Providence vs. Miracles: same difference?

No, it actually doesn’t. In thermodynamics (and physics generally I think) we focus on the system - interconversions between forms of energy, how much goes in and out, etc., but we treat the surroundings as essentially a black box without detailed knowledge. We don’t care where the surroundings got it’s energy, we just call it a thermal bath (a theoretically infinite source of energy) and move on to our calculations on the system.

No, we just acknowledge (as we already do, regardless of God) that those laws only truly apply to isolated/closed systems.

Let’s take the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as an example. When I was young I was told by YEC folks that it was a defeater of evolution – the law says that entropy never decreases for spontaneous processes, how could complex life then form spontaneously from less complex life? The law is violated!

Except they were forgetting the precise language and limitations of the law. The law says in an isolated system the entropy never decreases spontaneously. And here we see why complex life on Earth is not a violation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics – the system (the biochemical reactions, or even the Earth itself could be defined as the system) is not an isolated system and so it can lower it’s entropy by increasing the entropy in the surroundings. For us to conclude that life doesn’t violated the 2nd Law we don’t need to know anything about the nature of those surroundings (which would be the rest entire universe, so we have no hope of knowing it exhaustively) other than transfer can occur.

I think this is important: as long as God is part of the surroundings and not the system (which is what methodological naturalism provides), then I don’t see any violation of the laws of physics for God to provide an external force or energy sink/source. The system is the thing we are studying, investigating, measuring, etc. but the surroundings we don’t have much knowledge of at all (usually just things like whether mass and energy can flow freely to/from it and whether it is hotter or colder than the system).

On the other hand, seeing an external force of energy sink/source does not mean God, it could be an “ordinary” physical source that we just didn’t know about. I mean this is the how we get things like black holes and dark energy. There is something out there that seems to be providing extra energy to the universe, but we don’t actually know what it is. I don’t think we suddenly say all the laws are violated.

If that’s true, can there be any such thing as a miracle, i.e. a violation of natural law? It would appear that no act of God can be such a violation, by definition. Jesus walks on water, just a force applied from outside the system; water into wine, just matter added from outside the system; and so on. So how do we conceptually distinguish miracles from providence?

We acknowledge mystery, something that @Jordan appears to be attempting in good faith but @DaleCutler is clearly unwilling to do.

Does that mean that we can’t conceptually distinguish miracles from providence?

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I think so…

Where have you been?

There are more.

Some of us are capable of making a distinction between supernatural miracles and hypernatural ones, co-instants (or ‘co-instances’) of providence being the latter – Maggie’s co-instances, for instance. Both are still miracles.

I don’t doubt it. I don’t think we use the term the same way.

Well, I think the violation is more likely in the chain of physical causality, not violations of physical laws. From inside science I don’t think you can see the miracle. This is part of why I think science is not the only way to know things and faith and science are not necessarily incompatible.

Let’s take Jesus walking on water. If we were to say this was accomplished by God giving Jesus an external force upward equal to his weight (essentially replacing the normal force he would feel on dry land), there is no physical law that is violated, all of Newton’s laws still apply. You could analyze the water and you wouldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. In fact, the only way you could tell anything was if you looked at Newton’s 2nd Law and did a force diagram on Jesus. In that case, because the total acceleration in the vertical direction = 0, we would have an extra, unknown force, F_?, but we could write out the magnitude of the force ( F_?=mg) using the 2nd Law. No physical law is violated. So does that mean there is no miracle? No! People don’t just walk on water! If we found a physical cause for F_? then I think you’d have a case for it not being a miracle. It’s the cause (physical or non-physical causality), not the lack of adhering to the laws of physics, that makes it a miracle. Now, I think I’m on pretty solid ground with this not violating physical laws, but that doesn’t do anything really to prove that this was a miracle. Much like @swamidass and GAE, all I’m establishing is that the physical laws don’t rule it out. As a Christian then, I can make an argument from theology/philosophy that I believe it was a miracle and you are free to argue against it. But I don’t think the laws of physics say either way.

I am trying the best I can, I’m sorry if it’s not helping. I think I’m reaching the limit of my theological/philosophical abilities here and would defer to others more knowledgable.

For me personally, I tend to look at miracles as non-physical causality that is, for lack of a better work, bold. I don’t see good evidence that miracles are like genie wishes, religious reward points, or to make people wealthy. I once heard a good sermon in @glipsnort’s neck of the woods about miracles that really stuck with me. The pastor said the miracles are not for us, but are signposts that point us towards God.

Providence, on the other hand, seems to be much more subtle, and used theologically as a reassurance that behind all the chaos in the world, God is working in even non-obvious ways. This may be taken as sheer coincidence (and I don’t think that’s a bad working assumption) but to the Christian it may also be a reminder of God’s continual presence, even without the bold and brash “miracles”.

My own little providence story is that when I first moved to the Boston area with my wife for a postdoc, I was nervous about how I was going to make everything work financially. We both grew up in rural Montana so moving to New England was a big change. I distinctly remember at the end of our first month that rent was due and I hadn’t gotten my first pay check yet. We had $30 in the account and I didn’t know what to do. So I wrote the rent check out and waited as long as I possibly could before delivering it, and much to my relief it turned out that my pay check direct deposited into my account just in time to cover the check. Now, this was a coincidence (pay check deposited just in the nick of time to cover rent check withdrawal) and I could have easily forgotten it. But in that moment for some reason I felt God’s “providence”, his care, his faithfulness in some small way. I totally understand people not thinking that was a big deal, but it was a big deal to me. I had just gotten a great job in the middle of the big crash and I was totally stressed out over this rent check, and I think God provided that little coincidence to help me remember that I’m not alone. I don’t know that I’d call it a miracle, probably not, and I don’t even know if God had to actually do anything, but every time I think of it I’m reminded that God is there even in the little things. That is providence to me.

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How many ways are there? Can you elaborate?

(How many times have I said we don’t know how God does it, with respect to providential miracles?)

…being a (very special) providential miracle?

Now that makes sense.

So the difference between providence and miracle is in the magnitude of the effect? But what is this bit about sheer coincidence? That would seem to imply no effect at all. Puzzling.

But how would God have provided such a coincidence? Would he do anything? Plan for it from the beginning of the world? How is God present in that event? That’s what I can’t see. It seems that you merely choose to think it was God’s doing, and yet you can’t say that he actually did anything.

Some co-instants aren’t so little. And sometimes there is a string of them: q.v. Maggie.
 

We don’t know how. That is why it is a wonderful mystery, @Mercer. He is God and we aren’t going to get our heads around him, and that is why we call providence miraculous. It has to do with time and timing, place and placing, and God is sovereign and in control, and why his children are not to be afraid. Of anything. Including cancer and death, global warming, gun violence and terrorism. But I still brush my teeth.

You may have a distinction inside your head, but it hasn’t managed to make it out of your head so far.

Not helping. Not a response, not an explanation, not much of anything.

Then how do you know that God did anything or whatever you imagine is happening? How do you distinguish supernatural from hypernatural?

Yeah, it has. It’s just into yours, John, is where the problem lies. :grin:
(I’ve been talking to people about God’s providence and the distinction for decades.)
 

Jesus walked on water. He fed five thousand men with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. Miracles. Supernatural. Supernatural miracles.

Paycheck electronic deposit the same day the rent was due. Coincidence. Providence. Five or six coincidences in the order that Maggie had needed, solving or mitigating her problems and relieving her desperation. Providence. Providential miracles.

Timing and placing were the only things that were unusual in the latter cases. Each event in itself was ‘merely’ a ‘coincidence’, But Maggie’s, collectively? Absolutely miraculous, ‘supernatural’ ordering of timing and placing. And that is not to denigrate @Jordan’s experience of ‘simple’ providence, either. (He is not as old as Maggie or I, both of us septuagenarians, not that all Christian seventy somethings have experienced God’s providence as she and I have.)

There is a difference between something physical or ‘natural’ being changed and the results being against the normal order of things – a man walking on water, or the spontaneous generation of food, and one where ‘only’ timing and placing are unusual, unexpected or surprising (or extremely unusual, unexpected, surprising or startling), Jordan’s bank account or the multiple in Maggie’s wonderful sequence (which was way beyond merely improbable).

Well, I personally don’t think if I saw somebody just out walking on the water I would just chalk it up to providence go about my day. I’d go figure out what the heck was going on. In my mind, something dramatic like that could be a miracle but 1) experience says there’s probably an ordinary cause to the unusual behavior (a prank or some such) and 2) I don’t think miracles occur “just 'cause”. I think they occur for specific, theological, reasons and so I doubt I’ll just randomly stumble across one.

@DaleCutler, usually I know what you’re talking about and I don’t have a solid distinction between miracle and providence, but it seems like you more-or-less equate the terms, which is more than what most would do. Is that a fair assessment?

John says something I said makes sense!? It’s a miracle! Oh wait … :wink: :

In my view, magnitude of the effect is a big part of it.

The bit about sheer coincidence is that I don’t believe that I can know for sure if God did something “extra” (an interventional force or whatever) or if it really was a true coincidence. As @Mercer said, the best I can do is say there is mystery here where I (we) just don’t know the mechanisms. I believe that we are unlikely to know exactly how God works because some of our best tools for determining mechanism (science) can’t see God’s action in the way we’d like. I know it seems like a side-slip but we’re not God so I tend to think we are limited in our ability to investigate the precise nature of his action.

[Edit: forgot to respond to John’s last questions]

Man, those are good questions! Some of them are very theological questions (planning vs reacting). I don’t know that I can see it significantly better than you, I do think there is choice here. I would say I believe God did something, based on my experience, but I do not have enough knowledge to know how he did it or even to prove he did it. To say that God did something providential, to me, is to say something through faith.

Faith, in general, can be well grounded and thoughtful or a completely irrational, trivial notion. It could be faith as the extrapolation of a long line of evidence or it could be just a random statement independent of anything else. Those issues are not alway easy to determine. I think this is what everybody has to think through as they look at their own beliefs.

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The things you claim to know, I view as mysteries.

I’m talking about whether, not how.

What strikes me as interesting is that only the positive outcomes are said to be miraculous. A long string of co-instants and rare events that lead to someone’s death or misfortune are never described as miraculous. Why is that? To my eyes, humans are the ones adding meaning to a series of events. In fact, false associations seems to be one of the strongest biases that humans have.

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Maybe that is not possible from our perspective.

If God does play dice, so that it rolled according to his purposes, would we be any the wiser; could we discern between natural law and miracle? If many worlds is at least an allowable concept, God choosing the world he wishes does not seem too much a stretch.

Well, neither would I, personally. Frankly, too.
I was just going with your hypothetical. Eye-roll. ← (Please note, @John_Harshman, per your request.)
 

No, because most people that I have talked to understand almost immediately the difference between a supernatural miracle and a [‘hypernatural’] providential one, the latter doing nothing physically phenomenal, but involving ‘only’ miraculous timing and placing, aka ‘coincidence’ or more astoundingly, multiple ‘coincidences’ that infuse meaning, as in Maggie’s case – there was nothing subtle about them!

Individual ‘coincidences’ can be highly astounding, as well, so that is not a limiting criterion. (I put scare quotes around ‘coincidence(s)’ because it is not a word in my working vocabulary, denoting, as it does, mere chance. My Father is absolutely in control. It is a wonderful mystery, @Mercer, how he can choreograph time and events without violating anyone’s free will. Some Christians think that Molinism explains away the apparent paradox.)

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