Science does not address miracles, nor does it preclude them. That would be wishful thinking.
Yes you did. Look earlier in this thread to your reference to CNC lathes. That is your analogy, and is wrong on its face. Get your arguments in a row before displaying them. Hint: the C in CNC stands for âcomputerâ. You are wrong, just simply wrong.
Hoo boy. 
I was searching, unsuccessfully, for an analogy to demonstrate how God can use ânormalâ events for his purposes. Did you read Maggieâs story? If not, then you donât know what this is about. If you have, please explain scientifically how meaning was infused into the sequence of independent events.
The Choreographer analogy comes closest at describing it, but not how.
And while youâre at it, why donât you tell what the meaning was.
What I mean by ânaturalâ is the way the universe works without divine intervention. If you respond that the universe doesnât work at all without divine intervention, and that God sustains or supports or in fact causes everything that happens, then there is no nature, and everything is a miracle. If on the other hand you suppose that the universe runs, most of the time, without Godâs intervention, then âsupernaturalâ refers to that Divine intervention, causation proceeding directly from God. Itâs inconsistent with the way the universe works because divine intervention is not part of nature.
Natural law refers to the ways in which the universe works in the absence of divine interfention. Particles attract each other in proportion to their masses and in inverse proportion to the square of their distances. Protons and electrons have equal and opposite electrical charges. And so on.
Not relevant to anything weâre talking about here. If God created the universe, quite a while ago, thatâs not relevant to miracles happening now. If on the other hand his constant effort is needed to keep the universe running, then everything is again a miracle. To which do you refer?
I agree that this isnât interesting. I would add that it isnât relevant either.
Does that mean that the universe requires constant intervention? If so, then everything is a miracle in other than an uninteresting and irrelevant sense.
This too seems irrelevant. Hume was arguing that there can be no evidence for miracles. But we are assuming (me for the sake of argument, you in earnest) that miracles happen. Weâre trying to figure out what they are, notable whether they contravene natural law when they occur. I repeat: this is not an argument against miracles. Hume and critiques of Hume are not relevant here.
Every analogy fails somewhere, or it would be an identity. Your analogies, however, fail right at the start. Thatâs a problem.
Iâve been vaguely keeping an eye as you two go at it (I was interested in the thread earlier). I recognize some of what @DaleCutler is saying in common Christian thinking. Sometimes this kind of language is used dismissively or as a pejorative, sometimes it is simply an acknowledgement that non-believers and believers wonât share some fundamental beliefs.
Especially because Christians believe the Bible is special revelation, and that God gives the Holy Spirit to help illuminate spiritual truth, there is often seen, at least in spiritual terms, a knowledge differential between Christian and non-Christian. That is perhaps why Gnosticism was an issue early on. Jesus also used âears to hear and eyes to seeâ language, which also gets incorporated into Christian language. I think most orthodox Christians believe that God, in some way or another, reveals true things to a believerâs spirit/soul/heart that causes them to respond in belief.
All that said, in public discourse this belief can go either way in my experience. Sometimes itâs just used as a way to dismiss the non-believer. Sort of a, âwell, youâll never get it because your not a Christiansâ, when in reality it was just an unclear or poor argument. On the other hand, Iâve also seen it more like, âan atheist is obviously not a Christian so we shouldnât expect them to just accept Christian doctrines/beliefs/practices/etc.â, which I think tends to lead to more productive conversation because it validates people where they are rather than dismissing each other.
So are there things about Christian belief that I think an atheist just wonât âgetâ? Yes. Do I think thatâs a useful thing to say in public conversation, no.
I struggle very much to think about how providence actually works, though I affirm it. I donât know how âGod-guided evolutionâ would work at a physical level, though I think itâs the most likely explanation for life on Earth. Those beliefs donât come from purely scientific and objective evidence, so I donât expect to simply convince non-Christians that Iâm right and theyâre wrong based on an argument.
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Iâm not really interested in convincing you or in you convincing me that God does or does not exist or that he does or does not affect the world. Iâm interested in both of us understanding what you mean, in the current case by âprovidenceâ and âGod-guided evolutionâ. How it would work on the physical level isnât all that important, at least not in any great detail. The question is whether it involves direct intervention by God, and whether we should call that a miracle, etc. So far, I canât see any way out of answering both of those questions in the affirmative.
So I take the common definitions of general and special providence (you can find it in Wikipedia or dictionaries). General providence is taken as the âupholdingâ of the physical laws of the universe, a sustaining of nature. This is not miraculous, just an expression, in my view, that God is the one outside of creation who formulated itâs inner workings. Special providence, on the other hand, seems to me to be more the place of the miraculous. Special providence is how Christians would talk about divine coincidences, where we believe a particular timing or circumstance are divinely ordered for some particular reason. Itâs much easier for me to think thatâs miraculous (Godâs nudge) rather than some sort of divine pool shot (to use a term from another discussion). I donât know if I/we can tell those two mechanisms apart. I do think a providential miracle would be different than say the miracle of the Resurrection or virgin birth. Special providence seems to be focused on the timing of ordinary means, not things that violate normal physical laws. This may be where @DaleCutler is coming from.
As to God-guided evolution, I remain open. I think itâs possible God ânudgedâ things every once in a while in a way that is not detectable by science (maybe similar to GAE, but there are other ways I think). Iâm not sure if he needed to do that or not, but it seems possible in my view. Itâs possible God created the first DNA/RNA/cell de novo, but if he didnât then thatâs OK too. I think this is where science is helpful to the Church by seeing, as well as it can, the history of the Earth. Science can help guide us as to what amongst various possibilities, are the most likely ways to understand how God has worked through history.
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I donât understand what this means. Upholding is one thing and formulating is quite another. In the first case, Godâs constant action is necessary to keep things working, but in the second he sets in motion something that continues working by itself. Those seem contradictory.
Itâs not clear which two mechanisms you refer to here.
The problem with this is that the timing of ordinary means must be caused by extraordinary means if it isnât the result of a divine pool shot. It seems that you agree when you call it miraculous.
Nevertheless, if he nudges, thatâs still a miracle. Even if the result is something that could have happened naturally, itâs still action that contravenes natural law, since the cause was not physical.
Ah, hereâs divine providence for you:
Pennsylvania woman drives into path of oncoming vehicle while waiting for calling from god.
âReilly related God took care of her by not having her injured,â wrote Trooper Bruce Balliet in an arrest affidavit. âReilly expressed no concerns or remorse for the victims. Reilly also stated she did not care if the other people were injured because God would have taken care of them.â
Ah, hereâs an excellent example of the woman involved sinning by testing God â daring him, in effect, and not her faith, and her selfishly not loving or caring about anyone else.
Can you? @tim.anderson apparently canât. And when you do, give us an analogy that works, if youâre so good at it.
How does the Choreographer orchestrate the movements of the dancers? Hint: he doesnât use puppet strings.
One of Christendomâs (and Judaismâs, I presume) favorite accounts of Godâs all-encompassing sovereignty and providence:
  The Story of Joseph
He tells them how to move and they agree to do it. This doesnât seem at all to be what youâre talking about. Another useless analogy.
You seemed to have missed the capital C in Choreographer. I didnât think that you would be so clueless as to not infer that I meant God.
Donât insult my intelligence, please. The first time around, you said this was an analogy. If you donât intend an analogy this time and itâs really God who orchestrates the movements of actual dancers, I donât think he does that. If itâs a metaphor, whatâs it a metaphor for?
You conveniently avoided that.
Yeah, thatâs a question I have as well. As someone who teaches introductory physics now and then, sometimes the upholding/sustaining language sounds reflective of pre-Newtonian views of physics (i.e. that a force is required to keep things moving). I take it to be more that if God were to cease to exist, so would the universe. In some way, everything is contingent upon Godâs continued existence, nothing is truly independent of him.
Whether it is a nudge (intervention) or pool shot (setting of initial conditions). I would think of the nudge as a miracle but no necessarily the pool shot. I would think it would be very difficult to distinguish between these in any evidentiary way.
In some larger sense we might say everything in the universe is a miracle if God created the universe ex nihilo, but I donât think thatâs what weâre talking about here. We are talking about Godâs action along history, not in creating history in the first place.
I think so yes. However, I do think even within the miraculous there are more or less intervention that may have been needed. For God to produce a single mutation, for instance, seems like a very small intervention (perhaps making a particular base slightly more likely than normal). Something like the feeding of the 5,000 seems much more intervention (food out of thin air!?).
That makes sense, but I do wonder if there isnât something more to it. If I think on it a little it seems like the cause isnât as important as that the behavior is consistent with the law, that makes it ânaturalâ. So letâs take something fairly simple like Newtonâs 2nd law. It doesnât say that forces must be caused by physical means, just that an acceleration is proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass. If God were to apply a force to an object, that wouldnât violate Newtonâs law⌠as long as the acceleration of the object changed correspondingly. What would be a clear violation would be if God applied a force, and there was no change in acceleration. The physical and chemical laws that Iâm aware of are descriptions of behavior, not restrictions on the identity of the causes. I could be wrong though. Iâm just thinking that if God did do a providential type miracle (working through the ordinary physical laws), it would show up as something like an additional force we werenât aware of on the object.
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No, I canât. I donât understand what you mean by it. Were the events independent, and if so what does that mean? Did God do anything other than infuse meaning?
Why would you suppose that? And does it mean that every event is a God-caused miracle, or does it mean something less than that?
Iâd say that the pool shot itself was a miracle but that present events following from it would not be. But we arenât really considering the pool shot here, are we?
Agreed. Still, any intervention, no matter how small, would be a miracle.
I canât agree.
True. But it would violate conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, and other things.
That would be a logical contradiction.
Yes. A force with no physical cause, a violation of physical causation, i.e. a miracle.
They were not causally connected, as far as science can detect.
He solved or mitigated Maggieâs immediate problems.