Miracles GCSE RS
- Created by: R Butler
- Created on: 05-04-13 14:42
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- Is it reasonable to believe in miracles?
- NO
- David Hume, a scottish empiricist said that a miracle was "a transgression of a law of nature"
- He had four main arguments against miracles
- 3. Witnesses may be uneducated - at the time Hume only counted Europe in his finding about miracles because he claimed that other countries didn't know enough about science
- 2. Witnesses may be unreliable
- 4. Religions rely on miracles and all major religions have their own, but they cannot all be correct and therefore they cancel each other out.
- 1. There is not enough evidence, with evidence comes a stringer belief
- He had four main arguments against miracles
- Morris Wiles said that a God who performs miracles is unworshipable as it makes him arbitrary.
- The 'Problem of Particularity' arises. How can God choose which people he performs miracles on.
- Wiles is a deist and believes that God is not immanent and takes no part in the day to day runnings of the Earth
- Rudolph Bultmann and Dennis Nineham see miracles as outdated myths that didn't actually happen and need to be mordernised
- "Miracles belong to a long lost world and have no place in a modern world" - Robert Morgan
- This sentiment owes a lot to Bultmann who believed that miracles were acceptable in the first century but needed to be re-interpreted in the light of modern existentialism.
- If God had truly created a perfect world as recounted in the Bible, then there should be no need for miracles.
- David Hume, a scottish empiricist said that a miracle was "a transgression of a law of nature"
- YES
- By definition, a miracle is always going to be the exception.
- Many miracles have been recorded from a post-enlightenment Europe
- Jonathon Sacks (Chief Rabbi of the Orthodox Jewish Community) describes the 'Dignity of Difference' - all religions search for the same God but from different points on a mountain.
- We cannot make such demands on God to perform miracles, faith is the dispelling of doubt.
- Rowan Williams (ex-Bishop of Canterbury) said that we look for God in the wrong places, when he was asked where God was after the Beslan Massacre.
- Aquinas said that miracles were acts of God, and defined them as "that which has a divine cause, not whose cause a human person fails to understand".
- NO
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