. Like the one that turned me into a newt.
Let me guess…you got better?
b&
No, I’m still a newt.
Ew! Gross!
Next time, please be so kind as to use a NSFW tag, okay?
b&
or rather – a a not safe anywhere tag
Just be thankful that I didn’t imbed the image.
magic
That “Twenty Arguments for the Existence of God” thing is one of the greatest piles of bruhaha I’ve EVER seen. It makes me wonder if all theists are that stupid.
It really is amazing.
On our side, the big argument of the day is whether a god would have to make 1 + 1 = 3 to prove its divinity, or if it’s merely enough for it to manifest itself as a quarter-mile-tall Space Jesus who simultaneously healed every amputee in the world while giving unicorn ponies to all the good little girls.
On the other side…they’re still impressed with Anselm. I mean, really? This is the guy who came up with the argument that the greatest imaginable cheeseburger must, of necessity, <poof> itself into existence because, if it didn’t exist, it wouldn’t be so good after all.
And don’t get me started on Lewis’s false trichotomy or Pascal’s losing bet….
Cheers,
b&
I was shocked when I learned that people actually took CS Lewis seriously. I read his books in my pre and early teens and thought they were a load of badly written crap. I thought he was trying to write parodies and failed miserably – I was at university when I realized that he actually took his nonsense seriously and then I wondered if he was all doped up on opiates or something or if he had discovered LSD before it was even invented. CS Lewis was like an L. Ron Hubbard who was too witless to even invent his own cult.
Even many of the “sophisticated theologians” revere C.S. Lewis. It’s truly amazing.
Why would I find the story more convincing if it _wasn’t_* the same old damaged leg, and there _wasn’t_ a hole in the ground, suggesting that the Divine Creator of the Universe had to borrow a shovel? (Come to think of it, why did anyone need to Move the Stone?)
Did the leg still have whatever was the matter with it that decided doctors to amputate it in the first place? Gee, thanks, God!
*How do you do italics here? (With a preview pane, we could experiment.)
left caret i right caret to start
left caret / i right caret to stop
The carets are the shift-comma and shift-period keys.
italics
Same with bold and
That’s the extent of my HTML knowledge.
Thanks, that‘s wonderful great!
Wee speeksz HTMLz!
But not underline or strikeout, it seemsz.
like this?
And typing the less-than and greater-than characters without having them interpreted as html is < and >.
thanks – useful to expand the old keyboard skills – the depth of my ignorance amazes me.
That’s nothing. A retired preacher, who is related to me, claims to have found a man on the street who had a deformed arm. (Say a small hand attached to his shoulder.) He took the man to church and with a little bit of laying on of the hands and some tugging, managed to pull a new arm out of the man’s shoulder. I don’t know what the Catholic God has been doing recently, but the Pentecostal God has been busy.
The pentacostal one is quite busy. According to his followers, he’s doing the zombie trick too – but only in Africa for some reason…
Heh. When I lived in Columbus, Ohio, there was a homeless kid who as a thalidomide baby. He had no arms…everyone called him “Flipper” because his hands were literally attached at the shoulder.
He coulda used that preacher.
If someone fixed that kid by praying over him, I’d be impressed.
Just who is this prankster god who allows people to lose limbs, takes his time getting them back to people, then doesn’t even bother to fix it up before returning it?
Or maybe it’s a Monty Python sketch:
“Oh, ‘leg’! You’re looking for a leg! Actually, I think there is one in there somewhere. Somebody must have abandoned it here, knowing you were coming after it, and we stumbled across it, actually, and wondered what it was, and they’ll be miles away by now…”
I’m afraid all his evidence is undermined by the fact he’s still using angelfire….
You have to admit, it’s a nice tidy site – much easier on the eyes than the usual angelfire fare.
And his writing is excellent, by crackpot standards.
And why is it that people don’t rise from the dead anymore or hop on white beasts and fly to heaven and talk to god? Okay, okay, granted there are people who claim to be alien abductees, but you know what, they’re a lot more credible to me than any of this mystical hocus pocus. I mean, it’s not out of the realm of possibility for a highly advanced species to be conducting experiments on us. Unlikely, but not impossible. I’ll keep an open mind until proven otherwise. Oh, Jeebus, does this mean I’m an accomodationist agnostic?
Free tip to true believers out there:
Unless you really want to make the case that, in all of history, the only amputee deserving of miraculous limb restoration was an otherwise-unnoteworthy clumsy Spanish peasant who died half a millennium ago, don’t even think of mentioning Miguel Juan Pellicer’s name.
Cheers,
b&
Best bit is “some bruises and scars that were there before the amputation.” You just can’t beat that.
Also, the hole in the cemetery of the hospital of Zaragoza in which the leg had been buried was excavated and found empty.
Wow!!! Doesn’t that just give you goosebumps?
I buried a pound of hamburger in my back yard last year, and when I dug it up again this year, it was gone.
I’m getting out a postcard to send the good news to Ratzi. It feels kind of cool knowing that I’m destined to be a saint. And Momma said I would never amount to anything.
F**ing Brilliant. Best laugh I had all day.
Just wait until Doomsday! All the graves will open of course & the bodies be clothed with flesh again of course. Not sure if that applies to hamburgers. It MUST be true. It was in some religious tract. Perhaps tea Party religious nutters should send poor legless servicemen to Spain to be healed – oh wait, we are in the 21st century – god/s don’t do miracles now.
Not really, as apparently even the Christian god has to obey conservation of matter.
Ah-ha – these 200 or so articles, Torley says, are “the “creme-de-la-creme” so to speak, of what’s available on the Web.” Oh well then! As there are two hundred or so of them, and as they’re the pick of what’s available on the Web, there’s really no more to be said, is there. That’s because taken together, they make a strong cumulative case, on philosophical and empirical grounds, that God does indeed exist. Can’t argue with that. Two hundred is a lot.
I like these proofs of god’s existence much better.
It must be bunnies.
No, only Satan would send bunnies. They aren’t as cute as everyone supposes — they’ve got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses.
And what’s with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?
I browsed through the list of articles giving proof of god but all seem to be named arguments of X. Argument is hardly a proof but I doubt even reading them would give any proof.
How hard it is to distinguish between proof and mere wordplay?
“To simulate a double-amputee, [Lon] Chaney devised a leather harness with stumps that allowed him to strap his legs behind him and walk on his knees.”
And, after the movie was over, both legs grew back good as new.
Could some passing theologian explain whether the “Twenty Arguments For The Existence Of God” are the sophisticated theological arguments we are supposed to be enagaging with, or the simplistic arguments we are not supposed to waste our time on?
Whichever it is, they did nothing whatever to encourage me to try other articles in the list.
Yes, tell the religious apologists to stuff this “Twenty Arguments For The Existence Of God” website in their accommodationist pipes, & smoke it.
The always entertaining (as in get your popcorn ready when he joins an argument) Rob Knop recently posted the following explanation of the sophisticated Christian position on the subject of miracles. The question was raised about NOMA in a thread on Josh Roseneaus site. Specifically whether it allowed for intervention by a supernatural God in the natural realm.
Rob, despite the laughter his arguments generally provoke, should at least be commended for coming out and explicitly stating the ‘sophisticated’ Christian position, rather than the usual tactic of hiding the real point behind a waffly obscurantism.
“Science can only, if you really get down to it, set upper limits on the incidence of miraculous things — obviously things outside science aren’t happening very often, or we’d have statistical evidence for them. And, some of the things science can’t explain are obviously, from a quick look at the history of science, simply things that science can’t explain *yet*.
However, it’s possible to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus and *still* accept science without being in contradiction. That comes from the fact that science cannot prove that miracles *never* happen. The amazingly successful track record of science indicates that science is at least an extremely good way of describing and understanding the reality of nature. But it doesn’t prove that science must be the one perfect way to understand the reality of nature. No, miracles don’t happen very often, and there’s no good scientific reason to believe that they happened ever. And, it seems silly from a purely scientific point of view to think that one ever did happen. But it’s not inconsistent to fully accept science, and still yet believe in a relatively small number of miracles.”
>blockquote>But it’s not inconsistent to fully accept science, and still yet believe in a relatively small number of miracles.
Maybe. But to believe in those miracles based on nothing more than a single source? A book full of myths? A book shown to be full of contradictions? Written and edited by people with clear agendas? How is that compatible with science?
His pleading sure is special.
Gosh, Jerry, I don’t know whether you should be more troubled by the fact that you’ve been given evidence for god and still don’t believe, or by the compliments the UD crowd paid you.
Evidence not good enough!
I know. There is no evidence good enough.
That’s where we differ. I haven’t seen any evidence good enough, and I can’t imagine there will be any, but I can conceive of evidence that would convince me. For example, every Catholic prayer is answered and no Jewish ones are . . .
Maybe the incredibly powerful alien is Catholic.
Wouldn’t powerful (but natural) enteties playing silly buggers make more sense than a 3O-god in this scenario? To me it is certainly more parsimonious as it would only entail a lot of potence, not the omni. And would avoid all the problems with omnibenevolence.
Especially as no-one worships a god that grants every prayer, even though that’s what’s promised in the holy babble.
So how many of those proofs (I have a “no angelfire” rule) correlate with the proofs on this list? Just curious.
Dammit, I keep having my gangenous leg amputated, and God keeps sticking it back on. Is He trying to kill me?
The simplest answer to the reattached leg man is a long-separated twin (or even non-twin) brother and a “Hey, we could…”
(A guy once – briefly – fooled me that he’d had a [badly infected] tattoo removed perfectly, by this method.)