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gjm comments on Questions on Theism - Less Wrong
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Thanks for the post, that must have been hard given your beliefs.
At first, please do note that it's a long leap from believing in miracles/magic to believing in the christian god.
It's not an assumption but an observation. You wouldn't call them miracles unless they were a gross deviation from your normal experience.
Did you know that the lifetime prevalence of psychosis exceeds 3%? That's a lot of people out of touch with reality willing to claim all sorts of stuff. This is just one example of a naturalistic explanation yet you can see that it could cover many of those claims.
This doesn't mean that someone else couldn't :)
I bet they're mostly events that never happened, people just claim they did. This doesn't require lying, although that happens too.
Interestingly only the first two of those seem like good arguments to me.
Think about the definition of "psychosis". From a supernaturalist point of view, "psychosis" and similar things like the classic "mass hysteria" sound like a fake explanation, i.e., a term the materialist can slap on the phenomenon that makes it seem "scientific".
I think this is wrong.
One part of the argument from miracles goes like this: There's such-and-such a rate of people reporting things that would have to be miraculous if anything like them happened; so either there are real miracles or all these people are either crazy or lying, which isn't plausible.
And one response goes like this: Well, actually being crazy isn't so very unusual; 3% of all people are downright psychotic at some point in their lives (according to definitions that don't reckon most instances of thinking miracles have happened to them as evidence of psychosis). So how implausible is it, really, that there's enough craziness around to account for most of those reports of miracles?
It's true that saying "X thought s/he witnessed a miracle because X was psychotic" is little more informative than "X thought s/he witnessed a miracle because God performed a miracle", but I don't think that matters here. The person making the response in the foregoing paragraph isn't claiming to have a good explanation for the alleged miracles, but only that the theist's argument that only a supernatural explanation is credible is incorrect.