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[Trooper Lord]

Is there a sect of Christianity that follows the teachings of God/Jesus in a metaphorical sense?

I've never been religious, but I truly believe that Christianity has the best morals, and I'd love to be a part of it, but I'm just too much of a skeptic for the "faith" part. Is there any sect/group that believes in moral teachings of Christianity in a metaphorical sense?

[Dillardo]

There may be, but it certainly doesn't fit "Christianity". Jesus did not want to establish "religion". The Bible, if read as a whole, is a history of man's relationship with God. It started as God intended, and man chose something else by sinning. Because man chose not to trust and obey God, we could not continue in relationship with God in the same way. The rest of the Bible is God's pursuit of us, constantly giving us new information and redirecting us towards His will for us. All throughout the old testament, God would show the Jewish people what they were doing wrong, prompting them to change (or often, kill the messenger/prophet because they didn't want to hear what God was saying through the prophet). They would change a little, and soon after slip right back into some other bastardization of what God had intended for them. The entire OT is full of people trying to "earn" favor/blessing/salvation through God. He constantly showed that He was not pleased with what they were doing, and would tell them of a messiah he was sending to pay for them.

Jesus was this messiah, and most of what he taught was a counter to what the Jews in his time were teaching/believing. If you look, many of his teachings are in direct opposition to what the Pharisees were doing. Many of his parables included a figure meant to represent the Jews, and another figure that was meant to represent God's desire for man. His teachings, sayings, and parables all pointed to the desire of God. They were meant to teach people what God really wants, and they all pointed to following Jesus in order to have a loving relationship with God.

Jesus came to teach us how to love people, how to be humble, how to serve, how to give, and how to love God with all your heart (the first commandment). He became a sacrifice for our sins. People read the OT and think it means you have to follow all these rules in order to be saved from their sins, which is impossible. God even says over and over that no person has lived without sin. Jesus was the only one, and because he was able to do so, he was able to pay the debt for every person who has ever lived. The only requirement is that you believe that Jesus did this for you (which seems to be the exact piece you are trying to omit). When you choose to believe this, you follow Christ. You "die to yourself" and choose to operate out of faith. I don't see how you can do this without faith.

If you look at Adam and Eve, and Christ, it creates a circle. Adam and Eve were created without sin, and were perfectly holy. Genesis says that they had a daily walk with God and conversed with Him. They had the relationship with God that God designed us for. Then, when tempted, they played with the idea of choosing their own understanding over God's. God had told them that if they would eat the fruit of the tree, they would surely die. Satan deceived Eve, saying that they wouldn't die, but it would make them equal to God. Eve chose to rely on her own understanding rather than God's, and sin entered the world. Jesus lived his entire life without sin, and offers salvation (which is the direct opposite of what satan offered Eve). Now, we have the ability to enter into heaven, through Christ, but we have to rely on His word rather than our own beliefs. Adam and Eve were holy and sinless, and chose to believe in themselves over God, which created sin. We are sinful and cannot achieve holiness, but by choosing to believe in Jesus over ourselves, He will make us holy and sinless.

I know this is a long explanation, but it is important because Christianity (a word invented long after Jesus' ministry) is not a "religion" as a system. It is not a list of rituals and practices to bring blessing or salvation or anything. Jesus does not promise blessing, in fact He promises suffering for following Him. His teachings are not just good advice that will give you a pleasant life or purify you. He came to get us to stop trying to earn our way into heaven/God's love. He came to show that God (Father, Holy Spirit, Jesus) loves us equally whether we do good or bad in His sight. He basically said that all that matters is that we love each other, we love God, and that we follow Him, and taught us what all of that looks like. Then He paid for our sins by dying and was resurrected, which was His way of showing us that we don't need to keep trying to earn salvation. He did every thing He could to give us our salvation. He told us exactly what to do with our lives, then He died and was resurrected so we would know that we are clean through Him, the He gave us His Holy Spirit who comforts, empowers, convicts, etc. us so we don't have to rely on our own understanding, and then said "go out and do it".

[jimwalton]

I'm not aware of a sect that believes in moral teachings of Christianity in a metaphorical sense. Jesus used lots of different literary forms (simile, parables, metaphors, hyperbole, and others), and we have to interpret what he said by the appropriate literary forms. And, of course, sometimes he meant what he directly said. But I'm not aware of a sect that believes that all the moral teachings of Christianity are metaphorical.

You seem to be skeptical about the "faith" part, though. Perhaps you're not thinking of faith correctly. Many people today seem to think it's "believing without evidence" or "believing against evidence" or even "believing things that don't make sense." But the biblical concept of faith is none of those. The Bible doesn't imply that faith is blind. In the Bible, faith is evidentiary. I define Biblical faith as "making an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make that assumption reasonable." In my opinion, belief is always a choice, and is always based on evidence. When you sit down in a chair, you didn’t think twice about sitting down. You believe that the chair will hold you. Faith? Yes. You’ve sat in chairs hundreds of times, but you can't be absolutely sure it will hold you this time. Things do break on occasion. But you make an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable for you to make that assumption, and you sit down. That’s faith, and it was a conscious choice.

Almost all of life works this way because we can never know what lies ahead. Every time you turn a door knob you are expressing faith. Because 10,000 times you’ve turned a door knob, and it opened the door. So you turn the knob and move forward. Does it always work that way? No. Sometimes you turn the knob and the door doesn’t open. But you make an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable for you to make that assumption.

We know chairs hold people. That's past experience and learning. We know turning door knobs open doors. We know that when we turn a key a car starts. But every time we turn a car key, we do it because we believe it will start. The evidence is compelling, and it was a conscious choice. We don't know for sure that the car will start, and unfortunately sometimes it doesn't. Then we use our knowledge to try to figure out what to do about it. We dial our phone (as an act of faith, assuming it will work and help us reach another person), and try to get help.

You'll notice in the Bible that evidence precedes faith. God appears to Moses in a burning bush before he expect him to believe. He gave signs to take back to Pharaoh and the Israelite people, so they could see the signs before they were expected to believe. So also through the whole OT. In the NT, Jesus started off with turning water into wine, healing some people, casting out demons, and then he taught them about faith. And they couldn't possibly understand the resurrection until there was some evidence to go on. The whole Bible is God revealing himself to us all—and I mean actually, not through some exercise of faith.

My faith in God is a conscious choice because I find the evidence compelling. It's an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable for me to make that assumption. When you read the Bible, people came to Jesus to be healed because they had heard about other people who had been healed. They had seen other people whom Jesus had healed. People had heard him teach. Their faith was based on evidence. Jesus kept giving them new information, and they gained new knowledge from it. Based on that knowledge, they acted with more faith. People came to him to make requests. See how it works? My belief in God is based on my knowledge of the credibility of those writings, the logic of the teaching, and the historical evidence behind it all. The resurrection, for instance, has evidences that give it credibility that motivate me to believe in it. My faith in the resurrection is an assumption of truth based on enough evidence that makes it reasonable to hold that assumption. The same is true for my belief in the existence of God, my belief that the Bible is God's word, and my understanding of how life works.

I would contend that faith is never blind. Talk to me.

[Trooper Lord]

My problem is, it's hard for me to get behind the concept of miracles, God being all knowing and Jesus' resurrection. How can someone like me who questions everything accept that all of that is true? I'm very hard headed but if I can be convinced, I'm all for it. I've just always been skeptical.

[jimwalton]

The first step in any discussion about miracles is to define a miracle. Some philosophers say that it is an occurrence contrary to nature, but we shouldn’t be so quick to embrace that definition and then find our hands tied by our own definition. The Bible never claims that God violated the laws he himself imposed on the world. Maybe a miracle is God working with the laws of nature rather than against them, just in a different manner and on a different time scale. C.S. Lewis, for one, said that miracles were just nature on a different time continuum, like fast forward. He said water always turns to wine; it just usually takes four months instead of one second; human bodies have the capability to heal, just not instantaneously at the word of the Master. So what is a miracle?

The Cambridge Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (pg. 208) defines a miracle as "An event (ultimately) caused by God that cannot be accounted for by the natural powers of natural substances alone. Conceived of this way, miracles don’t violate the laws of nature but rather involve the occurrence of events which cannot be explained by the powers of nature alone." That’s an acceptable definition, but I would tentatively define miracle as "a supernatural exception to the regularity and predictability of the universe, and therefore it is not a common (this term needs to be interpreted) occurrence." Maybe the laws of nature speak of naturally recurring events, and miracles speak of supernaturally nonrecurring events. After all, the laws of nature are not really laws, but rather more accurately forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong field forces) and constructs (velocity, mass, energy, acceleration). Einstein's theory of relativity lets us know that velocity makes a difference in reality and can come into play in ways we are still deciphering. It’s quite possible that God has forces as yet unknown to us, and can manipulate velocity, as well as other forces, to initiate relative states.

Secondly, we should realize that science cannot prove that miracles are impossible. After all, science can only speak to what is within the purview of scientific observation and the study of nature. Anything outside of that ballpark is outside of its scope. Science can't prove to us whether entities exist outside of nature, and whether or not those entities could possibly have an influence in our natural world.

Since a miracle, by any definition, is a once only, nonrecurring event, it is outside the scope of science (which can only observe and test recurring sequences) and naturalistic evidence. Miracles can only be proven in two ways: (1) that they can be shown to be logically consistent with the physical world—the way things are, or (2) by enough corroborating, credible eyewitnesses to substantiate the claim being made.

If I put $20 in your pocket today, and then another $20 in there tomorrow, logic and reason would tell me that there will be $40 in your pocket. And of course that's true, provided that no one has meddled in your pocket. So one of the first things to establish when we discuss the possibility of miracles is to find out whether your presuppositions have ruled out all "meddling" by definition. In that case, of course miracles are impossible to prove. You have made it impossible by your arbitrary definition. The second thing to notice is that nature is full of once-only, non-recurring events, such as the cosmic blast that happened in Russia in 2013. It would be sort of foolish for a group of scientists to gather there saying, "C'mon, do it again!"

As far as the second, if you have enough trustworthy people whose eyewitness accounts corroborate with each other, even though the event may not repeat, it could be considered to be accepted as reality. Even our courts rely on such testimony as acceptable.

There is no philosophical argument or scientific experiment that conclusively disproves the possibility of miracles. Scientifically speaking, the odds of certain miracles occurring (such as the resurrection) may be infinity to one, but theologically speaking they are x:x (unknown to unknown). Miracles are outside of the scope of probability calculations. But realistically, the question is not so much “Can they occur?” but “Do they occur?” Anyone will admit that scientists exclude the miraculous from their scientific work, which they are entitled to do. But that’s because if a scientist tried to offer a miraculous explanation for something, he or she would no longer be doing science, but something else, like theology or philosophy. Miracles are inadmissible as scientific evidence because they are unpredictable, not able to be compared with a control group, and unrepeatable for confirmatory studies.

Ultimately you are asking the wrong question of the wrong discipline. Science can really only work in a uniform environment that is predictable, repeatable, and (in this situation) controllable (a control group and an experimental group). Evidentiary demands require some sort of material remains that allow a phenomenon to be studied, but this requirement is outside of the sphere of what we mean by “miracle.” Miracles are not predictable (so the situation can’t be intentionally studied before the event), reproducible (so the situation can’t be tested again to confirm hypotheses), nor controllable (cannot isolate causal mechanisms).

Science is appropriate when dealing with repeatable (reproducible) phenomena that can be studied under controlled conditions and give confirmatory results. One time events that were not predictable and don’t leave behind any material evidence can’t possibly fall under that category. Suppose you had a sneezing fit a few weeks back. I want you to quantify it and analyze it, or better yet, prove to me that it happened. That's not possible, Should I then assume you never sneeze, never sneezed, and that you’re wrong until you can prove it? What evidence do you have that you had a sneezing fit? Or walked around the mall last month? Or saw a catamount? We have to use the proper measure for the proper category. And science is not the proper measure for understanding or proving miracles. Even in the area of astronomy, for instance, where some phenomena are one-time only events, to study them scientifically requires multiple repeatable examples that can be observed and compared/contrasted. Again, miracles don’t fall into this category.

In short, the bottom line is that knowledge is not one-dimensional. The methods of evidentiary scientific study are not applicable to much of our knowledge, including the occasion of miracles. Attempting to extend scientific evidence as the grounds of all knowledge is doomed to failure in many arenas, not just this one. To presume that anything remaining outside of science’s scope fails to qualify as knowledge is not justified by science or any other argument, and is, in fact, self-contradictory.

Can anyone prove that a once-only nonrecurring event is a miracle from God or not? No, because either way it’s an interpretation of what one has seen or experienced. We all decide based on what we determine to be consistent with our understanding of the world and the evidences on which we build those understandings.

Let’s talk a little bit about Newtonian physics and miracles. People’s main problem with miracles is that they mess with what people know about science, while at the same time requiring them (if accepted) to subscribe to metaphysical realities like spirits and spiritual forces. But if we are honest philosophers and scientists, we have to be open to reputable questions (as any scientist would ask): Why can’t the causal continuum be interfered with by supernatural and transcendent powers? Why are miracles necessarily incompatible with modern science? A little probing will reveal that they are not. They are only incompatible if it can be proved that nature is a closed continuum of cause and effect, and closed to any intervention from outside that continuum. Classical (Newtonian) science is nowhere near sufficient for anti-interventionism. Newton himself believed that the laws he observed reflected the nature of what God had created. According to Newton, natural law describes how the world works when, or provided that, the world is a closed system, subject to no meddling. The Newtonian laws of physics only apply to isolated or closed systems, but there is nothing in them to say there is or can be no God who can intervene in such a system to make change to the matter or energy in question. Furthermore, it is not part of Newtonian mechanics or classical science generally to declare that the material universe is a closed system— because that claim isn’t scientific, but theological, philosophical, or metaphysical. The laws don’t tell us how things have to go, or even how they always go, but only how they go when no outside agency acts on them.

Interestingly, quantum mechanics offers even less of a problem for special divine action than classical science, since quantum mechanics is characterized by (among other things) indeterminism: a spectrum of probabilities to the possible outcomes. Quantum mechanics doesn’t by necessity prohibit any answers to prayer, raising the dead, or walking on the water.

Looking at miracles even another way, it’s absurd to think that everything must be subject to scientific proof and evidence, and miracles are in that category as well. We are wrong even to think that miracles should be or can be subject to scientific inquiry. There are thousands of things we know that are not subject to scientific proof (as critics want miracles to be): I like apple pie, I forgive you, I felt chilly yesterday, I saw a beautiful sunset five days ago, Bill is my friend, that wasn’t fair, I’m in love with Denise, I’m afraid of heights, my favorite movie is “Gladiator,” I feel at peace with myself. There are millions of these. We’re just in the wrong arena to think that we can use science to prove these things. There are also things that exist, that are coherent, but not scientific: peace, justice, love, memory, reason, values, to name a few. There are disciplines that have nothing to do with science, but they are still legitimate ways to know things: jurisprudence, economics, history, literature, politics, art, philosophy, logic, and theology. As it turns out, probably most of what we know is not subject to scientific verification, nor can it be considered scientific knowledge. Miracles also fall into this category. It is both illogical and unreasonable to apply scientific reason or necessity to the possibility or veracity of miracles. While we can bring some scientific thinking to bear as we evaluate them, they are just as much outside of the purview of science as "I forgive you."