An agnostic asks:
Hello everyone, new to the forum. I am an Agnostic who’s searching to find the truth. Since I’m trying to find out if Christianity and Catholicism in specific is true, if it includes actual miracles, it would only speak for it.
Are there convincing miracle cases?
This is my answer:
I sympathize with you because I was in your place many years ago.
I think what you want to ask is “Is there any miracles that could convince even a reluctant agnostic or atheist?”. And the answer is “no”, but not for the reasons you may be thinking.
(It is not that miracles do not happen today. Somebody said that the Bible is full of miracles, but if you take into account that the period described in the Bible is about 1800 years, the amount of miracles per year is underwhelming and not higher than today. For today’s miracles, read » Miracles : 2 Volumes: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, by Craig S. Keener»)
Theism (belief in God), like atheism (not belief in God) are worldviews. Worldviews are descriptions of the world that are based on a series of tenets that cannot be verified by empirical evidence. So worldviews cannot be verified by empirical evidence, such as miracles.
Imagine God makes a private appearance to you (very few people have had this special privilege, but let’s imagine). He tells you that He exists and you should pray.
If you are a theist, you will begin to pray more. If you are an atheist, you will go to the psychiatrist and ask for pills against hallucinations.
The empirical evidence is the same in both cases. It is your worldview that interprets the experience in a way or another. So worldviews cannot be verified by empirical evidence because they are the set of beliefs through which we interpret empirical evidence.
If a miracle happens to other people, it is even worse. You can doubt about if the report is accurate, if the original fact took place or if an (unknown) natural cause could be the reason.
In short, there are not convincing miracle cases for an atheist, because atheism causes miracle cases to be unconvincing.
Speaking for myself, when I was an atheist, a breakthrough was realizing that no empirical evidence could change my mind about the non-existence of the supernatural. Even if the supernatural existed, I could always explain it away in many ways.
If worldviews cannot be validated by empirical evidence, what are we to do? Choose a worldview at random and stick to it? This is very unsatisfactory for truth seekers.
Luckily, there is another way. I said that worldviews are immune to empirical evidence, but I have not said anything about non-empirical evidence. We can examine worldviews using non-empirical evidence. This means philosophy. If you examine modern atheism honestly using philosophy, you quickly realize that it is untenable. It is simply contradictory and cannot be true.
Then you have the work of analyzing different religious traditions to see which one is true. Buddhism and rationality are incompatible. The Qur’an has lots of basic mistakes. In summary, every tradition starts with a private event (Buddha’s enlightenment, Muhammad’s encounter with an angel) except Christianity (starts with a public event, which is the resurrection of Christ). Since it is a public event, you can investigate it with the tools of historical research and reach your own conclusions.
Once you belief that Christianity is true, miracles do not seem impossible to you. You don’t think every miracle is true, mind you. You are open to the possibility of fraud. But you don’t reject a miracle beforehand.
What I have told you is a long and winding path (with many books to read). I don’t recommend it, even if it is the path that brought me to the faith. It is a path only valid for the most skeptic people (such as myself). In my opinion, the best path is going to a Christian community and give it a try for a year or so, with an open mind. You can ask things in this community and progress little by little.
Or you could remain in your atheism, if you want it.
A final say: if you want to study these topics honestly, please don’t ask in a forum. These are complicated topics and you can play the skeptic here with any answer that you receive, because these answers must be short and are written quickly and inaccurately.
You should be willing to read books. In a book, you don’t only have an answer, but the objections to the answer and why these objections are not valid. To consider all these things takes hundred of well-thought pages and this is what the books are for.
Imagine that you demand proofs of biological evolution in a forum and then play the skeptic with any fast answer you receive. To have an iron-clad proof, you should read a book about evolution and not a forum. You can always find a hole in a fast answer written in a forum