Brent Meeker writes:
> > It's also possible that God intervenes all the time in a perfectly consistent
> > manner to sustain natural laws, such that if he stopped doing so the whole
> > universe would instantly disintegrate.
>
> That's possible, but then he's a deist God. He doesn't do miracles in response to prayer. It seems to me there's a contradiction between "intervenes" and "prefectly consistent". There's no more reason to believe that the universe needs "sustaining" than to believe there's a teapot orbiting Jupiter.
A deist God does not intervene once the universe is set in motion. But one can imagine
for example a gravity god, who pushes matter around in a perfectly consistent way so
as to give the impression of natural laws. If he stopped doing his thing, stars would explode
and the universe would fall apart. It's only because the gravity god is very conscientious in
his work that we don't notice he is constantly performing miracles. Of course, there is no more
reason to believe in the gravity god than there is to believe in any other kind of god, but at the
same time it is not possible to be rigidly atheistic about the gravity god just as it is not possible to
be rigidly atheistic about Zeus or Thor.
> >This would make it seem as if God either
> > does not exist or, if he does, he is a deist, whereas in fact he is a theist. The
> > problem with this idea, and for that matter with deism, is that it is empty of
> > explanatory value. Ironically perhaps, it is God-as-miracle-worker which comes
> > closest to a legitimate scientific theory, albeit one without any supporting evidence
> > in its favour.
>
> If it's lawlike it ain't a miracle. Deism was a common position that come out of the Enlightenment. It comported perfectly with a Newtonian, clockwork universe. It avoided the problem of evil. Franklin, Paine, and Jefferson were deists. But it fits well with scientific models because it does nothing.
Good old-fashioned miracles are not lawlike, which is what makes them subject to empirical verification.
If God is a Protestant, then an examination of a list of lottery ticket winners or people with serious
illnesses should show that Protestants are statistically more likely to have their prayers answered than
Catholics, Muslims or atheists (who wish for things, even if they don't actually pray). If not, then either
God is not a Protestant or there is no point in praying for anything even if you and he are both Protestants.
And yet I doubt that there are any Protestants, Catholics or Muslims who be at all perturbed by the findings
of such a study, or countless other possible studies or experiments. This cannot be explained away by "faith"
in the sense that one can have faith in the gravity god or a deist god (because no empirical finding counts for
or against such beliefs): rather, it comes down to a matter of simultaneously believing x and not-x.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Wed Nov 08 2006 - 02:37:51 PST