Providence vs. Miracles: same difference?

[Jordan (Jordan Mantha)]

@DaleCutler

If we found a physical cause for F? then I think you’d have a case for it…

…being a (very special) providential miracle?

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_Harshman

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 that makes sense.

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

@John_Harshman

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)

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.

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]

@John_Harshman

I think God provided that little coincidence to help me remember that I’m not alone.

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.

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.