The Hump of the Camel

In this thread at BioLogos, which I think was a spin-off from a remark of Eddie’s (but it was all so long ago) I spent some posts trying to field the difference between a theistic God, who is immanent in his world, and a “deistic” God (put in scare quotes to avoid pinning this view to all aspects of historical Deism) who sets the world up to run under its own steam. I didn’t really touch on the incoherence of the post-deist Evangelical attempt to have ones cakes and eat it by “allowing” God to answer prayer but not act within nature – as if the two are separable. Along the way I posted this quote from a philosophy of religion site on the difference: Continue reading →

Rounding off (as far as I can tell today!) this loose series of posts denying that “God uses chance” in nature, I just want to look at one minor example to leave us asking questions, rather than presupposing the common scientific answers. Continue reading →

This is by way of being a thought experiment, continuing the train of recent discussions about God and randomness. It may help clarify ones thinking, perhaps. It depends for its effect on an assumption I am making about most of my readers here, and that is that they agree with the proposition, “God sometimes heals people in response to prayer.” My apologies to Deists and Cessationists – my analogy works less well if it’s taken as totally unrealistic. All statistics and decriptions of research in what follows are imaginary and wildly inaccurate, and purely for illustrative purposes. By the way, what follows rides roughshod over the careful distinction I drew in a recent post  between “miracle” and “providence”, but my excuse is that I’m using the one only as an analogy for the other. In any case, I’ve been reminded by this anecdote how fuzzy the line between the two can be. Continue reading →

Looking for an illustration for the last post, I stumbled across what is evidently a slide from some lecture on origins positions. My eye was drawn to just one of the bullet points, familiar, perhaps, from recent threads on BioLogos: Continue reading →

Someone at BioLogos dismissed my distinction between providence and miracles, by saying that there is “nature” and there are “miracles” and nothing else and it’s simple. There’s little point in replying there because, apart from a rather dense thread made contentious by the usual suspects, if he won’t even investigate the army of theologians and philsophers I cited for the last two thousand years on the doctrine of providence (the Fathers, the Scholastics, the Reformers, Wesley and even Arminius), he surely won’t pay any attention to me. To some ECs holding the “intellectual high ground” means one needn’t engage with not only ones opponents in ID or YEC, but ones predecessors in the faith. Continue reading →