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Elijah calling down fire from heaven, 21st century version<\/em><\/p>\n Years ago I saw a New Atheist-y meme that showed a cartoon panel of \u201cthe power of God across time,\u201d starting with the creation of the world, moving onto the great flood and turning water into wine, and then ending with Christ appearing on toast, with the idea that in today\u2019s age we kind of grasp at straws to see this little miracle here or there whereas in the past there were seas being split and fire coming out of the heavens to burn up sacrifices.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This is one of those things where I think they have a point on some level. As a general principle I think miracles operate at the same cadence and magnitude today that they did in the past (typically in the subtle, private moments of our lives) and the farther back the record goes the more I\u2019m open to the possibility that the miracles described were later additions, that the correlation between the magnitude and how public the miracle was and how old it is is attributable to the kind of folkloric additions that we see in just about every really old story that has had time to evolve and become grander. Ethics aside, If Brigham Young isn\u2019t calling down a pillar of fire to block the way of the invading US Army in Echo Canyon, or President Oaks isn\u2019t calling she-bears out of Cottonwood Canyon to maul children who make fun of his baldness, I lean towards Moses and Elisha not doing so either.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Of course, there are two big-deal, big-picture miracles that I think are pretty fundamental to Latter-day Saint theology: God was the father of Jesus (which also includes the doctrine of the Virgin Birth by extension, unless you\u2019re going to go all Orson Pratt on this), and the resurrection of Christ. In terms of ancient scripture, I\u2019m open to just about every other ancient miracle being accumulated folklore <\/span>if it\u2019s not the kind of thing we would expect to see in the year 2024<\/span><\/i>. (As Bushman points out in his new book on the subject, the Gold Plates are another example where this-worldly concrete meets otherworldly provenance in a way that is hard to just brush aside as a well-meaning delusion, but it\u2019s also new enough that it clearly isn\u2019t just a tradition that grew over time, and actually runs counter to the trend of the really concrete miracles being in the distant past).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Individual personal appearances of deity or visions happen so often, in myriad religious traditions, that I don\u2019t include that in the demonstrable miracle category, since skeptics can easily take those experiences at face value and as being sincere without conceding the supernatural elements. They can\u2019t do the same thing with, say, the resurrection or plates.<\/span><\/p>\n Of course, I am not opposed to the idea of miracles, and much of our faith requires it. If God has the power to create the world He surely has the power to intervene in it, and the advent of science hasn\u2019t really changed that point. C.S. Lewis pointed out that Joseph the husband of Mary knew scientifically that virgins don\u2019t give birth. He didn\u2019t have to know about gametes to get the point; while with our modern knowledge we can carry the details to a further decimal place, that doesn\u2019t change the fundamental fact that God is intervening to cause something to happen that doesn\u2019t normally happen. Sometimes this rhetoric can become annoyingly superior, (\u201cbut how can a Virgin conceive, huh! Checkmate!\u201d) As if the realization that it requires some supernatural element will blow our mind, but an interventionist God makes sense if you believe in a creator God, if anything it seems like the former would take less energy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So yes, maybe God did allow more demonstrable, large-scale miracles back in the day before electronic, modern-day record keeping, but consistency would a priori suggest that miracles operate at the same cadence and level of publicity now that they did back in the day.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Elijah calling down fire from heaven, 21st century version Years ago I saw a New Atheist-y meme that showed a cartoon panel of \u201cthe power of God across time,\u201d starting with the creation of the world, moving onto the great flood and turning water into wine, and then ending with Christ appearing on toast, with the idea that in today\u2019s age we kind of grasp at straws to see this little miracle here or there whereas in the past there were seas being split and fire coming out of the heavens to burn up sacrifices.\u00a0 This is one of those things where I think they have a point on some level. As a general principle I think miracles operate at the same cadence and magnitude today that they did in the past (typically in the subtle, private moments of our lives) and the farther back the record goes the more I\u2019m open to the possibility that the miracles described were later additions, that the correlation between the magnitude and how public the miracle was and how old it is is attributable to the kind of folkloric additions that we see in just about every really old story that has had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":47689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy-and-theology"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/78aba12d-252f-4f00-971a-4cda366a6afa.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47682"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50269,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47682\/revisions\/50269"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}