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http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2870085.html?menu=
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2032591/Woman-comes-back-to-life-after-being-dead-for-17-hours.html

Another article I read about this stated that rigor had already begun to set in, hence the stiffening of the skin and curling of the fingers and toes as the telegraph article mentions.  They say permanent brain damage happens after 4 minutes without oxygen, and yet after 17 hours with no measurable brain activity, this woman awoke, was cognitive, and asked for her son.  I've heard of people surviving around 20 minutes to an hour or so in freezing cold water from induced hypothermia, but 17 hours and with rigor setting in... this is akin to Lazarus walking out of his tomb.  Would you say this qualifies as evidence of the miraculous?  That's what the doctors are saying about it at least.  What do you think?

This will be considered simply a Medical Mystery (WOOOOooooOOOooooOOOoo).

It will be considered as that until god comes down from heaven while playing an epic and massive riff with a 10 chord guitar WHILE farting on the face of Stephen Hawkings.

Actually I think it would be something more like telling Hawking "Get out of your chair, walk, and speak correctly", and then Hawking doing so.  That would be a win-win for everyone I think, no?

That's pretty impressive, seems like her time hasnt come yet.

No, you guys don't get it! This is actually just the first victim of the Zombie Viral Outbreak!

Seriously though, this is pretty amazing, there's no denying that. From what little information is given though, I'd be hesitant to say that it's a bonafide miracle. There is simply too much that we don't know about ourselves and how our body really works. Doctor's aren't exempt from this ignorance either, even if they'd like everyone to believe they are all knowing.

That is just amazing. This woman could teach David Blaine a thing or two :ninja:

There are many things that science cannot yet explain, Whether this is divine intervention is impossible to say, but anything like this that leaves people scratching their heads can only ever be a good thing.

As for Hawking, the best bit for me would be if God came down, cured him and then said "By The Way, Keep Up The Good Work." That really would be a win-win situation. Science and religion could then truly co-exist :doom_thumb:

I think science and religion can coexist fine when they both do the job they're meant to do.  It's when religion tries to replace science and when science acts like a religion that there's a problem.  I'll cite two examples, one from each camp.  First, the Creation Museum.  Throwing perfectly good factual information out the window and trying to conform the facts to fit Young Earth Creationism (the idea that the earth is literally 6,000 years old) is not going to score points with the science crowd.  Second example is attempts to prove God does not exist.  I've not read Dawkins, but you get the general idea the kind of works I'm referring to.  When science loses its dispassionate objectivity it stops being a pursuit of fact, and attempting to disprove a being on the level of an almighty God based on the limited knowledge available to a species that has not even left the solar system is the apex of arrogance and ignorance intertwined.  Besides, you'll not convince anyone at the Creation Museum that God doesn't exist so why are you wasting your time?

That's not to say evidence and data from one area cannot be useful in another.  The spiritual can be a guide people of scientific mind, and science can help demystify the universe.  Consider ethics within medicine, and scientific research.  Why is there an ethical and moral debate about cloning and the use of embryos for certain kinds of research?  Precisely because there are people with religious convictions who are concerned about the sanctity of life not because man says it is good or bad, but because they believe someone with a higher authority than man has set down certain rules of conduct.  Thus, religious ethics and morals can act as a check, restraining certain scientific endeavors and making sure that care is taken.  In addition, religion can provide an explanation for things that science cannot grasp, or for events that cannot be explained scientifically.  On the other side, science, in describing the physical universe more accurately, removes a lot of superstition and misunderstanding of illness and the causative effects of forces in the universe.  Things once attributed to the wrath of an angry God can now be understood the be simply the result of certain forces of nature.  By understanding the physical you can also better understand the Creator through the process of discovery.

Science focuses on the physical as it can explain the physical, and religion focuses on the spiritual as it can explain the spiritual.  One cannot explain the realm of the other, though if both are real then there will undoubtedly be overlapping of the two observed at times, which is commonly called the supernatural.  I think science when properly applied, and spirituality when properly applied, work to complement each others' understanding and act as a restraint against the worst aspects of the other.  The Pope once pointed to Faith and Reason as the two wings that lift up the Church.  I think that is a wise point of view.  A bird with one wing cannot fly, and even more so, if the wings are not balanced he will spiral and plummet to his death.  Take away reason and faith becomes fanaticism, and the passion of faith becomes an inferno of intolerance which has born many a victim to their grave at the point of a sword.  Take away faith and reason becomes cold and corrupt and can rationalize the worst kinds of atrocities born from apathy since it is not longer answerable to any higher authority, it being the only authority in its mind and thus justified in anything it chooses.  Take away both faith and reason and you are left with madness, which I'm sad to say that I see in abundance on both sides.

I, too, think that it's important to keep both science and religion side by side.

Religion, besides explaining spiritual phenomenons, has a very important role in societies: they help define what's morally correct or incorrect. This is why, like Pho said, Religion restrains Science, because it reminds her of what's correct and of what's not correct.

Well that's not entierly true religion also causes some religious fanatics to do what's moraly wrong, maybe its not the religions fault but the ppls who interpret it wrong.

The weak stitch in any moral fabric: humans.

I have expressed my discomfort at Creationism (and religious fanaticism in general) on these boards before, but what cracks me up about those who have completely rejected religion is that they refer to themselves as "free thinkers". I'm sorry, but the very idea of forcing everyone to abandon their faith is not free thought. My faith (and trust me, it is there) is my business. I'm not about to have some idiot with a couple of pounds of gelignite strapped to his arse tell me what to think, let alone a load of bearded boffins who think the solution to global poverty is to wipe everyone out with airborne ebola. It seems that one side is as bad as the other.

BTW Myself, I'm in the "No" camp regarding cloning. I don't subscribe to any organized religion, but I still have my beliefs, and I feel that mankind really has attained a level of power that he is not yet ready for. The ability to both create and destroy life artificially scares the shit out of me, frankly. We are not gods, yet as a race we strive to become so. We have learned to communicate, we have discovered much about the universe, we have cured diseases, yet we have massacred and enslaved millions of our own kind.

"Now we're all sons of bitches." - Ken Bainbridge, director of the first successful atomic bomb test

Depends on what the religion says, but that's why reason is necessary to restrain religion.  The Inquisition is an example of religion gone horribly wrong when reason was completely abandoned or at best perverted.  Jihad is another example of unquestioned following of a religious doctrine.  Fanatics may often say "who are you to question God?"  How does one know if it really is God that you are questioning?  I'm reminded of a simple question posed by James T. Kirk:  "What does God need with a starship?"

I guess what we should ask fanatics would be "Why does god need you to do X*?"

*X of course being whatever they insist is their holy charge

God does work in mysterious ways... :P

That's why Science and Religion must work together: Both influence each other. If Science goes extreme, Religion has the obligation to put an end to that, but this also works the other way around. This symbioses maintains the balance between the two of them.

What about when religions possess a sense of morality that can't or simply doesn't work for everyone? I would be hesitant to think of any religion as moral police, seeing as no one can quite pin down any specific path that everyone will agree with.

So, both science and religion are hereby placed in a framework of some kind. Within it, balance in important and cooperation appears to be foremost of the desirables. A (rather difficult) question to ask here is: what is the nature (or language) of that framework? Is it a religious, or more of a scientific contextual frame? My opinion is: the claim that science and religion must cooperate is itself made defensible by choosing this 'outer' framework, which is perhaps 'religious', perhaps neither religious nor scientific, but in any case not scientific..

Perhaps this framework transcends science and religion, or at least, is inclusive of both as part of a greater whole.  If you look at science and religion as studying the same reality, but where science is "bottom-up" and religion is "top-down" as far as approach is concerned, you're looking at one side or another side of the same coin.  The whole coin is impossible to view in its entirety.  It must be turned over or else viewed on its edge, but the whole can never be directly observed simultaneously.  The coin itself is unchanged, merely one's perspective of it changes depending on which side they're examining at the time, and if they accept what they are observing as true, assuming their observations are not made in error of course.

I see science and religion as the same thing.  All of science and math is based on axioms, otherwise known as assumptions.  Both require faith, but "different" kinds of faith.  However, all of these words are "relative".  Religion requires faith in perceptions other than physical.  Science requires faith in only the physical perceptions.  Neither is proven, both are entirely relative to the individual.

One way I try to explain this to other people, and hopefully open up their minds, is to say, if we have an infinitely long equation, or infinitely long series of infinitely long equations, if even one variable is unknown, then we do not know the true value.  For each "thing" in existence, we only have a tiny (null in respect to an infinite universe or infinite nothingness "outside" of existence) understanding of it.  We think that something is either true or false, while missing (inf - k) of the equation.  In an absolute perspective, in order to know even one thing in existence to be absolutely true, we must know everything else -- even one missing variable could dramatically affect the end truth value. 

This is very interesting to me, because if you think about it, we have a thought process to determine whether something is true or false.  Imagine being an absolute being and just knowing without any requirement for logical deduction.  However, it is also my view that humans are unfit to use logic, and should only be used by an "absolute" being; yet an absolute being would have no use for it.  Humans assume the truth values of everything -- perceptions, our reasoning process, the basis on which we even "begin" thinking.  Logic, as we have defined it, dictates that nothing can be proven based on an assumption, otherwise we could make statements like "The sky is made of walruses" and require no proof -- it would simply be true.

Yet this method of reasoning is more sound that any other.  Any method of human reasoning, since it based on assumptions, has a hole in it -- even this statement, and this one, etc.  Every thing in existence, if thought about hard enough, opens the door for an infinite paradox.  So the best, most infallible arguments are those of either infinite length (to cover all holes in human logic) or ones that never happened.

To expand upon the idea of paradoxes, think about this:
If human reasoning does have its basis in assumptions, then human reasoning results in unknown truth values.  By that reasoning, human reasoning is illogical; however, these statements are based on human reasoning, so they too must be illogical -- and so on, and so on, etc, etc -- infinite paradox.

And this is the thing so many people fail to realize when they make their pigheaded statements.  People are dumb, plain and simple.  We are hypocrites, we contradict ourselves the moment we open our mouths, and we are blind to it.  This is under the law of logic.

Under faith and understanding and belief in faith, we are no longer subject to this, since we recognize all of our knowledge as faith and no longer have to prove it to the harsh god, logic.

All we have are relative truths, so I don't like it when I hear atheists attacking peoples of "faith", when atheists have a "god" and set of unproven beliefs just like anyone else.  Their god, logic, is so blatantly attacking their very beliefs, but they don't see it.  But I guess you could say their god might be "relative logic", and they deny the existence of "absolute logic" as part of their beliefs.

The same is true for "religions".  They cannot attack atheists for their beliefs.  My belief is that people need to stop attacking each other's beliefs, and understand that no matter how much something seems to be "factual" (atheists) it is still entirely up to one's perception and reasoning process that make it so.

I'm biased, though.  I tend to be very harsh on atheists attacking a person's beliefs than I am on a religious person attacking an atheist.  I see atheists who attack religions as "more" hypocritical.  That is a relative term, and from an absolute perceptive, they are both hypocritical.  But I am one of those dumb humans, and I am willing to admit I know nothing.  When someone thinks they known something, then their argument is based on their relative understanding.  One can use the argument that their "facts" are based on assumptions.  This will result in them yielding either way if they are not pigheaded.  #1: the "fact" that their "facts" are based on assumptions shows that their "facts" aren't factual.  #2: they see the "fact" of #1 and use it against the argument, but they can only do this if they assume #1 to be true, thereby nullifying both arguments, and again yielding unknown truth values.  So we all know nothing at all... even this statement we don't know if it is true or not, so we don't even know whether we don't know anything...

hehe geez this topic surley de-railed quite good.. Either way you see it, humans are stupid as long as there are power hungry ppls we will always have war. However id like before my days are over, to see a long lasting peace.

Logic is useful from a practical sense, and logic should be practical in its application.  Logic works so long as the process produces the expected result repeatedly.  The basis of mathematics and all other "hard" sciences is repeatability and rational outcome.  Yes, there is assumption, but so long as the results remain consistent over time then the assumptions and the logic based upon them are useful.  For example, gravity.  Things fall to the earth.  We can observe this.  The longer we observe it, the more comfortable we are with the principle as being fairly constant.  Mathematics, physics, and chemistry rely on predictable rules in order to function, otherwise technology could not function, and nor could biology either since biology functions based on these same principles.

Where you get into trouble is making the assumption that because the rules are one way here, that this is the only set of rules, and that the rules cannot ever be different elsewhere or at a different time.  Man tries his best to describe and explain the universe with the tools he has available, but the dangerous trap to fall into is expecting that because some aspects of the universe can be described and explained with logic that all aspects must be explainable, and more so, explainable in the same manner.  One rejects the possibility of irrationality and paradox being part of existence.  Thus, when confronted with a paradox or some other irrational quality, the tendency is to reject it out of hand since it does not fall within one's expectations.  Occam's Razor is commonly cited as a means to dismiss all but the ordinary and easily observable.  Man's mistake, and it stems from his arrogance, is in assuming that the universe must play by his rules.  Why should it?

To bring the topic full circle, dismissing specific events as miraculous is one thing.  Dismissing the possibility of the miraculous has quite different implications.

That's exactly "right".  Your top paragraph describes what I am talking about.  When I have discussions like this I try not to take a relative perspective, but also yield that at least in some way I must be since I am human.  The point I was making is that "repeatability" in respect to either an infinite universe or infinite "non-existence" "outside" of existence is absolutely worthless.  If I asked you will there be gravity tomorrow, you would almost certainly say that there would, but in fact you have no absolute basis for this, only relative observation of your tiny (again, in respect to the universe, time, non-existence) life span.  And, even if we made it a closed set, it would still require proof that your observations in the past were correct.  So, yes, it is a prediction, but in respect to any absolute it is absolutely worthless and unproven.

So it doesn't just apply to future, but current and past as well.  If I ask you right now if there is gravity, how do you know that there is?  The only response any person has to this is either demonstration or simply saying, "because there is".  It also doesn't break only in respect to an absolute, it also breaks in respect to any perspective other than your own.  If we are at a table, and you see an apple on the table, is the apple there?  I say it isn't, and you cannot prove yourself to be right nor can you prove me to be wrong.  This is the problem with man's reasoning.

So, yes, this is "impractical", but "impractical" is a nice little word man made to escape from these situations.  We do it with everything we cannot really understand or would make us think too much such as "infinite", "nothing", "always", "never", etc.

I think what humans need to do is better define certain words, because maybe science is "rational", but it certainly isn't logical.  The deduction with a closed set of data is logical, but the basis and means of obtaining the data are unfounded.  It is exactly the same as saying, "There is a god" or "There isn't a god".  No proof, and it is beyond us to prove it.  "True == not false", "a == a", etc.  These are the grounds for most human reasoning, and they are completely unproven.

I believe what you were saying in your post is that this kind of reasoning is sort of pointless, and in some ways it is.  I bring it up in discussions of religion and science to point out that from a scientific perspective, it is pointless, but why would it be pointless?  Because this reasoning specifically destroys any foundation for science, and therefore it is scientifically "pointless".

From a "rational", "practical" perspective, it serves no purpose.  From a "philosophical" perspective (I don't like that word, but for lack of a better one...) it is very, very important for people to think about.  I'm not saying people should think this way all of their waking moments, but just at least once in a while stop and think.  And when you think the absurdities of this mess of human reasoning, your mind opens more to other possibilities.  I'm not really directing this at you, Pho, or anyone I have in mind, just to the people of the world who aren't even reading this :)

I like your discussion on rules, and I used something similar several years ago when I was discussing things with a few atheists.

We we are the chess pieces on the board, we do not make the rules, we are bound by them.  Now, that isn't a very good metaphor, but loosely sums up a few hours of discussion.  Humans like to understand things, and we do not like to be in a free fall (from an absolute perspective, the zero amount of data humans have could literally result in not even knowing whether there was ground beneath your feet).  We are built the way we are to exist and to function as best as we can.  We are built in a way that we have to work hard to discover the inner workings of the universe, but as you said, how can we think that our pathetic understanding of anything is correct or would apply to anything else.

This is a rudimentary counter to any attempt to prove there is no god or disprove his existence:
If we assume that we know EVERYTHING in existence, every bit of data, and
If we are not gods,
Then how can we even begin to attempt to try to disprove a being who "exist" outside of existence in ways we cannot even begin to grasp.

Now there are gods that didn't create existence, didn't create time, that weren't always in existence, but I am talking about trying to disprove gods that always were.  So in debating with people, I could actually say god doesn't "exist" because he doesn't "exist" as some "creature" of this universe.  Does it mean that he doesn't have an absolute power over what he created?

If we are playing chess, we reach our hands to the pieces and move them as we will, but we setup rules for how the game works, rules which we choose to obey.  I could easily just grab the opposing player's king, and he could just say, "the king is pointless, you have to take my queen", and run away with it.

Now, I believe we have freewill.  So the chess board metaphor has flaws in it, but it gives you the gist of the idea.  We have freewill because we have choices, but I believe there is at least one absolute -- whether it be that the universe, or time, or nonexistence, or any other infinite (nonexistence is infinitely "nothing").  So our lives are done already, but our choices were made.  You can put everything in past tense, and it allows there to still be freewill within a life that is already known in respect to an absolute.

The disproof of anything lies in it.  It is a big mess.  As you said, man likes to apply his rules and his arrogance in attempting to refute something.  Even from existence, you can say that there may be existence other than that which we can perceive.  What if there existed a being, just like you and me, not a god, but he existed in another dimension of existence, one which we cannot perceive.  Does he exist or not?  One may argue that he doesn't exist to us, but how do our rules affect him?  He still exists, and we may not exist to him (depending on whether he can perceive or act in our realm of existence).

It is just so stupid, and it really baffles me how dumb people can be.  They cannot see the tiny, minuscule box they are cramming themselves into then trying to force everyone and everything into that box.  Why do we do this?  Man likes to understand things.  And instead of opening our minds to things which we will never understand, we'd rather dismiss it.  We like to understand things, we like to learn, but we outright refuse to "allow" into existence anything that we cannot understand.  We can see the effects, but we will never know the causes, so we dismiss it.  Idiots.

I ramble a lot :)