Whether divine guidence can be detected

I agree with this. If by “gods” one means specific creaturely entities like intelligent aliens with biological bodies, or even (say) intelligent, super-powerful aliens which have ghost-like bodies that only interact via the weak force (like neutrinos), then in principle we could detect them. They would be like detecting the presence of other humans. This is similar to what projects like SETI are trying to accomplish.

But in general that is not what most Christian, Muslim, and Jewish theologians have in mind when thinking about God (with a capital “G”). According to this understanding, God is everywhere (immanent) in the universe yet not identified with it (transcendent). God is not subject to constraints like being only able to interact via the weak force, in fact he is the one who “runs the hardware” of the universe by sustaining its law-like operations.

Thus, while science can certainly test for certain specific, narrow scenarios of guidance by “gods” or God - for example, scenarios where such guidance results in clear discontinuities in the regularity of nature, there are two problems:

First, while science may be able to detect a discontinuity, it is unclear to me that it could attribute the discontinuity specifically to God (as opposed to gods) based on the scientific evidence alone. To take an extreme example, even if we had irrefutable scientific proof that Jesus turned water into wine, it would theoretically be consistent with Jesus being a hyper-advanced alien with powerful synthetic chemistry capabilities (i.e. a “god”), not necessarily that he is the Son of God. Because the concept of God is so all-encompassing and general, it does not lend itself well to specific testable hypotheses of the kind that science studies. In this sense, God is before science, not an object of science.

Second, it isn’t clear that the detection (or lack of detection) of such discontinuities has much to say about how God (with a capital G) accomplishes his will in the universe at large. Although (for example) many Christians do believe that God did directly cause such discontinuities several times in history (such as in the case of the Resurrection), that is not the norm, since the Bible also clearly proclaims the handiwork of God in the regular, law-like operations of the Universe.

In general, I think science is best for testing certain specific scenarios espoused by certain theologians, such as YECs arguing (implicitly) that if God exists and created the universe, then it must be less then 10,000 years old. Because science can judge if that question is true, then science can judge if the YEC narrative of the world is correct. But that does not rule out large classes of completely different narratives about God.

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