rationalskepticism.org

monkeyboy wrote:

tolman wrote:

Sendraks wrote:Only God can do "magic" only it gets rebranded as "miracles" or "divine intervention" or some other such nonsense. Then everything else branded as "magic" is clearly either false or evil in some way.

Presumably one reason for that is that actual 'magic' would be distinctly better than many things claimed as being 'miracles', such as a child surviving a landslide which kills everyone else in its village, including its entire extended family.

Or a well designed aircraft (still controllable despite its engines being put into out of action) being expertly ditched onto a river by a pilot who has trained for such an eventuality in a simulator and the passengers and crew able to escape thanks to safety planning, drills being followed and built in safety features of the plane working. All perfectly explainable as to exactly what happened, kind of the opposite of a miracle, yet which still gets called a miracle and is attributed to God despite the fact that had a god actually intervened, he could have done many less risky things like not letting birds fly into the engines or fixing the engines or gently guiding the plane back to its original airport or to the one just a mile or so away from the ditching site......and let's not mention all the ones he just let's crash where oddly enough, there isn't a nice flat, wide river to ditch in with conveniently placed boats at hand to complete the rescue.