>Miracles
> WHY! who makes much of a miracle?
> As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,
> etc....
IMHO, you are confusing providence with miracles. It's a matter of
definition, of course, but I think it is an important distinction to make in
*this* discussion. It may not be important or even desirable in other contexts.
Steve Clark wrote, concerning my Chesterton quote,
>You can take the worst of materialism and compare it to the best of theism
>and reach the above conclusion. But it ignores those places where the best
>of materialism confronts the worst of theism.
I suppose you're saying here that the best of materialism is TE theism, i.e.
that we see the hand of Providence in origins, but not miracles. Though I
think your logic is in order, I'm not sure it is faithful to the Scriptures.
SC
>I posed a question earlier that you skipped. In the natural world, how do
>we know when materialism will be insufficient to explain a phenomenon? Or
>put differently, how do we distinguish miracles from natural events. Let's
>take the parting of the Red Sea. Was this a miracle or an event explainable
>by natural causes?
A miracle is when the materialistic cause is insufficient to explain the effect.
Often it is difficult to know all the materialistic causes, so we can't say
whether a certain person's recovery in our church was a miracle. But when
the Bible calls something a miracle (in so many words), then we should
accept it.
The parting of the Red sea is both a miracle and an event explainable by
natural causes.
Ex. 14:21-22 "Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that
night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into
dry land. The waters were divided, and the Israelites went through the sea
on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left."
The wind is the natural cause; the fact that it came in response to Moses
stretching out his hand is the miracle. (BTW, I've heard that someone worked
out how the wind could do such a thing. Does this make sense? Could the wind
really make a wall of water without an extra push by God? Help me out here.)
Another example that comes to mind of a "miracle" being explanable via
natural causes is the Israelite crossing of the Jordan river in Joshua 3.
Joshua 3:15-16 "Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during harvest. Yet as
soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet
touched the water's edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled
up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam"
Here again, we see both a miracle and (I assume) natural causes together.
Perhaps the Jordan's banks caved in upstream precisely at the time the
priests put their feet into the water. The miracle was that the priests feet
touching the water caused the banks to cave in several miles (as I remember)
upstream.
Let me repeat my request for a third time. I'm still awaiting that list of
miracles TEs believe are a part of origins.
Jim
Jim Blake
Associate Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843