I don’t know of anyone who disagrees on this point. If God made all the stars spell out in English “I am God and I exist”, most would consider that pretty convincing.
We disagree as to what constitutes this sort of message.
I don’t know of anyone who disagrees on this point. If God made all the stars spell out in English “I am God and I exist”, most would consider that pretty convincing.
We disagree as to what constitutes this sort of message.
So, if we show you the rolls of dice from a casino, you would be able to demonstrate that God governs the rolls of dice? I’d like to see that!
That is not out of the question. For example, if just the right sequence of many, many rolls came about to win a whole boatload of money to feed starving orphans in Africa, then this would have a pretty high CSI.
But I’m sure that God governs all those dice rolls. Even when I can’t detect it. You aren’t sure of this?
I don’t know how providence works, which things are secondary effects that are directly driven by God. But, it is clear there are such things as empirically detectable miracles, as I mentioned.
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My point is that I think God governs the outcome of all randomness, whether it be from rolling actual dice or mutating genomes, regardless of whether we can detect that governing scientifically, philosophically, or whatever. So, even if Greg has objections against evolution, he cannot have objections with regards to its randomness. So I really don’t understand your point.
This would not be enough. God basically did this over and over throughout the OT, and the Israelites kept rebelling against Him. Similarly, Jesus performed many miracles, but the Pharisees and many others refused to believe that that authenticated His message. Short of removing free will and forcing people to believe, there will always be some people who reject the message.
I’m nearly 100% certain it’s possible to connect the dots to do just this. It is not convincing.
We also have Dawkins going to great lengths in The Blind Watchmaker to argue that even a statue of the Virgin Mary waving to him would not constitute a scientifically impossible action. He probably would not become a theist even if he saw miracles like that.
Yes, burning shrubbery don’t seem to work these days. And changing water into wine and fishes and loaves can’t match modern agriculture. And curing blindness and lameness is done all the time today by medical doctors. Perhaps tachyon pulses coming from a pulsar 13.8 billion light years away encrypted in an encryption algorithm not yet invented that says “I created the universe today from nothing - God (or L. Ron Hubbard)”
I bet you that if such a miracle happened, we would not even need atheists - there would be a bunch of cessationists who would argue that it’s not real.
As one pundit might have said in response to your quote above, @EricMH, " you are halfway to crazy town!"
What we call miraculous might be detectable… but that is not the same thing as detecting God’s role in that event!
Maybe to English speakers. but would that be necessary? Moving the fixed stars around from their recorded positions into a new set of positions (any positions) would destroy all we understand about astronomy and the laws of physics. But what would link that to the Christian god? This could be attributed to any god powerful enough to mess with the Universe or capable of instilling optical illusions in all living human brains.
Ninja’d!
The interesting case is the stars spelling out “God is dead”, which would no doubt be declared an official atheist miracle.
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The Deists would be happy, at least.