God limited intervention for vast periods even during Biblical times. Large-scale miracles only happened frequently during the Exodus, Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, Elijah/Elisha, the book of Daniel, Jesus and the early church. These are the ones I remember off the top of my head. All of these are stretches of time no more than 1-2 decades. There were large stretches of time during the intertestamental period, the united and separated kingdoms of Israel, the Babylonian captivity which were more or less pretty “quiet”. So we’re not living in a very odd time, not seeing many large-scale miracles.
This is what I originally wrote:
Notice the big if there John? I thought it was pretty clear from the beginning that this is a fundamental difference in epistemology.
Any discussion of how God works within a Christian worldview has to involve revelation - otherwise it would be useless, no Christian would accept it. By its very nature, being a philosophical and theological investigation rather than a strictly scientific, empirical one, we will never be able to answer the question with the same kind of certainty as purely scientific questions. But we can work out the theological and scientific options available to us, similar to the GA model.
I disagree. I believe that my scientific and theological epistemologies fit around each other without contradiction. I don’t think that I’ve fully worked it all out - there are many questions that I don’t know the answer to, as we’ve seen in this exchange. If someone points out a clear contradiction or tension in my belief system, I might amend or rethink parts of it. (Finding the GA model was an instance of that.) But nothing you have said here has moved me towards that.
I suspect that people who accuse Christian scientists like me of compartmentalization only do so because they have pretty naive epistemologies which are basically a variant of scientism, and expect everyone to believe the same as them. These epistemologies are excellent for purely scientific investigation, but they fail to take into account the depth and breath of questions that philosophy and theology attempt to answer. The fact is that among philosophers (including non-theistic ones) who have actually thought carefully about various issues in epistemology and metaphysics, naive scientism is untenable. I’m reminded of @PdotdQ’s comment some time ago, that scientists who are religious on average seem to know more about philosophy and non-scientific matters, perhaps because they have to think about such things given their religious background.
Even if God didn’t exist, theology has a lot to say about the human condition and human desires. Something as deep as theology can’t be rendered irrelevant by a series of gotcha questions or pointing to science.