Re: Methodological naturalism & parallel tension in Christian thought

A few years ago, I was asked to see a patient who was not
waking up after a cardiac bypass. Unfortunately, he had a
long period of hypotension and as a result was suffering
from anoxic encephalopathy. This has a highly variable
outcome, but he had many risk factors working against him,
such as age, other comorbidities, and the length of time
that he was continuing to be unresponsive.

Months went by. In general patients that have a coma from
anoxic injury, and then awake to a vegetative state, and
remain in a vegetative state for months, often remain in a
vegetative state permanantly. And this patient was still
in a vegetative state months later, after having many
other complications, and was still in the hospital.

And then on Easter morning, many months after the surgery,
I walked into his room and he said "good morning"!

It was a dramatic change.

So one could look at a story like this and proclaim it to
be a miracle. Others could look at this and say, well,
this kind of thing happens from time to time. And it is
true, this kind of thing does happen, but this case was an
outlier. Certainly the family, the patients' clergy, and
the friends that were praying for him see this as a
miracle.

I dont know if it was a miracle or not. However, I dont
think that one can point to this, or other things like it,
and claim that it is proof that God exists.

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 05:28:13 -0600
  Mervin Bitikofer <mrb22667@kansas.net> wrote:
> It seems to me that Christians have their own version of
>"m.n." to contend with. We pray, yes, but we also work
>(or we should) as if the very solution itself must come
>from our own hands. The paradox is that we know it
>really comes from God whether or not our own hands had a
>part in the orchestration. I see no conflict with the
>scientist, Christian or otherwise, acknowledging the
>limitation of scientific method to a naturalistic
>methodology. The difference is that the Christian sees
>this as a real and substantial limitation because he
>believes in a Creator that transcends the created and
>even operates on it and within it. Naturally, science
>cannot touch this, although as an unbelieving friend of
>mine insists, science should still be able to at least
>observe these alleged interventions and recognize them as
>such. The unbeliever, on the other hand, sees this
>acknowledgment (the m.n. limitation) as a trivial (indeed
>meaningless) concession because he doesn't believe
>anything else exists anyway. He is happy to toss what he
>sees as a 'phantom bone' to the philosophers and
>proselytes. Our preconception in this will determine
>how we define science, and hence whether or not it would
>be possible to recognize a 'miracle'. The unbeliever
>sees a fantastic phenomenon and immediately subsumes it
>into his repertoire of observed naturalistic phenomena -
>he sets about finding the natural causes (or discovering
>the 'trick' if it was a human contrivance), and the
>possibility of 'miracle' is precluded for him from the
>outset. The most he can concede on it is that it may
>remain for the moment an unsolved mystery. Hence, the
>philosophical "skeptic" assures by his own preconceptions
>that no divine interventions will ever be observed. The
>believer can (and as a scientific thinker probably will)
>do all the same things with the one significant
>difference being that he does not, from the outset,
>preclude the possibility of the Divine hand. Another
>non-trivial difference is that the believer ought not
>concede in the first place, that naturalistic phenomena
>cannot be of Divine origin. For him, everything -
>whether gap or not, is a subset of the Divine reality.
>
>
Received on Tue Jan 10 08:53:18 2006