Thank you for reminding me that Luke (ours, not the bible's) saw miracles when he was a Christian and then deconverted anyway.
My own atheism follows deconversion as best i can recall at about the age of 9 or 10. There was one day i was afraid for my soul having been told once again that not believing in god would put me in hell and all of the sudden it struck me that the fact that you are afraid of something does not make it more or less reliably true. So believing because i was afraid simply stopped making sense and honestly I could not think of any other good reason to believe. Clearly there is some sort of very large change of state that occurs between belief and disbelief, even more so than between Republican and Democrat (two American political parties that hate each other).
Since then I have realized that all the evidence from miracles or from logical "proofs of god's existence" may prove something exists that we don't understand, but it does not prove that a vengeful god who recited chapter and verse to Moses, who parted the red sea and flooded the world, who created Adam without a belly button, and who wants me to go to church each sunday or else who will throw me in eternal hell fire because he loves me so much, none of these proofs show all this theology is true. So suppose you saw a young virgin girl stand there in front of a statue of mary and you saw her with your own eyes start to bleed from her hands and her side. You could be reliably sure something was happening that you did not understand. You would have learned NOTHING about whether this means God will burn you in hell for eternity if you say "fuck god" or that Mary was taken bodily into heaven as a virgin at the end of her life (as the Roman Catholics believe) or that the blessed Eucharist is merely a symbol and is not actually the flesh of Jesus Christ (as many protestants believe but not the Catholics).
So one thing you can be sure, you can witness miracles yourself and believe the accounts you hear of miracles, and it does not tell you one iota about dogma. It doesn't even tell you that there is an omniscient and omnipotent being, or who created the universe, or whether or not it is OK to use birth control devices. So no matter how many miracles you see or hear of, you must still wonder, do the thousands of years old texts attributed to moses actually reflect what moses said god told him, and even if they do, was moses correct in concluding that the voices he heard were god? Was the miraculous life of Jesus really a warning to us about all the things we must believe and do in order to avoid an eternity of hellfire, or was Jesus some other form of very special being who had great, but not necessarily perfect moral knowledge?
From there we can talk more about miracles. Science creates models of the world that predict what we would expect. When we get the prediction wrong, we know the model is wrong. So far, whenever that has happened we have not had to resort to "OK the only way to explain THAT is that there is a really smart powerful guy who is invisible and is secretly, but not too secretly, pulling the strings." But suppose there is a "miracle," all that means it is something that science can't explain at the moment. Most likely it means science hasn't figured it out yet. Weather used to be a miracle, eclipses were miracles, asteroids hitting the earth were miracles. Getting sick used to be a miracle, and getting well used to be a miracle. We learn more, we explain more without appealing to the man behind the curtain. Guess what, we are only half way there to explaining everything, and we will ALWAYS be only half way there. But everything we do explain, we don't wind up seeing the man behind the curtain, the trend is not looking good for god.
Good luck with this!
Long time lurker, but I've barely posted anything. I'd like to ask Less Wrong for help.
Reading various articles by the Rationalist Community over the years, here, on Slate Star Codex and a few other websites, I have found that nearly all of it makes sense. Wonderful sense, in fact, the kind of sense you only really find when the author is actually thinking through the implications of what they're saying, and it's been a breath of fresh air. I generally agree, and when I don't it's clear why we're differing, typically due to a dispute in priors.
Except in theism/atheism.
In my experience, when atheists make their case, they assume a universe without miracles, i.e. a universe that looks like one would expect if there was no God. Given this assumption, atheism is obviously the rational and correct stance to take. And generally, Christian apologists make the same assumption! They assert miracles in the Bible, but do not point to any accounts of contemporary supernatural activity. And given such assumptions, the only way one can make a case for Christianity is with logical fallacies, which is exactly what most apologists do. The thing is though, there are plenty of contemporary miracle accounts.
Near death experiences. Answers to prayer that seem to violate the laws of physics. I'm comfortable with dismissing Christian claims that an event was "more than coincidence", because given how many people are praying and looking for God's hand in events, and the fact that an unanswered prayer will generally be forgotten while a seemingly-answered one will be remembered, one would expect to see "more than coincidence" in any universe with believers, whether or not there was a God. But there are a LOT of people out there claiming to have seen events that one would expect to never occur in a naturalistic universe. I even recall reading an atheist's account of his deconversion (I believe it was Luke Muehlhauser; apologies if I'm misremembering) in which he states that as a Christian, he witnessed healings he could not explain. Now, one could say that these accounts are the result of people lying, but I expect people to be rather more honest than that, and Luke is hardly going to make up evidence for the Christian God in an article promoting unbelief! One could say that "miracles" are misunderstood natural events, but there are plenty of accounts that seem pretty unlikely without Divine intervention-I've even read claims by Christians that they had seen people raised from the dead by prayer. And so I'd like to know how atheists respond to the evidence of miracles.
This isn't just idle curiosity. I am currently a Christian (or maybe an agnostic terrified of ending up on the wrong side of Pascal's Wager), and when you actually take religion seriously, it can be a HUGE drain on quality of life. I find myself being frightened of hell, feeling guilty when I do things that don't hurt anyone but are still considered sins, and feeling guilty when I try to plan out my life, wondering if I should just put my plans in God's hands. To make matters worse, I grew up in a dysfunctional, very Christian family, and my emotions seem to be convinced that being a true Christian means acting like my parents (who were terrible role models; emulating them means losing at life).
I'm aware of plenty of arguments for non-belief: Occam's Razor giving atheism as one's starting prior in the absence of strong evidence for God, the existence of many contradictory religions proving that humanity tends to generate false gods, claims in Genesis that are simply false (Man created from mud, woman from a rib, etc. have been conclusively debunked by science), commands given by God that seem horrifyingly immoral, no known reason why Christ's death would be needed for human redemption (many apologists try to explain this, but their reasoning never makes sense), no known reason why if belief in Jesus is so important why God wouldn't make himself blatantly obvious, hell seeming like an infinite injustice, the Bible claiming that any prayer prayed in faith will be answered contrasted with the real world where this isn't the case, a study I read about in which praying for the sick didn't improve results at all (and the group that was told they were being prayed for actually had worse results!), etc. All of this, plus the fact that it seems that nearly everyone who's put real effort into their epistemology doesn't believe and moreover is very confident in their nonbelief (I am reminded of Eliezer's comment that he would be less worried about a machine that destroys the universe if the Christian God exists than one that has a one in a trillion chance of destroying us) makes me wonder if there really isn't a God, and in so realizing this, I can put down burdens that have been hurting for nearly my entire life. But the argument from miracles keeps me in faith, keeps me frightened. If there is a good argument against miracles, learning it could be life changing.
Thank you very much. I do not have words to describe how much this means to me.