John wrote,
>
> I was thinking more about what you wrote. As scientists, we pretty much
> adhere closely
> to William of Ockham's "razor" principle, and I think I respect that. For
I too am a devotee of Occam's "razor", and it is often invoked in my field
(Neural networks and Probabilistic modelling), in a probabalistic form; the
most simple "explanation" is also the most probable one.
However, the problem is that atheistic scientists such as Richard Dawkins
and Peter Atkins then use the Razor to shave out God. Once we have
establisted that everything can spontaneously arise by chance processes
(evolution), then we already have a "lazy Creator". Once this can then be
pushed even further to the idea of an infinitely lazy Creator, who has to do
precisely nothing to explain everything, then by the principle of Occam's
Razor, we can (and should) eliminate the Creator altogether, because He had
nothing to do.
James Taggart wrote:
There is a slightly different view you can take on the seeming conflict
between miracles and science, particularly biblical miracles. In many
cases, the issue may not be how the event took place, but rather when. I
am willing to believe that the parting of the Red Sea for the Israelites
was a fortuitous confluence of wind, tide, and perhaps sand drift that
enabled the Israelites to cross on foot.
It seems there are two possible views of the miraculous at work here:
(1) God working subtly through natural processes, but causing natural events
to happen at the right time.
(2) God deliberately and spectacularly violation the laws of Physics to
produce a visible miracle.
I'm kind of inclined to think that the two are really no different. Take
the parting of the Red Sea example. Actually I find it a little bit hard to
believe that meteorological conditions could naturally cause the sea to
part, but suppose that was possible without "miracles". We still have to
understand how God caused the "coincidence" to happen. It is often said of
chaos theory (I believe?) that the flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause
a tornado the other side of the world three weeks later. So it's possible
that the small, subtle change of an event might cause such a thing to
happen. And clearly the calculation of the consequences would be easy for
an omnipotent creator. But when it comes down to it, there is still a
violation of the natural order, where God "intervenes" and causes the
butterfly, or whatever, to flap its wings in just the right direction to
cause the wind that parted the sea. Thus, information is planted in from
outside that makes the course of history change. The information is
ultimately the firing of electrical pulses in a set of neurons, and
therefore is still "miraculous"; God had to change the electrical signals
from what they were going to be; and conceptually I can't really see the
difference between that, and a miraculous parting of the sea by unnatural
causes (except in scale).
Hope that makes some sense!
Iain.
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