Providence vs. Miracles: same difference?

You obviously have to think so. :slightly_smiling_face:

But you are not going to get your head around God no matter how much you insist you must be able to.

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe Dale uses The concept of Providence correctly as hyper natural is something he made up entirely. I don’t want to go through this debate again, it’s just FYI

You could have at least googled it before you spoke, not that I mind being credited with coining it, because it does make a useful distinction.

You should know that a smiley face after a passive-aggressive non-response doesn’t make it less annnoying. More annoying, if anything.

I guess the implicit ‘No’ was undetectable by you.

Could you explain the concept of Providence to us correctly then?

It seems inconsiderate of you to demand that others do what you refuse to.

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It’s not Christian orthodoxy, and there are sparse google entries related to theology or the Catechism

We’ve gone down the road before. I won’t do it again. You could google Aquinas & Providence that way if you disagree, I’m out of the loop. :wink:

Funny. I have, and with examples. It is totally beyond your ken, but it is also a wonderful mystery that I am not going to encompass, either.

You may think you have, but you have not. Your supposed definition is incoherent, and the examples don’t help clarify.

That’s called blaming the victim.

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Of course they don’t. You have to believe in God first, and even then it is not a simple concept to apprehend, let alone completely comprehend (that is beyond us since we live in sequential time).

 

No, it is simply recognizing that you haven’t met the prerequisites, a belief in the Sovereign God of time and space.

I am not saying that an unbeliever is necessarily clueless, but if someone cannot even imagine a God who is omnipotent and omniscient, let alone omnitemporal, then no, they will not have any hope of any idea of God’s providence, and examples of which will be completely lost on them.

It seems as if you have strenuously resisted the existence of a God with such attributes, so it should not be surprising that you cannot penetrate the wall you have built.

Nonsense. I can easily imagine a God who’s omnipotent and omniscient. I can imagine all sorts of things that aren’t real. Imagination is like that. You need to find another explanation for my failure to comprehend your genius.

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My genius obviously does not extend to that.

God’s guidance of evolution is providential – MN cannot detect it because it does not violate any natural laws, hence it is not 'super-‘natural. Maybe @Mercer could help explain the concept of God’s providence since he refers to it here. I’m sorry if the term hypernatural miracle is problematic to @Rich_Hampton – it is descriptive and I am not the only one to have used it.

That also is incoherent. The reason MN can’t detect it, if it exists, is because it closely resembles what we would see from natural processes. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t violate natural laws, just that it’s arranged so that we can’t see.

The question remains: how does God cause things to happen without violating natural laws? I don’t think you’ve thought this through.

To be fair, I struggle to imagine this, and I am a Christian. If you don’t struggle to imagine this, I wonder if you mean the same things by those words as I.

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As I have said in multiple places, it is a wonderful mystery that we cannot get our heads around, and many have struggled with it for centuries, since the time aspect of it is involved with the tension between Arminianism and Calvinism.

My examples should be illustrative of its meaning in use. Take my nephrectomy account, for instance.

It is saturated in God’s providence, from the timing and placing of the mutation(s) that caused the cancer to the timing of the presentation of the first symptom, and then the timing of the busy signal, the physical placing of the devotional book and the placing of the date, and on all the way to Thanksgiving eve.

I don’t think I ever mentioned the timing and the placing of the 2017 solar eclipse. It brought my son – now a Swiss citizen who lives in Zürich – home during the period of my recovery (which was really good for his mom :slightly_smiling_face:), since we live only 20 miles from the center of the umbral track.

So God is sovereign over the timing and placing of molecular mutations as well as the spheres in the heavens, all illustrated in one account.

That’s pretty funny, actually, John. I’ve been thinking about it for (what century is this? :slightly_smiling_face:) over five decades (I’m a septuagenarian).

God’s ‘technology’ of causation is beyond our understanding. I’m okay with your denigrating it as magic (like the providential sizing of the disc of the moon, speaking of the eclipse).

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C Clarke.

Maybe @jongarvey or @AllenWitmerMiller could give us their perspective on God’s providence (the special variety, not general :slightly_smiling_face:).