Testimony or coincidence

I have know an elderly man most of my life and when I was young, his wife passed away from cancer. They were both Christian and he still is.He is about 76 now and a very wise man, an historian and just a great guy,he is like a second father to me.

Anyway, years ago he told me that when his wife was really sick,it got to the point where she could not eat anything and hold it down,nothing but watermelon as it turns out. This was the only thing she could eat but they weren't in season,they weren't in any grocery store,fruit stand,anywhere. They were just out of season but he did go everywhere desperately looking for them.

Out of luck,leaving the last store he went to, he came out of the store and there was a truck full of watermelon in the parking lot.They weren't delivering them to the store so he told the men of his situation and they told him to take as many as he needed and of course, didn't charge him.

This is a true story,no exaggerations. If you don't believe it then assume it is true like your most trusted friend had told you of this.

Is there a point where calling something a coincidence is not the most logical answer ? Am I to believe that there is no kind of harmony,or rather no kind of gifts that this Universe gives us at the right time for an obvious reason ?

Opinions ?

 

Sure, that can be a coincidence. Watermelons are not so uncommon that finding them should count as a miracle. I don't know where you live, but isn't the bad luck of not finding any watermelons anywhere else just as big a coincidence? I can certainly find watermelons in several stores around me even when they're not in season.

I believe you're applying a confirmation bias here. Let's say for instance your friend's wife's cancer went into remission instead. Then you could write a story about how unlikely it was that the cancer went into remission and say that was a miracle. However, when you write about your friend finding watermelons, you ignore the vast amount of miracles that didn't happen. Altogether, the chance that there is something which looks like a miracle is quite high. The flavour of it, the watermelon part, is unlikely, but it has no bearing on our assessment of whether a miracle occurred.

 

I could go on but I think I'd get a ten yard penalty for piling on.

 

Just one of many article that can be found on the subject.
Some are better than others, but all express the same idea.
Thoughts are things and they become real, so be careful of the thoughts that you entertain.

http://www.charmingelements.com/thoughts-become-things.html

 

Thoughts are not things and they don't become real except on a physical, conscious, premeditated decision by a live human being.

 

I think if miracles do happen then a lot of times it happens it happens in the most unremarkable way. We don't need wind and fury for a miracle to occur.

 

This happened many years ago, north on the east coast and imported fruit was not nearly as common as it is now, I know watermelons weren't in season and weren't anywhere to be found.It wasn't like now, where you can get pretty much anything,anytime. This man was really in a jam here, we are talking about the only food she could eat so when I say he searched everywhere, I mean till he was at a loss.

You also have a truck in the parking lot that wasn't delivering. This wasn't even a truck that would be doing imports if it was in today's times, it was a pick-up style truck with visible watermelons in the back. No way locally grown unless they had sodium pressure bulbs and an indoor grow system for watermelons. (lol) But you are right, that could have been the case,or something else, it could have been a coincident with nothing more to it than that. I just don't think so.

I personally wouldn't offer 'cancer going into remission' as alternate testimony, that happens all the time.It is not my claim that this was a miracle but I do believe God or the universe throws us fitting gifts sometimes. As far as the vast amount of miracles that don't happen, I just don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

 

Alfalfa, you curse God because evil happens in this world. But this was not the world we were created for, and that is why it seems uncomfortable to us. Our true home is the world beyond this lifetime. In that world, there is no evil, there is no war, and there is no suffering.

 

You have much to learn.
You can start by reading the articles and paying attention to events in your life relative to the thoughts you constantly entertain.
By repeatedly entertaining a thought you impress your subconscious mind and it will manifest the thought into your life. It may be good or bad.
You do realize that you have a subconscious mind, don't you?
Here's a primer for you. It has an added bonus in discussing NLP.
http://www.leaderperfect.com/nlp/nlp-and-the-brain.htm

 

It's not necessary to pile it on. It only takes one tragic thing to happen to one person and your point is equally as valid.

 

An atheist looks at the negative aspects of life, and says, "There can be no God to allow all this to happen!"

A Christian looks at all the positive aspects of life and says, "There must be a God, to make a world so beautiful!"

It's really a glass half-empty/half-full kind of thing.

Which is it?

 

What would have been a miracle is if she could have eaten a steak.

 

Well even if we suppose that there are miracles, or gifts from God, or whatever you want to call them, presumably they have to maintain some level of consistency with what we expect from the every day world. That is to say, watermelons couldn't have just started magically falling from the sky - your friend had to look around, and eventually found some people with a truck. To take that further, I would say we can reasonably assume that the truck and the people were real, and didn't just pop into existence 5 minute before your friend showed up. So even if events were somehow guided by the hand of God, these people with the truck presumably had some reason of their own for being there which, while perhaps unlikely, would not be completely outside the realm of possibility in a God-less world. Now you say they weren't delivering, and that there weren't any watermelons growing locally, but somehow, even if it was with a little help from God, those watermelons came to be there. So I think we'd have to know exactly what happened from the truckdrivers' perspective, and only once in full possession of the facts could we make a decent judgement of how likely it would be without divine intervention. That said...

Not working in the produce industry myself, I'm largely unfamiliar with the migratory patterns of large fruit, but I do know that watermelons exist, and I do know that trucks exist, and I do know that one can often be seen carrying the other. No new science is needed to explain a chance encounter with watermelons, and even without God, the probability is going to be greater than zero. On the other hand, I don't know if God exists, or even if it's possible for God to exist given the laws of the universe. I can add God to my explanation of watermelons, but what am I really gaining? I've taken something that I can understand, and turned it into something I can't possibly understand. I've made things worse! Until you can actually say, with data, "coincidences happen more often than they should", there's simply no reason to defy Occam.

 

Or just as often, a Christian looks at all the negative aspects of life, and says that God is punishing everyone for not following a bunch of old books filled with barbaric rules and stories.

Whatever universe we evolved in is obviously going to look beautiful to us because it wouldn't make evolutionary sense for us to hate our own habitat. It's a simple application of the weak anthropic principal. Of course evolution is a constant struggle, so there will also be some things that look horrible; these are to be expected in a world without God, and we can do our best as a species to make things better for ourselves. If there is a God, however, then all the horrible things don't make nearly so much sense.

 

I am an Agnostic but regardless...why would you think just because a person doesn't believe in GOD or in my case does not believe people can yet understand what our reality is....that such a person would see only negative aspects of life?

In my experiences it is always those who are Highly Religious that are professing Doom and Gloom.

AboveAlpha

 

The non-religious don't argue that there can't be a god because of the evils in the world, they're arguing that since a fair distribution of both goods and evils exists, marking the good ones but ignoring the bad ones is a faulty argument.

Since a non-religious person has no preference for which god to argue against, he must consider an evil god as well as a good one. The problem of evil does nothing to disprove such a god, so it clearly isn't in itself an argument against the concept of god. However, it shows that the argument that "the world is beautiful so there is a god" is inconsistent. As usual, the non-religious cannot mathematically disprove the idea of a god, but it can show that most or all of the arguments don't affect the likelihood of there being a god, leaving the religious sides with nothing but an assertion similar to that of the Russell teapot.

 

I have always assumed that the drivers could have given a more detailed explanation. I'm not suggesting that the men were angels,and that they and the watermelons just 'poofed' into existence magically,so to speak.

You have to consider that a truck load of watermelons as I described,(off season,not being delivered,not possibly locally grown unless an indoor system) - this is not a common item such as a person with a pack of smokes coming along right when you are craving one, or a person with extra change on them when you are short a quarter for the parking meter.

The timing.

The timing is the main thing. The only thing that can't be explained unless you call it a coincidence. Being that you don't believe in God,this really is your only choice. For that matter, I would say that getting more information from the delivery men would be somewhat pointless.

You say you don't know if a God exists, that adding that to your list of explanations would make matters worse.I don't see how.What you would be doing is simply entertaining an interesting idea or observation,but not necessarily a coincidence, as opposed to your definitive conclusion.

 

If you actually would like to know something about how others think, rather than just posting as a way to express your rather ugly and bigoted ideas, it would be helpful for you to quit making up things about others.

Do you do it on purpose, knowing that false witnessing and calumny are
against the rules of your religion, or do you actually not even know what you are doing?

Which is it?

 

This may seem a bit harsh but it's not meant to be, it's only meant to illustrate a point. 9,000,000 children die every year before they reach the age of five. That’s 24,000 children a day, a 1,000 an hour and about 17 or so a minute. What kind of miracle is it for God to have a truck full of watermelon appear for your friend’s wife when a number of children will starve to death on that same day? To me this kind of faith is the perfection of narssacism. God loves me don't ya know? He found watermelon for my dying wife. Given all that God does not accomplish in the lives of others, given the suffering some child is experiencing at this instant, this kind of faith is obscene. To think in this way is to fail to reason honestly or care sufficiently about the suffering of others.

The universe is full of incalculable variables, using the story in the OP for reference, for every guy who finds a truck full of watermelon many more do not. It may seem like a miracle but it should be considered more tragic than anything that it doesn’t happen more often so as to not seem like a miracle.

 

There is no point in stacking the numbers of all the starving people in the world unless you are going to stack them against those that are not starving. No reason to count the number of children that die unless you count the number of children that live. Your bottom line is not harsh, but is no different than saying that if one,single person in this world receives a miracle, it is unfair.

This is not the case. First of all, the man probably did ask God why his wife was dying in the first place,but does this take away that he made an observation and was thankful for it ? No. Is it narcissism that he,and most of us do ask why God would help us out and not others ? No. You are describing a narcissistic believer. You might want to compare them to narcissistic non-believers.

 

Ok, so what's wrong with saying it's a coincidence? There are 7 billion people in the world, and every one of them is involved in countless experiences every single day. And not only that, but people are very, very good at finding patterns, even if they one's they find aren't always based in fact (hence all the various superstitions, good luck charms, etc. that people believe in). So I would put it to you that it would be incredibly weird - perhaps even miraculously weird - if you there weren't stories of coincidences such as the one that you described.=

But OK, let's go with the divine intervention scenario for a moment. You acknowledge that the truck drivers probably weren't angels, so we're dealing with some ordinary folk who are only worth mentioning because of the watermelons they happened to have. You say that timing was critical, so my question for you would be "How did God influence the timing to work so perfectly?" Assuming he's not messing with peoples' free will, he would have somehow had to arrange things so that they had to stop when they did, and so that they couldn't have left any sooner, but assuming he doesn't want to inconvenience thousands of people by causing a traffic jam or something, just for the one miracle, then I continue to maintain that most of the elements of the coincidence already had to be there before God's involvement. Maybe he could have done something to slow them down by half an hour, but if that's the extent of his involvement, then for the most part it really is all random chance. If it's reasonable that all the necessary elements might converge within a half-hour window, why is it so much harder to believe that they might all converge within the five minute window needed for the so-called miracle?

You see it's not enough to just say, "well it would be more likely if there were a God", because you aren't accounting for the likelihood of a God existing in the first place. If I might make an analogy, suppose I roll some dice, and get double-sixes. "Well", I might say, "that's awfully unlikely." But then I think, "But wait! If these dice are weighted, it wouldn't be unlikely at all!" And I'd be absolutely right. Where I'd go wrong though, would be going on to conclude "Therefore these dice are weighted!". Sure, the double-sixes are more likely with weighted dice, but it's also true that dice weighted in that way are very rare compared to everyday, perfectly fair dice, and so on the whole, it's still far, far more likely that the roll was the result of nothing more than random chance. Now I'll acknowledge that this analogy has a weakness in that I don't know of any objective way to measure how likely the existence of a God is, but I hope you won't completely dismiss the main point, which is that by adding assumptions to try and explain something (such as, "these dice are weighted"), you might introduce other complications (such as, "well how did these weighted dice even get here?", or "how does an all powerful deity that we can't ever verify fit into everything else that we know to be true about the world?").

 

This is the totality of your position.

 

I know, but it's fun to explore. You are correct.

 

I see no connection between the woman's need for watermelon and the truck full of watermelons in a season that this fruit is not found in the market. I see no connection at all to justify the coincidence.

As a skeptic I must recognize that something out of the common happened that day.

So, I think that you might not be wrong at all if you think and feel that God allowed for that event to happen.

 

Quality, not quantity.

Sure many people look for patterns and have experiences everyday but I'm talking about something that you don't have to look for,something that smacks you in the face and puts the wonder into you naturally.That is when It becomes an observation and after something like that happens to you (us/anyone) I would say that definitively calling it a random coincidence is automatically ruling out a possibility of an intelligent,or guided one.

Too many assumptions.

First, I can't assume he is or isn't "messing" with anyone's freewill.I believe in freewill until I don't. After that, I would think that God's influence has a long reach - i.e - can put thoughts into people's heads. That is all it really takes. That is how I see the timing of a miracle working out "perfectly."

Well I certainly agree that in your analogy, the guy jumped the gun making a definitive conclusion based on those odds but It's not enough to ask, what are the chances,conclude that there is a chance, therefore that is the answer. We have to judge the quality of the coincidence.

By your logic of simplifying my story and breaking it down to two guys that "just happened to have watermelons" and moving a timeline from a half hour to five minutes etc... to show how close that a miracle isn't really needed to explain it, -is just that, a reduction in the story.

For example, hypothetically, lets say that I prayed for a strange man with a surfboard to show up at my house tomorrow and ask me If I could make him a strawberry milkshake,and it happened. By your logic, well, people do pray, some people get what they ask for even if it's just a coincidence, men with surfboards do exist and some of them do like milkshakes. Is there a logical possibility that this could happen,sure, if it did happen, there was a 100% chance that it would.I think we have to look at the quality of the coincident to judge it, does it resemble something random or something intelligent [?]