Miracles & Other Supernatural Thingamabobs in a Naturalistic Cosmos (4 of 3) :-)

6 He left that place and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. 2 On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! 3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Mark 6:1-3 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

21b But whatever anyone dares to boast of—I am speaking as a fool—I also dare to boast of that. 22 Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I. 23 Are they ministers of Christ? I am talking like a madman—I am a better one: with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. 24 Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one.25 Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; 26 on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters;[a] 27 in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked. 28 And, besides other things, I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the churches. 29 Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I am not indignant?

30 If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. 31 The God and Father of the Lord Jesus (blessed be he forever!) knows that I do not lie. 32 In Damascus, the governor under King Aretas guarded the city of Damascus in order to seize me,33 but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall,[d] and escaped from his hands.
2 Corinthians 11:21b-33 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.
Tacitus The Annals (written 109 Common Era)

First, however, I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show, deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar: nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant.
― Celsus, On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians
(written, per Peter Kirby’s Early Christian Writings, between 177 & 178 Common Era)

He, the Life of all, our Lord and Saviour, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind. No. He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by others, and those other His special enemies, a death which to them was supremely terrible and by no means to be faced; and He did this in order that, by destroying even this death, He might Himself be believed to be the Life, and the power of death be recognised as finally annulled. A marvellous and mighty paradox has thus occurred, for the death which they thought to inflict on Him as dishonour and disgrace has become the glorious monument to death's defeat.

― Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation

Miracles in Summary

1. A naturalist believes reality to be self-contained and completely comprehensible (in principle) in terms of itself.
2. A supernaturalist believes that reality is contingent on the divine and mediates that divine reality to creation as a sponge mediates water to one who is washing something.
3. Speaking from within a Christian supernaturalist worldview, miracles are perceived as extraordinary events revealing both the authority and power of God over the finite and broken character of human existence in the world and God’s intention for creation.
4. Because of incommensurability the physicist who says science disproves God or the fundamentalist who says that geological evidence shows that once upon a time there was a worldwide flood are making similar types of category error: the physicist by “concluding” something that is not even defined in physics and the fundamentalist for dressing what is basically a theological claim (which, at its root, seeks to defend the inerrancy of the Bible) as a scientific claim. They are in the position people who only know checkers arguing about whether “checkmate” is real.
5. On the face of it, the believing saying miracles are real and the physicist saying miracles are not real are at loggerheads because, generally speaking, “A” and “Not-A” cannot both be true.
6. There is, however, a case where they can both be true: the case where A is taken to mean two different realities. And if knowledge is “justified, true, belief” and if the Christian and the physicist have different models of belief, truth and justification (and, therefore, for all intents and purposes, “know” different things, even if those things go under the same name) then it is quite appropriate for the Christian physicist to say that the universe is full of miracles except when I am performing an experiment in my lab. Then the miracle becomes an anomaly that I presume can be explained - in principle if not in the current state of practise - through immanent, natural explanations without recourse to the supernatural.
7. In my opinion the Christian physicists way of looking at things passes both philosophical muster and is inline with the Christian belief that God created the world (that is, reality) as an entity dependent upon yet distinguishable from the Divine - and occasionally  transparent to both the authority and the purposes of the Divine.
8. In a way, it’s like the Oscar Wilde quote: "We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language". And that applies to Christians, physicists and the word “miracle” as well.

The Pauline / Marcan Spin on the Miraculous

32 Now as Peter went here and there among all the believers,[a] he came down also to the saints living in Lydda. 33 There he found a man named Aeneas, who had been bedridden for eight years, for he was paralyzed. 34 Peter said to him, “Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you; get up and make your bed!” And immediately he got up. 35 And all the residents of Lydda and Sharon saw him and turned to the Lord.
Acts 9:32-35 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

1. Compare the above quote from Acts to the initial quotes from Christians and pagans at the top.
2. To anticipate later discussions on the Bible, the author of Acts is believed - by both tradition and historical scholars - to also be the author of the Gospel of Luke. We don’t know who he or she was, but we will refer to the writer as Luke.
3. Luke, in Acts, holds Paul in high esteem. Yet Luke’s understanding of what it means to be a Christian is so at odds with Paul’s own conception that the very opponents Paul is contending with in 2 Corinthians (above, taken by historians as actually written by Paul) are, in essence, Lucan Christians!
4. Paul is writing in the early to middle 50s of the Common Era while Luke is written some forty or so years later. (The Gospel of Mark was written some twenty years after Paul and some twenty years before Luke and Luke probably had a copy of Mark when Luke / Acts was written.) In the time of Paul, what he calls “super-apostles” are spreading their gospel which they evidence through the mighty miracles they have performed. They accept the support of those Christian communities of those who take them in and actually produce “letters of commendation” from past communities attesting to the miracles they performed.
5. In Luke, as quoted immediately above, Peter performs a miracle and, as they say, “the crowd goes wild!” People see the miracle and are so impressed with the power of Peter that they say, in essence, this must be the real deal - and they all become Christians.
6. Going back twenty years to Mark, we see that Mark handles miracles in a very different way, though he/she (again, we know not the writer) has miracles sprinkled liberally throughout the gospel. But note that in the example of Mark’s gospel cited above, the people take offense at the miracle because of the nature of the miracle-worker, Jesus: who does THIS guy from our village who does such things take himself for?!
7. Throughout the Gospel of Mark, Jesus does miracles and people follow but do not necessarily believe. His disciples fail to believe and his family thinks he is mad. One steller exception is the Transfiguration where Peter sees and believes… the wrong thing. :-)
8. Paul in Corinth is contending with super-apostles who attempt to discredit Paul by saying that he works for a living (rather than taking the support from the community as any self-respecting apostle would surely do) and that he lacks “letters of commendation” regarding his miracles.
9. Losing it, Paul lets loose a thunderous barrage of sarcasm, irony and ridicule at his opponents, turning his opponents argument on its head. He boasts of his mighty miracles - sufferings, persecutions, rejection, weakness, failure, helplessness - and admits that he was too “weak” (note the word) to accept help from the Corinthians.
10. Paul is, in fact, contending with a power theology in which one follows God and is rewarded with great power to achieve great things and perform great miracles. (Remind anyone of contemporary TV preachers? :-))
11. Paul’s response is the model of Christ crucified. Crucified in weakness and raised by God in power in the resurrection, the resurrection, for Paul, does not undo the crucifixion of Jesus, it subverts it.
12. BIG TIME SPOILER ALERT :-) : Someone looking for contemporary examples of this mythology (which is not a dirty word, though we’ll return to that later) need look no farther than Lord of the Rings, where the hero goes on a quest, not to attain the Ring of Power… but to destroy it, and the Harry Potter series: where Harry must accept his own destruction to vanquish Voldemort. (Voldemort’s life ‘mission,’ if you remember, was to overcome death and achieve immortality. Rather than accepting “eternal life” in the context of one’s limitation and mortality, Voldemort sought eternal deathlessness - which is not the same thing at all.
13. The core of the supernatural and the miraculous, for the Christian, is God in Christ overcoming death for everyone, ironically, but being defeated by it. By subverting the power of death in this way, God in Christ makes every conceivable human experience, no matter how dreadful, an opportunity for new life in some way, shape or form. We may not see or understand how, just as the scientist as any given point in time cannot explain an anomaly, but Christians believe that because of God in Christ, there are no godforsaken places or experiences on earth.
14. Christians therefore do not (or, more often, should not :-), require those responses to the aggressive power of death referred to biblically as sin: aspiring to power over death a la Sauron or Voldemort, escape from the power of death a la “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die,” or to negotiate a separate peace with death through some sort of immortality project.
15. Tacitus and Celsus, two pagan critics of Christianity, were - in fact - quite discerning. More discerning than today’s TV preachers. The poor, the disreputable, the sick, the dying, the deformed, the criminal, the mad, the low-life, find Christianity much more attractive than the rich, the powerful, the young, the healthy, the righteous, etc. The former lack the resources of the latter to engage in escapism, power fantasies, and monument making and serve as a living rebuke to such futility.