In Reply to: Re: Miracles (of inclusion) posted by Farmer on January 15, 2006 at 21:22:07:
Farmer,
Thank you for refreshing my memory. I wish I'd be more conversant on Bible verses like these but I only vaguely remember them.
As I view things, conditions are important and I think that it is a matter of meeting them, even if we don't know them all. In fact, through conversations with non-Christians, I have seen close similarities on how their beliefs include similar conditions for prayers.
What I am getting at is that perhaps there are larger or greater conditions, which are simply part of nature and we haven't yet discover them in our scientific progression.
Imagine a type of cloud with a very dense core of knowledge that becomes less and less dense as we move away from that core. There is a core of pragmatic and solid knowledge that can be replicated and is fully understood within the scientific parameters to which it belongs. As we move away from that solid knowledge, the most dense part of the cloud, science starts using more probabilistic models and a degree of faith is necessary to accept them. The case in point here is the theory of evolution. While it makes sense, it requires a great deal of faith.
But then we find a sort of missing link, and a huge chunk of that cloud pretty much gels and can be incorporated to the dense core (I am not saying that evolution had that missing link). From that point on the gelled portion as it is integrated into the body of dense knowledge making it more sophisticated, creates new questions which are also more sophisticated.
In other words, what was accepted by faith is now demonstrated by facts. Faith on the particular issue addressed by the previous state of knowledge vanishes. What was thought as supernatural or miraculous, is now accepted as a result of some natural law. My original ignorance, which required faith is replaced by knowledge which pushed away the boundaries of mystery. God is further.
The only way I have to resolve this agnostic situation is by declaring that God is much larger that my knowledge, which makes this God independent of knowledge, thus of faith. Therefore whenever I say faith it must be way beyond any type of knowledge, including experience, or is it?
Like I said before, I think too much.