This is not what I’ve been talking about. This is not about what we can tell, but about what it is. Why are you bringing all this up?
I’ve tried asking someone who claims to know, but he seems unable to say.
It does if God introduces energy or momentum from outside the system.
Wouldn’t we have to add the source of that energy/momentum as part of the system if those conservation laws are to continue to be applicable?
What I meant was, and was not articulate to say well enough, apparently, and that you could not deduce, in a conversation about the natural and the supernatural 
, was that there was no natural causation in common among the events. You also failed to articulate your issue with it, you just had to be insulting first.
…as far as science can detect.
What that meant, in context, was that scientific detection is not possible.
For thinking what is not possible?
I do not understand what ways of thinking you’re talking about here, and therefore have no way of knowing what questions to ask.
What sort of connection do you envisage, and how is that relevant? I also don’t know what it means for God to be consistent with physical reality.
That makes no sense to me. If he lost interest in the world it would automatically disappear? Why would anyone suppose that to be true?
That’s certainly crude. Why would God construct the universe as a bomb that would detonate unless he held his finger on it? The analogy seems senseless. If only he hadn’t pressed the detonator, the bomb would have been fine without him.
I’d say that holding one’s finger down is an action. But why would creation of the universe be analogized to pressing the detonator on a bomb? What snse does that make?
But wouldn’t all this providence be an action, not just a consequence of holding his finger down, and therefore a miracle?
Do you mean that the events had no single natural cause? But that just increases the ambiguity. Did they have a single supernatural cause, or did they have multiple, unrelated natural causes? If the former, that’s a miracle. If the latter, how is God involved at all? (A request: could you please stop with the emojis? They add nothing.)
Of course that’s what it meant. That was obvious. My point is that the inability to detect a miracle is not relevant to it being a miracle.
Since you do not believe that God exists and that there is no such thing as the immaterial or supernatural, how do you expect to be able to allow for ‘non-scientific’ causation?
Of course it is. If it were due to natural causes, those causes should be detectable, at least in theory. If it were due to supernatural causes, natural science would be unable to detect it, by definition. Miracles are, by definition, supernatural.
That it is not possible for someone to believe that God sustains everything that happens, while maintaining that God is not a direct cause of everything that happens. Some people believe this, but it is possible to not believe this and remain consistent. You don’t think it is possible, so I am wondering why.
At it’s most basic, a connection that stems from God being the foundation of existence. So long as the physical world is something that exists, it is necessarily connected to God, which is the foundation for all existing things.
One way his existence might be consistent with physical reality, is by his existence and activity not being in contradiction with any laws of nature.
All analogies are senseless when you break them down into little pieces from the very moment they’re presented.
A little charity would go a long way here, John.
It is an action only in the sense that the pressing down of the button was an action. The character wouldn’t be doing any more of an action than what he did when he first pressed down the button - he’s just actively performing that action without having ever stopped it. While for us, continuing the action would require more and more effort, this person doesn’t ever get physically tired, so he doesn’t need to exert anymore effort to keep the button pressed than the effort it took to press it in the first place.
The purpose of the analogy, as crude as it is, is to describe how an active process/action is required of God to keep things as they are.
We could drop the connotations of a bomb and simply say that this person holds a device with a button which, when pressed, brings all possible things apart from himself into existence - but only as long as the button stays pressed down. While the button is pressed down, this person can continue to perform other actions that affect the things that only exist because of the button being pressed down. Some of those other actions we could call miracles.
Do you understand the concept of “accepting for the sake of argument”? That’s what I’m doing. My opinions about whether God exists are not relevant.
That made no sense; perhaps you had a real point to make but just stated it badly. But it comes out the same in print. I believe you’re trying to talk about a miracle that mimics natural causes, in which case there would be no way for science to distinguish the miracle from a natural event. And you appear to be saying that such a miracle isn’t a miracle, though I can’t tell why. Or you may be trying to do something else entirely. No way to tell, given that you don’t seem able to articulate what you actually mean.
No, I am not. The infusion of meaning into a series of disparate events is not natural. Your presumption is wrong, and that is why you are blaming me for your misunderstanding.
But is holding your finger down an active process? And how does that simple act, if it is an act, result in providential events? That would seem to require wiggling one’s finger in complex ways, not just holding it in place.
Why would we call only some of them miracles? Why not all? And what’s the difference between a miracle and a non-miraculous action of God?
No, I blame you for my misunderstanding because you are unable to say what you mean. What sort of event is “infusion of meaning”? How does one infuse meaning into events one had no hand in causing? And if it’s not natural, doesn’t that make it a miracle?
Hoo boy. It is not an event, it is meaning infused into a series of disparate events, what we have talking about from however far back. Remember Maggie?
I would say so.
If I pressed my finger down 10 times, 1 per second, I would have pressed down my finger 10 times.
If I press down my finger 1 times, each for an infinite amount of seconds, I would have pressed down my finger 1 times.
The fact that in the second case, my finger remains pressed down indefinitely doesn’t seem to suggest that I never pressed down my finger, or that I ever finished pressing down my finger.
Providence relates quite heavily to concepts of predestination - God knowing everything that will ever happen. Given his omniscience, God would have known all the possible worlds that could exist. Whichever he chose to actually exist would be fully known by him. He may have chosen the actual world knowing that certain things would occur in certain ways, or with an intention to intervene at certain points in history.
In this analogy, perhaps we can say that this device has settings on it which could be altered before the pressing down of the finger on the button. It may even be the case that these settings, or some of them, could be altered after the finger is pressed down on the button.
Here I am leaving room for a trinitarian account of Gods divine action.
One example of such an account is in Understanding Scientific Theories of Origins: Cosmology, Geology, and Biology in Christian Perspective. Here, John Walton gives an account of divine action that differentiates the divine activity of each person in the godhead. Direct interventions are one form of divine activity.
We certainly agree with respect to God’s sustaining activity (it’s not passive – he continuously speaks, so to speak 
), but I don’t buy into Molinism, which is what think I am hearing. It is way better than pantheism, though.
I do, personally. But you don’t need to accept Molinism to think that Gods omniscience includes a full knowledge of counterfactuals. Molinism holds that his knowledge of counterfactuals occurs after his creative decree, which to my knowledge is the point of controversy.
There doesn’t seem to me to be any good reasons why God couldn’t have reflected on the kind of world he wanted to make before actually making it. Having such reflections as part of his omniscience would allow him to order the worlds history in a particular way from beginning to end.
I’m not sure that molinism is required to believe this, but maybe you disagree.
There is an alternate explanation. Ü ← (Minimalist unapologetic emoji.)
It seems to me to be an academic exercise with little scriptural support, and I think it depersonalizes his interventionism, making him an ‘epistemological calculator’, I think someone has said.
I’m not sure if that means logically after or chronologically after. If the latter, I don’t believe it applies, because I think God is omnitemporal. (That has huge bearing in a discussion of providence. I wonder where we might find one of those? 
We never do know how he works into time and timing, though.)
The question would be whether there is sufficient scriptural support to grant justification. I don’t see that it depersonalises him, because he can still act via intervention and relate to us as free individuals.
I suggest we take this to PMs if you would like to continue, so the thread doesn’t deviate anymore than it has.
How is meaning infused into these events? Does God cause the events, or does he just infuse meaning into them?