No it isn't. People always seem to clump together atheism and stupid nihilist philosophies.
Being fair, most atheists I have met are not nihilists. However, nihilism truly is more prevalent among those who deny the existence of God than among religious believers. Further, being a logically consistent atheist would normally
require one to be a nihilist. Actually, come to think of it, I'm wrong about that. There's no requirement to be anything. Nihilism would be the most honest thing to do, but there's no grand metaphysical value of being "honest" either, so one could be logically inconsistent as an atheist and
not be a nihilist and it wouldn't matter, because there is no "mattering" in the atheist universe.
I actually agree with you here, kaneda. I think the poster was aiming for a level of sentimentality and using the word "miracle" to express this. I myself would point to other things.
For instance, many supernatural things have happened in my family. When my mother was a child, she and her family were at a family reunion. My aunt was a child. She was on top of a very tall structure, I think a swing or something, and fell. End of story, right? Wrong. You have no reason to believe what I'm about to say is true, and if nobody here does, that's completely understandable. After all, I'm am just a kid posting on the internet, so take this with a grain of salt if you wish. I say this with utmost honesty in my heart. My aunt fell,
floated in midair, levitated sideways, and was gently placed on the ground. The entire extended family witnessed it. It was quite an event...
Now, one could conceivably conjure up some freak reason, such as a temporary rift in gravity caused by a strange lack of gravitons in the area, a mass hallucination in the family, or whatever. I personally, believing in the honesty of my family members, believe that the word
miracle best describes this.
That's just one example. There have been other things happening, too. Three people in my family have received visions from God. I wouldn't call that a miracle or even use it as any kind of proof of Christianity (people from other religions have visions), but I believe it is part of God's interaction in the lives of the people I know.
Another example. The man who led a Bible study I used to attend. When he was a teenager, he got to the point where he tried to kill himself. And his plan was a pretty good plan. He ingested roughly
120 sleeping pills. You read that number right,
120. He sat on his bed and waited...waited for himself to be dead. His grandmother came in after a while, and noticed that his face was blue. She called an ambulance, and he was saved. There was no permanent damage to his body whatsoever. But here's the icing on the cake:
she came in an hour after he ingested those pills. That's pretty freakin' amazing . He should have been dead within half an hour. He was still conscious for an hour afterwards. By the time the ambulance got there, he definitely should have been on the way to the morgue, but he wasn't.
Incidentally, that incident is what propelled him into a relationship with God, so there was a purpose to it.
There are so many other things that I think about. The universe, with its laws, constants, etc. being so fine-tuned for life on Earth. The fine-tuning exists, and I'd say a conservative estimate would say that the probability of our universe existing to allow life is somewhere along 1/1X10^120. To give you an idea of what that means, that is ten-thousand million million million million million million times the number of atoms in the whole universe. And that's a
conservative estimate. That is a miracle to me.
Another miracle I think about is the authorship of parts of the Bible. For instance, there is an abundance, and I mean an
abundance of evidene that the Book of Daniel was written around 510 BC. Yet it clearly predicts things that happened around 300 BC and beyond, including the life of Alexander the Great. I would say that this is miraculous. If one wants to see some information about that, see
here,
here, or
here I also think about how the Old Testament got so many things right even though the documents were not written in time periods that would have allowed this by a natural means. I gave an example of that in the above, but I will give two more. In the Book of Genesis, Sodom and Gomorrah are mentioned as both being destroyed around 2000 BC. They were part of the five cities of the plain, according the Bible, and the Bible gives the names of these cities. Skeptics thought that these cities never existed, but that can not be argued anymore. A series of tablets from the city of Ebla in Syria dating to around 2000 BC was found. It contained a vast amount of information...and here's the deal. It mentions the five cities of the plain by name. Yet the secular theories of Biblical composition put Genesis as being written around 700 BC, and Christians believe it was written around 1500 BC. How did ancients, who had almost
no way of researching things that far back, get to know this stuff? I find that highly interesting.
The third and final example. The Old Testament parallels the coming of Jesus in so many ways. The trinity, the atonement, his suffering...it is illuminated in even the smallest of ways. The way that the New Testament perfectly fulfills the purpose of the Old is astonishing to me. I can provide examples of this if anyone wishes. This gives me the impression of planning...of God setting things up for the coming of Christ. I can provide examples if one wants me to specify.
So, yes, I believe in miracles. It would be impossible for me not to.