Matthew_Opitz comments on Questions on Theism - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Aiyen 08 October 2014 09:02PM

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Comment author: DanielLC 08 October 2014 09:44:25PM 1 point [-]

Whether you say something happened because of a physical process you haven't yet come to understand or the ineffable will of god, you're basically just saying you don't know why it happened. Neither theory has any explanatory power, and random miracles aren't evidence either way. If you claim that miracles are due to the perfectly understandable will of god, and demonstrate that people that follow Christian values are consistently helped by miracles and people who do not are consistently hurt by them, that would be a different story. But since we haven't observed that, miracles aren't evidence for a god.

Comment author: Matthew_Opitz 09 October 2014 01:43:07AM -1 points [-]

If god were perfectly understandable, if his miracles were repeatable, and if you could devise a perfect algorithm to elicit miracles from god, then how would "god" be distinct from "the natural world"? Wouldn't it be more parsimonious to say, "We have gravity that says if you do X then Y happens, we have electromagnetism that says that if you do X then Y happens....and then there's this "god" rule to the universe which says if you do X then Y happens."

Of course, if you approach the Christian god in this way, Christians will immediately object and say that "god does not like to be tested," as if they have a priori decided that they don't want to think of themselves as living in a predictable universe. Strange preference, that....

Comment author: DanielLC 09 October 2014 02:25:37AM 2 points [-]

God is sentient.

I don't mean to say that you should be able to perfectly predict god, but if unless you have some idea of what he'll do you can't really get any evidence of that theory over the theory that stuff happens at random.