There's a world of a difference between a professional magician who spends his life devising an[d] creating clever illusions, and a devout, poverty-stricken, poorly educated peasant girl, who spent her short life working and helping others. Can you see it?
There's a huge difference: the peasant girl in question only has to learn one simple trick, and might easily do so by accident or trial and error, if not instructed by some other person. A professional magician has to master tricks that work for an audience of people who
aren't vastly underestimating them (such as by assuming that because they're devout and poor, they couldn't possibly be resourceful enough to fool anyone educated—now
that's hubris, and dehumanizing to boot—or be perceptive enough to weigh a little deception against the obvious resulting benefits to their impoverished family when the gifts and offerings start coming in).
I can walk a Slinky from hand to hand, which is a difficult stunt that few professional jugglers can do (because it's hard, and also because it's not part of their usual repertoire so they're not particularly motivated to learn it). I taught myself to do it when I was a kid, because I thought that's how you were supposed to play with a Slinky. (And because video games didn't exist yet.) Learning a trick or two isn't unusual for any child.
Consider the afflicted girls in the Salem witchcraft cases. By all accounts, their contortions and anguish were so dramatic that no one believed they could possibly be faking. (And, despite a recently popular idea, any actual disease such as ergotism is an unlikely explanation for it.) How could such devout hard-working village girls have learned such superb acting during their short lives? The naiveté implicit in that question led to many deaths. (Unless you believe, instead, that the girls really were being assaulted by the spectral forms of witches and the twenty people executed actually were guilty of casting those spells.)
I never said any of the mystics didn't sin. However, a sin of this magnitude, to someone of such faith, would in their belief system have grave consequences.
And yet, in my experience, that exact kind of sin is easily forgiven by other people of comparable faith even when the deception is discovered, usually because "it brings people to God." There's no reason to think they couldn't think of the same rationalization themselves if the deception remains their secret.
To deny the truth of these accounts - and there are many - you and your fellow skeptics have to invent increasingly implausable alternative scenarios. You sound like a reflection of the God-of-the-gaps theists.
Implausible: even though dying without food and water is something all people have in common and all cultures know, some people can live indefinitely without food or water if spirits are helping them.
Implausible: some people can fool people, especially when the people being fooled are also chauvinistically underestimating them because they're foreign, poor, devout, uneducated, and/or young.
Which one are you claiming is more implausible, now?
Observing you isn't the correct way of determining whether or not you have ingested the flu virus (unless the doctor's eyesight was particularly excellent).
Correct.
On the other hand, observing the situation and daily life of a bedridden mystic, weighing her, etc, is the correct way to determine whether or not she has taken any food.
Incorrect, for the same reason the previous quote was correct.
The only hypothesis that "observing the situation and daily life" of the mystic can falsify is that the mystic is insane or deluded; that is, the mystic is eating food and drinking water normally and openly without realizing it. For other hypotheses including deliberate trickery (and actual spirit intervention for that matter), observing daily life is a useless test. Did you know that people can eat and drink at night?
No, they simply observed the mystic and concluded that as far as they could tell that he or she hadn't taken any food or water.
So they disproved the delusion hypothesis, which no one was suggesting in the first place. That has some small value, but does nothing to distinguish between the two "implausible" hypotheses mentioned above.
I think they were present because they were well educated and honest and therefore more likely to detect any subterfuge.
They were educated idiots if they thought that. I asked what training their respective educations gave them in detecting subterfuge; the obvious answer (which you've offered nothing to contradict) is none, nor is there any account of them putting any
procedure in place, even the most rudimentary such as round-the-clock observation, to help do so. If the examiners had been police detectives, magicians, guards from an involuntary drug rehab facility, retail stop-loss (anti shoplifting) personnel, people who actually trained and experienced in how deceptions are done and how to figure them out, and/or if they'd actually made some attempt to study what was going on instead of look in and say, "nope, no ham sandwiches in sight," then you might have a case.
God can choose people for special purposes.
God, as usually defined, can do
anything. Including
not choose people for special purposes and
not secretly administer intraspiritual feedings. So an argument about what God
can do advances no position in particular. The evidence that God actually
does that is lacking.
I think given the many careful accounts we have of phenomena such as inedia, the stigmata etc, there is a reasonable likelihood that something was directing the lives of these mystics that could defy natural laws, or that understood them better than we do - and that had the purpose of bolstering our faith. It is therefore also reasonable to look into the matter further and to be ready to change one's worldview if the evidence warrants it. You would likely argue that the evidence would have to be overwhelming, abundant and scientifically repeatable to be anywhere near convincing enough to change your mind, as per Carl Sagan's famous dictum. But I would say that the materialism that many hold as true is not and has never been warranted by the evidence of science, which it co-opts for its own purposes. The problem is not that the evidence for religious claims has to be more extraordinary, but that the skeptic and materialist has strayed so far from the truth that almost no evidence, no matter how extraordinary, would be enough to put him back on track. He would always want more.
"You would always want more" is a nasty claim, though it's common enough that we usually take little notice of it. Do you refuse to tip waitstaff because no matter how much you tip, they "would always want more?" How about giving to the poor—even Jesus said, basically, that they will always want more.
It's not about what anyone wants, it's about what's fair or deserved or sufficient.
You tell tales of miracles that I'm supposed to accept as well-evidenced because they were
investigated in a way that could not possibly rule out the most likely explanation of subterfuge, and address my claim of insufficient evidence by tarring me with the terrible sin of "wanting more." It's not that your evidence (despite obviously lacking in obvious ways) is lacking, it's that I'm greedy! I suppose "arrogant" and "not knowing my place" will soon be wafting my way as well.
Show me
sufficient evidence and I won't want any more. For example, I have more than sufficient evidence that my computer works via electronic semiconductor circuitry, that life on earth evolved, that Antarctica exists even though I've never seen it with my own eyes, that the sun is a star, and that my exhaled breath contains a substance, which is also found in many rocks, that plants take in and use to build their forms. (Each of those facts would have astounded, confounded, and possibly delighted the greatest and wisest of mystics and prophets throughout the ages, had they been able to learn them). I might want to know more about the details of any of those things but I don't need or want any more evidence that they're true. So your "would always want more" is a libel as well as a flimsy excuse for crappy evidence.
