Dear Gordon,
I stand corrected on the idea of wind being used to divide the sea; I
should have checked the text!
However I believe that the original point still stands; I don't think there
is any conceptual difference between the Lord causing something to happen by
lots of subtle invisible "interventions" and one big one.
Presumably miracles of the type of raising someone from the dead, turning
water into wine, walking on water, or indeed a withered arm growing back (as
I reported in an earlier post- about third hand) would be of the latter
kind.
I guess it's just that the "big spectacular" kind is far more difficult for
a skeptic to explain away. I once had spoken to a caller at the Samaritans
for half the night, ending with the complete conviction that they were going
to kill themselves. I prayed, exhaustedly, that they would be found before
it was too late. What must have been no more than five minutes later, the
callers boss woke up, decided they were worried about the caller, and rushed
round to their house to find the pills taken, papers arranged in order and
so forth. The caller was rushed to hospital in time and was saved. Now a
skeptic could well shrug that off as "coincidence", though I would consider
it a miracle (another volunteer, also a Christian, rang to tell me the next
day). But on the other hand, a very visible, spectacular healing could not
in any way be so easily shrugged off.
Iain.
----- Original Message -----
From: gordon brown <gbrown@euclid.colorado.edu>
To: Iain Strachan <iain@istrachan.clara.co.uk>
Cc: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 12, 2001 11:29 PM
Subject: Re: Miracles and Science
> Iain,
>
> Exodus 14:21 clearly indicates that the Lord used wind to divide the
> waters of the Red Sea, and so the timing was what I would consider to be
> miraculous. A few years ago two Israelis did a computer simulation to see
> what a sustained very strong wind would do at the presumed site of the
> crossing and concluded that it would do what Exodus said it did. I don't
> believe that God's involvement in an extremely unusual meteorological
> phenomenon has to be any different from his involvement in what we would
> consider to be normal weather.
>
> I once visited the Neusiedlersee (if I correctly remember the name), a
> lake on the border between Austria and Hungary. Although this lake has a
> large area, it is only 1.8 meters (about 6 ft.) deep at its deepest point.
> The residents of that area say that when there is a very strong wind in
> the right direction, all the water is blown to the Hungarian end of the
> lake. There have been occasions when people wandered out onto the dry part
> of the lake bed and were drowned when the water suddenly returned. The
> resemblance of this phenomenon to that of the Red Sea crossing supports
> the idea that it was the timing that should be regarded as the most
> remarkable aspect.
>
> Gordon Brown
> Department of Mathematics
> University of Colorado
> Boulder, CO 80309-0395
>
>
> On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, Iain Strachan wrote:
>
> > 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.
> >
> >
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 12 2001 - 19:03:25 EST