What’s Wrong with the World

"Probability isn't just a subjective function of the perspective from which one chooses to look at something." - Your response in the debate about evil spirits. You appear to be making a contradictory claim here.

Lydia, this is good. Thank you so much. From what I gather about your correspondent, he is probably a very smart and handsome guy. Keep up the good work!

No, Step2, no contradiction. A person responds either rationally or irrationally to his evidence. That is an objective matter. I can be irrationally optimistic or pessimistic about the evidence I actually have. However, different people have different evidence. We see this in all sorts of trivial ways. I have different evidence about my house than you have about my house, for example. Some people have collected different evidence (perhaps, more evidence) favoring Christianity than other people have collected.

Now, it's quite possible that either a given skeptic or a given Christian is being irrational. I wasn't getting into that here. What I was saying was that if we imagine for the sake of the illustration a Christian who is actually rationally believing in the Christian God on the basis of independent evidence, this can make other conclusions rational, given the evidence that he actually has (that is, objectively rational). Those conclusions would not be rational if he did not have that evidence. Or, to put it differently, if he did not evaluate that evidence as he does and see the strength of the case, believing in God with an objectively well-based argument, but he nonetheless believed that God had brought about the coincidence, he would have an inconsistent probability function.

So probability is always relative to a *body of evidence*, which one person might have while another person didn't have the same evidence. But what that body of evidence supports or doesn't support is an objective matter.

Thanks, Joel, always glad to be helpful!

Some people have collected different evidence (perhaps, more evidence) favoring Christianity than other people have collected.

That shouldn't make much difference if their body of evidence is largely similar unless one person is predisposed to be skeptical while another is predisposed to see with "eyes of faith". But then we are right back to subjective perspectives.

For someone who dismisses the war between science and religion as atheist propaganda, you have gone a long way to showing that theistic belief fatally undermines coincidental and natural causes. Which is fine as far as I'm concerned, but at least admit there is an essential conflict between the two worldviews evidenced by totally different explanations for the same event.

Well, first of all, their bodies of evidence might _not_ be largely similar. They might be _quite_ different. You'd be surprised.

Second, let's go back to inconsistency. If we take it to be a problem with rationality to assert both A and ~A, then Joe Atheist has a problem if he simultaneously asserts, "God does not exist" and "God healed my brother." Whether Joe Atheist is _rational_ to be an atheist or not is a different matter and depends entirely on the body of evidence Joe Atheist possesses.

Now, Chris Christian doesn't, at a minimum, have this consistency problem with asserting, "God healed my brother." I was asking, by way of setting up the illustration, that we also assume that Chris Christian has good independent reason for being a Christian. (Remember? I set it up that way in the main post explicitly?) And under those circumstances, Chris Christian, who has prayed for his brother, should thank God for his brother's healing.

On to your talk about science and religion: God might deserve thanks for the healing of C.C.'s brother because God worked by way of a number of different means. For example, God _might_ have performed an actual physical miracle. But that isn't the only possibility. God might, instead, have subtly "brought things to the mind" of the doctors involved which led them to the right treatment. Or, if there isn't a metaphysical problem with this with causation (for the moment I'm just listing it as something to consider), God might have "taken into account" the fact that Chris _would_ pray for his brother and "front-loaded" the natural causes of the universe from the moment of creation so that Chris's brother would get better. If nothing else, God simply deserves thanks because he created the soul of the doctor with the seeds of brilliance that would ultimately allow the doctor to find a cure. Or the same, mutatis mutandis, for the original discoverers of the medicines and technologies used in treating Chris's brother. God, as Creator, is the source of all human creativity and genius at _some_ level, however you slice it, even if that doesn't involve some kind of right-here-right-now miracle, as it often doesn't in the case of an individual healing.

Now, I could go on listing these things, because there are more, but hopefully you get the idea. You will notice that only one of the above reasons for thanking God or ways in which God works or might have worked involved an immediate miracle.

By no means am I closed to the occurrence of immediate miracles, but they aren't the first thing I would assume in a fairly unremarkable case of the kind I had in mind.

Please remember, too, that I am not a materialist as far as individual humans are concerned, nor do I think _anyone_, not even a non-Christian, is reasonable to be a materialist. And once we are talking about minds, then all kinds of interactions take place. Anyone who thinks that "science can explain" in materialistic terms why Bob didn't commit suicide is, frankly, a fool. As someone I think very highly of puts it, science chooses to examine the questions it can tackle, and "Why doesn't Sally love me?" isn't one of those. The same applies for, "Why did Bob change his mind and not commit suicide?" or even "Why did Bob get into a heavy conversation with Chris?" Materialism should not be confused with science. If there is a "war" when it comes to explaining coincidences involving human beings and human minds, or human choices generally, it should be a war between common sense and materialism, not between religion and science.

There's actually a real guy named Chris Christian. He's a Christian songwriter who wrote some stuff for The Imperials, among others. :)

Oops. I wasn't thinking. Just making up a name with "Christian" as the last name.

That shouldn't make much difference if their body of evidence is largely similar unless one person is predisposed to be skeptical while another is predisposed to see with "eyes of faith". But then we are right back to subjective perspectives.

In my experience, a great many if not most theists in this country have a decent grasp of a certain amount of science (having had it drummed into them for 12 years of school, at a minimum), and most atheists are at least aware of claims of miracles and similar "direct" evidence of supernatural things. But these are not properly parallel tracks: the theists often or usually believe and accept the bona fides of the claims of science, they accept (for example) that when scientists claim to have experimentally verified X prediction from Y law, that generally the scientists really did the experiment and the result is really the way they claimed, and they were not deluded by their senses or by their hopes of seeing X results (in spite of the fact that (a) something like 50% of high school science experiments are flops in terms of actually showing the law they are designed to show, and (b) there are known instances of scientists fudging the evidence and con men making scientific claims - i.e. in spite of some indicators that the evidence is troublesome or mixed). Typically, though, going the other way, many or most atheists DO NOT credit the bona fides of theists' claims of any miracles: they generally insist that the person is stupid and couldn't tell X from Y, or was snookered by a con man, or was out of his mind at the time, or that he was seeing what he hoped to see, or that it was an optical illusion - often without actually knowing the witness or the actual details of what transpired. Saying one or all of these things about the claim before knowing any of the details is either (a) a prejudiced attitude about what constitutes "the body of evidence" to be considered, or (b) it must come from a pre-existent belief in a metaphysical world-picture which is fundamentally incompatible with supernatural events. Of course, (b) is certainly at least as much a belief-based perspective about the world as is the theists belief in God, so it does him no good at all to claim it as a basis for discounting the evidence of miracles to a theist. And (a) is just prejudice.

But when impartial atheists and agnostics take a close look at the body of carefully documented miracles, such as 1 or 2 cures each year at Lourdes (out of hundreds claimed cures each year for which little documentation exists), there are certainly cases of such atheists changing their minds and becoming theists, and many other atheists coming away saying "well, I don't know how to account for it naturally, worse I don't have even the start of a hypothesis for how it could be accounted for naturally, and I am going to keep a more open mind about it in the future because it is a real puzzle." I.E. who realize and accept that the evidence is real, bona fide evidence that they are intellectually obligated to consider, and the evidence is not all on the atheistic side.

On the other hand, there are some considerable number of theists who study science sufficiently to become professional scientists who yet remain theists - and not in just one or two scientific disciplines, but in most - who see nothing inapposite in their holding both science and theism.

So, in answer to Step2's comment, I would ask whether the body of evidence each is "taking into account as bona fide evidence" is largely similar? Because I am not so sure it is.

I saw your post through the CAA. THANK YOU for writing this. It is extrememly helpful in a very practical way to me. My brother and I were just discussing this very thing and I was a bit at a loss. This helps. Thank you for the distinction you make.

Therefore, such experiences and coincidences should not be an important ground of my faith. They are too weak a reed in themselves. In themselves they can be explained away too easily. Rather, they should be received gratefully as gifts from God by one who already knows, for other reasons, that God exists "and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him."

I especially appreciate this, Lydia. I have seen, in this emotion- and experience-driven age, way too many people rely on such experiences for proof of God's existence and then become angry or discouraged or even despairing when the answer they were looking for to their prayers doesn't occur. I've seen people call believers liars because they don't get the desired answers to their prayers ("you didn't really pray":or "you don't have enough faith"). And I'm right now watching a person I know devolving into insanity because of an insistent, irrational belief that prayer ought to "fix" things so that suffering and sadness and difficulties just melt away somehow.

We must have those other grounds for belief, and then experiences such as these take their rightful place as you have described it.

I would say, too, that simply being aware of this claim or that on either side isn't anywhere _near_ having approximately the same body of evidence. It's a matter of knowing the supporting evidence in some detail. There is a huge lack of overlap there between the theistic and atheistic sides. I'm not casting blame for that right here but merely saying that it doesn't do *at all* to throw around notions like "they have approximately the same evidence" loosely.

As for accepting or evaluating evidence differently, I suppose that Step2 would take that somehow to confirm his point (if he has a point). But I never said that two different people *will* evaluate a piece of evidence, even when it is the same on both sides, in identical fashions, merely that there is a fact of the matter regarding how it ought to be evaluated. (And of course background knowledge makes a huge difference as well.) When one person *does not* accept something as evidence, he will usually try to make the rest of his beliefs consistent with that rejection of that statement, for obvious reasons (desiring consistency). I was merely asking that we imagine a Christian who can and does believe in Christianity both consistently and rationally, as (by definition) an agnostic or atheist cannot do at some time t while simultaneously remaining an agnostic or atheist.

Bethany, thank you for your encouraging words. It's always helpful to know that one has made the right decision in writing a post.

Beth, those stories are tragic and even frightening. I know of a deconversion somewhat like them, prompted by the fact that a woman for whom a church was praying died. One wants to say that people in such situations were looking for a reason to deconvert anyway, but it's hard to be sure. C.S. Lewis has so many, many wise things to say about not being dependent upon experiences or God's apparent private revelation of Himself to the individual. I strongly recommend all that he writes on the subject, much of it in The Screwtape Letters. Lewis tells in Surprised by Joy about how he was motivated as a devout youngster to become less devout and eventually become an atheist. He had decided that whenever he prayed, which he had time to do only late at night, he must not go to sleep until he had "realized" his prayers. This category, which evidently he made up himself, had to do with a certain set of feelings about the prayers and God and their reality. He made himself exhausted and miserable in this way and was only too glad when a housemother who was into theosophy or spiritualism or something of the kind "convinced" him that Christianity was false.

He had decided that whenever he prayed, which he had time to do only late at night, he must not go to sleep until he had "realized" his prayers.

I know that many youngsters get warped ideas in their heads about what Christianity is calling for, like this one. The importance of our praying doesn't rest on how firmly we pray, but the purity of love with which we pray - i.e. the degree to which our love conforms us to God. And the efficacy of the prayers doesn't derive from us at all, it derives from God who grants gifts out of his mercy, not out of our deserving them (thank God). Even with the apostles like Paul and John, even with their great love, sometimes God's answer to their prayers of petition was "no". Heck, that was true even of Jesus' prayer in the garden of Gethsemane.

I know people who, in grave doubts about their faith, prayed for a miraculous sign, and when it was not granted walked away from Christianity. Without trying to pretend any kind of judgment on any individuals, I wonder whether this sort of thing is sometimes a case where, in their consenting to such doubts, they were already working against the gift of faith rather than cooperating with it. There is an old saying of John Henry Newman's, 10,000 difficulties do not make one single doubt: to doubt apparently implies some further kind of willfulness toward the difficulty, some sort of consent. Also, Jesus reminds the devil tempting Him that Scripture says "Do not put the Lord thy God to the test," which would make sense of Newman's comment: to have a _difficulty_ is to have a matter that you are not yet able to resolve though you (by default if nothing else) remain confident that a solution exists, whereas to have a doubt seems to be to at least to remove the default confidence, and turn it the other way and say, effectively, "I have this difficulty and if it is not solved satisfactorily then I will have to give up on Christ." But that latter quality is not that of faith, it is a different condition. So in a sense the person who says this firmly and definitively may already be without faith. (Although a person may be merely tempted to think this instead, or maybe only trying it on for size to see if they really think it, so it is not for us to judge.)

That shouldn't make much difference if their body of evidence is largely similar unless one person is predisposed to be skeptical while another is predisposed to see with "eyes of faith". But then we are right back to subjective perspectives.

I do not devalue the impact of fortuitous and serendipitous coincidences and encounters in one's spiritual life; indeed such experiences can edify and reinforce one's faith and allow one to discern and follow God's will from the perspective of the recipient. Moreover, my own faith is the consequence of a coincidence. One morning about a year ago, I attended noon Mass at the parish where I was baptized simply to experience Mass a secular, exotic experience (I wasn't a spiritual seeker and regarded religion as bunkum). During my second time there, I encountered a young woman who offered to sit by me during Mass. Due to my divergent political and philosophical views when compared to the parish and personality traits (high introversion due to autism), I preferred to observe Mass as a detached and indifferent spectator at a distance from the rest of the parish, and I initially found her unsolicited offer unusual. During the course of the Mass, I slowly became impressed by the her sincere participation, especially her singing of the hymns and her humble conduct. She merely did not have a euphonious voice: her singing conveys her sincere and faithful love of God and is not used to advance her interests, but to glorify her benevolent creator. My encounter with her made a preternatural impression on me, and led me to question whether I should adopt her faithful attitude and abandon my skepticism. After sitting by her during Mass for about a month, I decided to pray for faith, since I believed that I could not acquire it endogenously without divine intervention, and the Spirit eventually responded to my earnest entreaty. In retrospect, I obviously regarded my encounter with the young woman as divine providence. It was not merely a improbable event with little significance: given that it is unlikely that someone would approach a visitor during Mass, the likely outcome is that I would have attended only a few more services before I would decide to spend my Sundays elsewhere without having my inveterate prejudices against religion being challenged. In the counterfactual scenario where I did not encounter her, I would not be a Catholic today.

Still, this is a subjective testimony, not an argument for revealed religion, but it still has the power to demonstrate the immanent presence of God in our personal lives to my faithful friends and myself and fortify our faith.

Because of my conversion experience and time as an agnostic, I consider myself a weak fideist who tends to emphasize the weakness of evidentialist arguments when converting someone's conscience. I understand the limitations of using empiricist and rationalist arguments based on natural theology; at best, such apologetics can tenably defend the transcendent attributes of God, that He created the universe and designed its physical laws to make it possible for the evolution of sentient life. But in such disputations, even a well-formulated theistic argument does not overwhelming establish the necessity of God's existence, since there are reasonably counterarguments for the naturalistic case. Even though these arguments do not conclusive demonstrate the existence of God on a critical level, they can still leave powerful impressions on one's mind on an intuitive level. I knew the fine-tuning argument and various difficulties of naturalistic origin of life hypotheses (particularly the RNA world hypothesis) quite intimately, but it was not sufficient for religious faith. The young woman does not possess the scientific competence and knowledge to even comprehend those subjects, yet she is a fervent Catholic despite that. Compared to her faith, those arguments are quite weak. And I would never consider using the "problems" of the RNA world hypothesis as a religious apologetic, although I would hesitate to note that the evidence has not yet firmly established its prebiotic plausibility.

I agree with Step2. An atheist/agnostic can credibly argue that my faith is rooted in subjective experience that is interpreted by a bias mind, while in contrast, scientific inquiry tries to divorce subjective perspective so it can reach universal, objective conclusion through analytical and rigorous thinking. There are no statistical tests or rigorously stated null hypotheses with strictly quantified terms and known probability distributions to test the proposition of a benevolent God who intervenes in our personal lives. I can't say my own spiritual experience has an impressively low p-value such as p = 1.4 x 10-9, nor could anyone here.

* I would not hesitate to note.

I don't do p-values. I'm a Bayesian. :-) Though not a subjective one. It's important not to put artificial constraints on the strength of arguments. We believe with good, non-subjective justification that Napoleon existed and conquered most of Europe even though we don't have "statistical tests or rigorously stated null hypotheses with strictly quantified terms and known probability distributions" to test the proposition of Napoleon's existence and behavior. And the same for all of the people you know personally, all historical figures, and so forth. For that matter, I would suggest that the proposition, "S actually performed x experiment and got y result," necessary for establishing a scientific theory in chemistry or physics, does not have these hyper-precise features in its epistemic ancestry. In any event, BR, I would just note that there's _even more_ evidence for Christianity than what you've mentioned, though the ool issue is nothing to sneeze at.

I have a feeling I may be missing some important subtleties in this reasoning, but I have to ask what may be a naive question: if the appearance of an answered prayer (for example) is treated as any kind of evidence at all, however insignificant all things considered, then what is the epistemic status of the appearance of an unanswered prayer? Sure, I get the point that one can reasonably treat the former as evidence of a certain kind without placing too much importance on it. But in the experience of most people it will happen very, very often that prayers seem to go unanswered -- maybe just as often, or more often, than they seem to be answered. So if we are treating the relevant evidence in an even-handed way, wouldn't that second kind of evidence be significant *enough* to cancel (for most of us) the evidence from answered prayers? And the same would seem to be true for the other kinds of "coincidences" under discussion. Or am I overlooking something here?

Jasper, I would say that because such experiences cannot be in themselves grounds for faith, therefore other grounds teach me how to respond to "unanswered" prayers. For example, many people have been praying for a particular result from a medical test I had the other day, and just a bit ago the doctor called to tell me that the opposite result had been found. I don't take that to be "unanswered" prayer, however. Rather, I take that to mean that God has seen fit to allow me to go through a larger trial of faith than I'd asked might be the case, and therefore He has my good in mind in a different way than we had prayed for it. All prayer is to be "if it be Thy will," which means that we should never pray without the willingness for our prayers to be answered differently than we might wish or hope -- and that such an answer stays within God's sovereignty and requires me to continue in faith and trust. I can, of course, have this view only if I am not relying on mere experiences as the ground of my faith.

Beth,
That is a proper British attitude. Keep Calm and Carry On. I would like to add that you are very much an integral part of this strange tribe at W4, and we all sincerely hope for your best health and continued graciousness and insight.

Jasper, I think it's important to remember that my biggest point in the main post was that we should *not* think of answered prayers in many ordinary cases as being of significant evidential value. The qualifier "in most ordinary cases" is there for a reason, of course. If you prayed for protection from a pursuer and fire came from heaven and killed said pursuer, that particular answer to prayer should be given significant evidential weight. Everything has to be evaluated in terms of the particulars of the case. But in a large range of garden-variety cases, I was arguing that we should _not_ lean any significant amount of evidential weight on the confluence of prayer and the result prayed for. So it surprises me a little that you're asking the question that you are asking about unanswered (or, as Beth aptly points out, "unanswered") prayer.

However, your question does raise an interesting evidential point which I will address briefly: In a huge range of situations, there is a gigantic asymmetry between the importance of the presence of a piece of evidence and the importance of its absence. Hence the weakness of many arguments from silence. Let me give you an example. Suppose that you are having what seems to be a detailed, face-to-face conversation with your wife. This is great evidence that your wife exists. If, on the other hand, you aren't presently having what seems to be a detailed, face-to-face conversation with your wife, the absence of those particular wife-type experiences is evidence against your wife's existence so weak as to be evidentially invisible for all practical purposes. There is simply no comparison between the extent to which _having_ a particular conversation _confirms_ your wife's existence and the extent to which _not having_ a particular conversation _disconfirms_ your wife's existence.

Similarly, suppose that you have excellent independent evidence that a particular person exists, and you call and leave a message on his answering machine. If he does return your call, this is great evidence that he exists. But if he never returns your call, this is only the weakest possible evidence that he doesn't exist at all. After all, there are many, many possible explanations for his not returning your call besides his never having existed.

There are innumerable such examples that I could give. I could literally go on all day long. Our lives are full of such examples.

So, even in an isolated case where I did believe that an apparent answer to prayer was significant evidence (such as the hypothetical pursuer-struck-by-fire-from-heaven), it would by no means follow that if that prayer had apparently gone unanswered--e.g., if you were caught by the pursuer--that would be similarly strong evidence against the truth of Christianity.

Hence, it really won't do at all to talk about apparently unanswered prayers as canceling the effects of apparently answered prayers. We simply can't make a statement like that. One would have to look at the particulars. I myself would say that all the apparently unanswered prayers of the rest of my life would be overwhelmingly insufficient to "cancel" the effect of seeing my pursuer struck down by fire from heaven after praying for deliverance. :-)

Step2, my British blood is many generations back by now, but I spend much of my life immersed in British literature, so perhaps that is one cause of my "carry-on" attitude (the other main one being raised by Depression-era parents!). Thank you for your kind words; they do mean much to me.

Step2, I second that thought most thoroughly.

A further aspect to Beth's answer: When you ask God for something, His answer might be yes or it might be no. (The "no" answer is not the same thing as not getting an answer, though). In addition to Beth's wise conclusion that therefore He has my good in mind in a different way than we had prayed for it, some of the saints say that in God's infinite mercy whenever God says "no" to a prayer it is because the alternative He has in mind is even better than what we asked for. Sometimes, a week or a month or 10 years down the road, we can see clearly just that fact: that the thing God gave us instead of what we asked for IS better. So, part of the answer to Jasper's question is: sometimes we clearly see that the answer we got is better than what we asked for.

One of the necessary aspects of having faith is accepting that we see unclearly now - through a glass darkly. It is only in the hereafter that we will see all of it clearly. So, if we ask for X and get Y instead, in faith we must accept that we won't always see the reason why Y is better than X for quite some time, maybe a whole lifetime, or sometimes within this life, just "later." So, when we get a "no" answer from God, or perhaps it looks like we don't get any answer, why are we to assume that the explanation for that should be up front here and now? Maybe the "no" is now with the explanation why that is better coming in 5 years, and so the evidentiary value" isn't complete yet: the evidence isn't all in yet. So, to give another partial answer to Jasper, we have to learn to look at the evidence in the proper light, and that can require some discipline while we wait for the evidence to amass itself, sometimes for a long time. As with unanswered questions (including scientific ones) generally, it requires allowing your mind to remain in tension and without resolution, accepting that "I don't know the answer" does not count as evidence that there is no answer.

I understand the limitations of using empiricist and rationalist arguments based on natural theology; at best, such apologetics can tenably defend the transcendent attributes of God, that He created the universe and designed its physical laws to make it possible for the evolution of sentient life. But in such disputations, even a well-formulated theistic argument does not overwhelming establish the necessity of God's existence, since there are reasonably counterarguments for the naturalistic case. Even though these arguments do not conclusive demonstrate the existence of God on a critical level, they can still leave powerful impressions on one's mind on an intuitive level.

Black-Rose, I would be a little more cautious in drawing conclusions about how these natural theology arguments play out among non-Christian thinkers. The fact that a non-Christian philosopher denigrates the argument from causality, or the argument from contingent & necessary being, DOES NOT imply that either of these arguments is in themselves wrong or even doubtful. Just as the fact that there are people who insist the world is flat does not establish that the scientific proof the world is round is a doubtful argument in itself. It's the difference between the argument itself and the subjective effect on a particular person's mind by the argument. The argument from contingent and necessary being either is a truly valid argument in itself, or it is NOT a valid argument in itself, whether Richard Dawkins agrees with it or not.

The reason I insist on the point is that the Church herself actually insists on the point: that the existence of God can be known _definitively_ by the natural light of reason, not just probably, not just without a _reasonable_ doubt, but definitively. In theory that teaching could be in reference to some philosophical argument that is so difficult, so abstruse and complex that only the smartest 50 people ever will truly grasp it, so maybe for the mass of us that argument won't be all that useful. But it's still a point the Church insists upon.

But you are absolutely right to point out that none of these arguments, no matter how valid in themselves AND no matter how well grasped by the human intellect, are sufficient for faith. That's because our adherence to the truths about God in faith are stronger than our adherence to truths seen by the natural light of reason, even truths seen with complete clarity such as mathematical demonstrations. Also, our adherence to faith is bound up in our having God within our souls moving us to assent to His word - so faith has God both as its object and as its moving agent. So, no matter how well we study the natural theological arguments for the existence (and attributes) of God, we cannot neglect faith since it is much more critical.

it requires allowing your mind to remain in tension and without resolution

Negative capability -- yes! (Keats)

And learning to rest in that tension is, to my mind, the strongest faith there is. I have been blessed to know many people who have demonstrated this for me, encouraging me to try to grasp it and live by it.

Hi Lydia, and Beth.

I don't think that these comments really directly address the point I was trying to make. Maybe it wasn't clear enough. First, Beth's scare quotes aren't really adding anything to my way of framing the issue: I didn't speak of "unanswered" prayers, but I did speak of the *appearance* of unanswered prayers, so as not to presuppose that we know which (if any) are ever really answered or not. Second, although Lydia does emphasize that, in her original post, she spoke of giving only a very little evidential significance to apparently answered prayers -- at least most of the time -- that was precisely the way in which I framed my question. Granting that the evidential value of such things might often be very slight, all things considered, the claim that they do (often, or typically) count as *some* kind of evidence is enough to raise the question of why apparently unanswered prayers would not count as evidence of the same general kind, with the same general kind of value -- and then my further question was why, given the experiences most of us have, the latter would not tend to cancel the former.

According to Beth, it would seem that the answer is something like this: they don't cancel it, because she already has a strong basis for her religious beliefs, in light of which she is warranted in construing only the former class of experiences as evidence and not the latter. This seems to involve some worrying kind of bootstrapping. She acquires new evidence (however slight all things considered) only because she already accepts the beliefs meant to be supported by that evidence, and on that same basis rejects what would otherwise seem to be evidence with the same profile against those beliefs. The idea is not obviously wrong, of course, but I'd like to hear more about how this works...

According to Lydia, the one kind of evidence doesn't cancel the other because of facts about the overall epistemic situation, I guess. But I'm still not seeing how this connects with my question. True, if a prayer for heavenly fire is immediately followed by giant flames from the sky, then *that* might well count for more than the mere fact that many prayers seem to go unanswered. But I was asking about the ordinary experiences most of us have. For most of us, there are no such spectacular "answers", but only a very mixed and ambiguous series of experiences. (We also are not normally in a situation where the seemingly answered prayer is like the evidence we have in a face-to-face conversation with Mrs.X, for the conclusion that Mrs.X exists.) It sometimes seems like we're getting what we asked for, or some of it, or sort of getting it, and sometimes -- roughly as often, I suspect -- it seems we're not getting any of it. So how does the business about the "particulars" of a person's situation help with this? What I am describing (I think?) is a set of very familiar particulars, in light of which it seems hard to explain giving *some* evidential value to certain experiences but none to others that seem relevantly similar.

Jasper, I don't have a lot of time right now, but I'll just say this: I don't "reject" the evidence of "unanswered" prayer. In fact, that's why I use the scare quotes, because I don't believe that God doesn't answer prayer. For me, the fact that a prayer isn't answered in the way I might want it to be is not evidence against the existence or care of God. It is, rather, evidence that God does not agree that what I requested is what is best, and that I must look for His answer elsewhere than in my desire or preference. I have on this basis found myself making specific prayer requests less than I used to, and praying more often for one thing that I know with absolute certainty will always be answered "yes" -- that God may be glorified in whatever the situation is.

This may not answer your concern, and I'm afraid I have no idea what you mean by "troublesome bootstrapping," but it's the best I can do to explain myself at this particular time. I expect Lydia or Tony can do better.

The philosopher Bill Vallicella, describing the grades of prayer as he sees them,

"1. The lowest grade is that of petitionary prayer for material benefits. One asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessionary prayer, for another. In its crassest forms it borders on idolatry and superstition."

I am inclined to agree with his assessment. Believing petitionary prayers are answered requires a view of God as a granter of wishes, which is idolatry, as this is not what God is. No prayers are answered.

Jasper, actually, I answered your question _very_ directly, and in detail. I pointed out that as a matter of probability theory there is *not* in general a symmetry between E as evidence for some proposition and ~E as evidence against that proposition. Hence, if my feeling peaceful after praying for peace is only (as I implied) minuscule evidence at the most for the truth of Christianity, so minuscule that I should place no serious weight on it whatsoever (which I implied in my post), it could easily be the case (and I believe _is_ the case) that not feeling peaceful after praying for peace is such incredibly infinitesimal evidence against Christianity as not to be worth mentioning. I thought I made this sort of asymmetry quite clear, only I used homely examples meant to illustrate the general point about asymmetry.

Rusty Shackleford, as a matter of Christian revelation, I cannot agree with the extremely negative evaluation of petitionary prayer you give. We are expressly taught by Our Lord and by the apostles to engage in petitionary prayer for specific things. This sort of prayer is urged on us repeatedly. Whatever gradations we want to give to prayers, if we wish to call this kind the "lowest," that should not be taken to be pejorative but merely comparative. It may be the "lowest" form, but it is not a form we are allowed or encouraged to avoid.

God is a personal being. Scripture encourages us to approach Him as our Father. Jesus expressly taught that we should ask the Father for things because the Father loves us. This is no more wrongfully treating God as a "granter of wishes" than it is for a child to petition his father for bread (an analogy Jesus expressly makes).

However, we are to have faith (faith, I stress, based on facts) in the goodness of God and his personal love and care for us even if it appears that, in human terms, our specific requests are not granted.

Lydia,
I grant the point about the lack of a general symmetry, but I don't think my question rests on that assumption. It was fairly clear, in both my posts, that I was asking about a specific kind of situation -- the familiar, ambiguous one that most of us seem to be in. (So no giant plumes of fire from the sky, etc.) Let me try again.

In your original post, and now also, you seem to stop short of saying that a seemingly answered prayer has *no* evidential significance: it provides "only quite weak evidence" or "very little evidence", or a "miniscule" bit of evidence. Okay. But then it counts for something. And add up enough miniscule bits of evidence, and you might have something pretty important, right? My question can be framed on these assumptions, and allowing that seemingly unanswered prayers *might* have so little evidential import as to be completely negligible. My question is why we should think that is really the case, given the way our experience tends to go...

As you said earlier, there are plenty of easy and plausible naturalistic explanations for the seemingly answered prayers in the experience of most people. So that kind of experience is *not at all* like a phone call from a friend or a conversation with your wife. A closer analogy might be this. You talked to Jones yesterday, and arranged for him to call you today. Now your phone rings, but the connection is bad and you can't make out who's on the other end. So it could have been Jones. Or your uncle Jim, or a telemarketer, or a wrong number... Under these circumstances, have you received confirmation -- a little tiny bit of new evidence -- that Jones exists? I'd be very puzzled if someone told me that (a) the mystery call is indeed new evidence that he exists, but also that (b) were your phone never again to ring, that would not be any evidence at all against your belief. I'm not saying this attitude is incoherent. I simply find it very puzzling. I don't see why it is reasonable.

To stick with the analogy, we can say a bit more about why it is that there's an asymmetry here. Jones not returning your call is not at all surprising, on the hypothesis that he exists. So whether he calls or not, it remains reasonable for you to believe that hypothesis. So the hypothesis is further supported by the right kind of call, and not much undermined at all by no call. But if we have excellent reason to believe that God exists, it seems to me we have excellent reason to think that many prayers will be answered -- e.g., prayers for the health of a sick child. And yet many of those seem not to be. That is pretty surprising, on the hypothesis that God exists. (Maybe we should be mysterians about this. But then shouldn't we also be skeptical about our capacity to judge that any prayer was indeed answered, as opposed to being the result of some easily imaginable naturalistic process?) So, again, my question doesn't presuppose a general symmetry, but one that seems reasonable enough in the epistemic situation that most of us are in...

But if we have excellent reason to believe that God exists, it seems to me we have excellent reason to think that many prayers will be answered -- e.g., prayers for the health of a sick child. And yet many of those seem not to be. That is pretty surprising, on the hypothesis that God exists.

Actually, lots of sick children do get better. I'm pretty certain that lots of sick children who are prayed for do get better. And complicating any attempts to "count up" such things are all the broad and general prayers that are offered. Every week in my church we offer in our liturgy a prayer that God would "comfort and succour all those who, in this transitory life, are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity." That's pretty darned wide-ranging, and I'm sure we're not the only ones who pray such prayers. That means that _all_ the children who get better (as well as those who don't), and all the different _times_ they get better or don't (and how do we count those up?) are getting prayed for every week. That's what I believe is called a confounding variable.

But in any event, I suspect that you and I would disagree fairly radically about what our expectations should be on this point and whether the existence of God can or can't account well for the failure of some given sick child to get better. I can think of many explanations consistent with the existence of a good God for a child's not getting well.

I think the "never cured an amputee" challenge is a fairly serious one.

MarcAnthony, I don't know if you're being humorous, but I imagine Mary and Martha would have something to answer to that, if we take it that Jesus raised their brother from the dead after he'd been in the grave for four days. What's curing an amputee, or for that matter not doing so, by comparison with that? :-)

But if we have excellent reason to believe that God exists, it seems to me we have excellent reason to think that many prayers will be answered -- e.g., prayers for the health of a sick child. And yet many of those seem not to be. That is pretty surprising, on the hypothesis that God exists.

Actually, this does not follow at all. "Excellent reason to think that many prayers will be answered" may be held at one and the same time as "excellent reason to think that many prayers will not be answered" without contradiction. If there are 1 billion prayers to God on a given day, and he answers 100 million of them with a yes, he answers "many" of them.

You are using "many" as if it were carrying the logical weight of "most". But it doesn't and shouldn't, from the standpoint of your premise. We have NO good reason to think that God will answer most prayers affirmatively. None at all. We only have good reason to think that God will grant our requests when they are good for us, and we have no clue whether that is rarely, seldom, often, or usually. (Changes from person to person and time to time, anyway). So it is just is NOT surprising that many a sick child prayed for does not get better.

I think the "never cured an amputee" challenge is a fairly serious one.

MarcAnthony, why do you suppose that Jesus had to ascend to heaven instead of remain visible here on Earth on and on into the future? The Fathers of the Church put it that He had to leave room for the acts of faith and hope to grow in us. These virtues become enlarged and confirmed only when we exercise them in strenuous, difficult times. And that faith becomes more reliant on God alone (instead of on your senses and your personal faculties) when exercised without the crutches of obvious miracles lighting each and every step you have to take. This is the "dark night of the soul" that St. John of the Cross says is NECESSARY for union with God to take place. If Jesus were to still be around for the entirety of the last 2000 years, nobody would have any trouble believing in Him, but nobody would move on to the more difficult but more spiritual forms of faith and hope necessary for the unitive way of perfection.

Same may hold true of some overwhelming class of possible miracles that leave nobody room for deeper acts of faith and hope. He could write the 10 Commandments in the heavens with stars for pixels if He wanted to, but that might not be the sort of interjection into the natural order that fits with His plan of salvation.

What's curing an amputee, or for that matter not doing so, by comparison with that?

Well, you figure that after you come back from the dead YOURSELF...

(Yeah, my sarcasm sometimes doesn't register online.)

C.S. Lewis had an excellent piece on the efficacy of prayer that seems similar to yours. It basically said something to the effect that we really can't know what is and isn't the answer to the prayer.

We first needed to have good reason to believe that God answers prayers. If we don't already believe that looking for proof by watching to see if your prayers are answered is an exercise in futility.

(This also answers the amputee question fairly well.)

We first needed to have good reason to believe that God answers prayers. If we don't already believe that, looking for proof by watching to see if your prayers are answered is an exercise in futility.

Yes. This is the point of what I was trying to say.

~~I think the "never cured an amputee" challenge is a fairly serious one.~~

The healing of an amputee would border on the coercive, and would diminish the necessity of faith.

God could, of course, sign his name on the moon, or write "Jesus is Lord" miraculously in the sky where everyone would see it, but the need for faith at that point would disappear. He's not interested in forcing people to believe, or else Jesus would have had no qualms about throwing himself off the temple.

(Having said that, I imagine that if tonight the moon rises and "Jesus is Lord" is written on it, there would no doubt be atheists who'd blame the Religious Right or the Vatican, or whatever. In other words, even the most dramatic display will not convince the hard-hearted/headed.)

Christian teaching includes the claim that God has performed "quite a few" well-attested miracles which do indeed provide extremely strong evidence for Christianity. To go farther than this and hold that God "would be likely" to perform _innumerable_ other miracles in addition, indeed, that God would perform all the miracles necessary to heal all the people who are prayed for and who are not going to recover otherwise by secondary means, is not reasonable.

We have good reason to believe that miracles are the exception rather than the rule and that God has enough respect for secondary processes and human free will that He is not going to be performing a visible miracle every time we turn around. If nothing else, miracles themselves require a backdrop of regularity, the order of nature, in order to be striking and noticeable. If we lived in a world where natural processes were being set aside continually and visibly, all day long, eventually the concept of the order of nature would become useless and we would indeed be in the realm of magic interrupting everything, which the skeptics refer to as a "science stopper." There are not clear-cut edges to this sort of thing. The natural order is a tough fabric, already established by extremely strong evidence, and it can withstand quite a few miracles before we start being unable to predict the results of our actions or other extreme consequences. But when we get to the point of saying that we need to worry about an argument against Christianity from the failure of God to miraculously heal everybody ever prayed for, we're obviously asking for a never-ending cascade of miracles day after day, which Christians are by no means bound to expect. Not even close.

...the need for faith at that point would disappear.

Here's a non sarcastic question: So what?

Seriously. If we don't need faith to believe in God, well, okay.

I agree with Lydia, but this comment strikes me as a way to dodge the question. If we had a way to believe in God without faith, well, isn't that a good thing?

I feel that my earlier line of reasoning has been distorted here beyond all recognition by various commenters.

Lydia writes, "I'm pretty certain that lots of sick children who are prayed for do get better". Did I deny this at any point in any of my posts? I merely made the very modest observation that in the experience of many people it _seems_ that there are prayers that are not answered, and that many of these are cases in which I for one would expect God to take action (if He ever does). Lydia seems to completely ignore what I've said about her earlier phone call analogy, which earlier she said was such an important part of her position and which I'd misunderstood. In fact she seems to have ignored all the substantive reasoning in my comment.

Tony accuses me of some kind of logical mistake about the word "many", and of failing to understand that "we only have good reason to think that God will grant our requests when they are good for us, and we have no clue whether that is rarely, seldom, often, or usually." It is true that there some assumptions at work in my comment. For instance, I do assume that there are _many_ cases in which a young child dies a slow and agonizing death, and this is not "good for us". Not good for the child, not good for the parents, etc. That's how it seems to me anyway. I admit it's not absolutely certain, but it seems to me that, on reflection, that is the most likely conclusion. Perhaps you disagree. But then wouldn't it always be irrational, on your view, to pray that a 2-year-old be cured of cancer? Why not just pray that whatever God wills be done? But then why pray for that, since on your view that will happen no matter what and necessarily? I wonder why Tony is so confident that we human beings can never, ever tell whether something is good for us or not. And if that's his view, how does he think it can be reasonable to judge that a prayer is answered. If we are so ignorant as this, then how can we suppose that, if the 2-year-old gets better, this is the work of God? (How can we be entitled to think it even _seems_ to be the work of God?) If we're as ignorant as Tony thinks, we should hold that the miraculous cure of the child might well be the work of the Devil. Or the work of nothing at all. We seem to have some very selective applications of skepticism and credulity here.

Jasper, I don't think I've ignored or distorted you at all. I think I've taken you quite seriously and answered you seriously. Here you raise a new set of questions:

But then wouldn't it always be irrational, on your view, to pray that a 2-year-old be cured of cancer? Why not just pray that whatever God wills be done? But then why pray for that, since on your view that will happen no matter what and necessarily?

No, of course it wouldn't be irrational. God is a personal being. We are told to bring our requests to him. As a personal being, he can say "yes" or "no" to those specific requests. Naturally, we attempt to make requests that we think are likely to be in accordance with his will, but we are also supposed to be willing to submit to his will if the child is not healed.

You yourself seem to have ignored the rather significant number of pixels I have expended on the subject of miracles and the need for God to respect the fabric of the order of nature and to perform miracles as an exception rather than as the rule. Once one grants that, then one can rather easily see how, if the child is healed by secondary causes, the Christian sees this as "from God" in the sense that all good is from God ultimately, as the creator (I discussed some of this in my answer to Step2, upthread), but if the child is not healed by secondary causes, this could well be because God is not going to perform miracles for every sick child and every beloved sick person and every beloved person about to be in a terrible car accident and on and on and on, because that would be interrupting the order of nature too much, making a hash of his created order, and making miracles something other than the special signs they are meant to be. Hence, we pray for the child's healing but recognize that this may be accomplished apparently by secondary means (for which we can still thank God, for reasons I have already discussed), may be one of the rare and exceptional cases of truly and obviously miraculous healing (which we shouldn't positively expect, but which would still be a sign of God's power if it did happen), or may not happen at all. We do this as a communication with a person whom we trust to make the wisest choice among these options.

As for _why_ we pray with our petitions, we do so because we are commanded to do so, and because doing so is part of our relationship with God. We also do so because we are taught by revelation that, in the mysterious providence of God, our prayers can be a portion of the means by which the event occurs. James expressly says that sometimes we have not because we ask not, and Jesus implies the same. God sometimes grants his blessings only in answer to our prayer. As to how this relates to "the will of God," I am not a Calvinist, and I believe that God sometimes permits things to happen one way rather than another depending on our choices to do or not to do. If I don't start my car, and if there were some good work that could be done only by my starting my car, God doesn't turn me into a puppet and force me to go out and start my car so as to "accomplish his will." And just as my failure to take some positive physical action may result in someone's not getting important help, so my refusal to pray or my laxness in praying may have the same result. In the end, God still has a plan for that person and loves that person as an individual, and it is still fully possible that God will bring that person to the infinite bliss of heaven which will make the sufferings of this present life seem as nothing in comparison, but perhaps the person will die now rather than later because I didn't pray for him, just as he might die now rather than later because I was lazy or inattentive or uncaring in some other way. I don't know _why_ God has set up the universe in that way, but I have reason to believe that he has done so.

If we lived in a world where natural processes were being set aside continually and visibly, all day long, eventually the concept of the order of nature would become useless and we would indeed be in the realm of magic interrupting everything, which the skeptics refer to as a "science stopper."

Um, according to you they are being modified continually, just not visibly. That is a necessary consequence of causation that can, at any moment in linear time, reach back to the beginning of the universe and design a "coincidence". God, as the subtle source of all human creativity and genius is frequently interrupting human activity. You bring up the natural order only when you need to deflect blame from God, because you abandon it whenever you want to praise God.

If we're as ignorant as Tony thinks, we should hold that the miraculous cure of the child might well be the work of the Devil.

If I recall correctly, which I might not because it has been a long while, Lydia does believe a miracle is the work of the Devil if it is in response to a prayer petitioning a pagan god.

Step2, you'll recall that I brought up the time-causation issue with a metaphysical qualifier, because I was trying to list a large variety of possibilities. There may be a backwards-causation-in-time block to that one. I haven't decided yet.

But in any event, what does it mean to say that God as the subtle source of all human creativity and genius is frequently _interrupting_ human activity? That certainly doesn't follow. For example, if God creates the brilliant soul of Bob, who later goes on to become a doctor who heals many children, God's creation of Bob's genius soul at the time of Bob's parents' intercourse would not normally be called an "interruption of human activity," though it is a response to it.

As far as God's, say, suggesting ideas or bringing reminders in a defeasible fashion to Bob when Bob is contemplating the child's case, that's hardly going to create any sort of problem of "interruption." Bob is mulling over the case anyway. God's nudging his mental elbow a bit is sufficiently subtle that I don't think you need to get your scientific knickers in a knot about it. It's certainly not going to appear to be some sort of "interruption" in the order of nature, unless it's so bizarre or unheard-of an idea that it might as well come from aliens from outer space as an out-of-the-blue revelation, which was not what I had in mind.

As for the devil "performing miracles," I'm not closed to the idea of unnatural events (or events that appear to us to be unnatural) caused by fallen angels, since I have reason to believe in the existence of such beings. However, I would be _at least_ as reluctant actually to draw such a conclusion as to draw the conclusion that an event was directly caused by God. And we should already have very high standards for concluding the latter. As far as the particular (and, frankly, rather silly) thing that Jasper said in response to which you raised this issue, it is enormously unlikely based on what we know by revelation concerning fallen angels that they would bring about a cure from disease. Very much to the contrary.

My position throughout has actually been rather meticulously consistent, Step2. To you I emphasized the fact that our thanks to God for his mercies *need not* imply anything that would amount to or further a "war of science with religion" according to which there is no visible order of nature, because God might be continually making (as it were) our laboratory instruments float or other such nonsense. In other words, I emphasized God's use of secondary causes.

To Jasper, as well, I emphasize God's having a reason to respect and mostly allow the workings of secondary causes, such as human choices and actions and natural law. Given that dramatic and visible miracles are going to be and _ought_ to be the exception rather than the norm, it is _not_ the case that we can construct an argument against God's existence from little Jenny's death from cancer. There are innumerable little Jennies, all dearly loved by many people and (we may conjecture) prayed for, and if God were to guarantee that all of them got well when seriously ill, that none of them were in accidents, were kidnapped, drowned, etc., etc., etc., God would have to be performing far more visible miracles than we have any reason to expect.

Even more, if all the Jenny's were never hit, kicked, treated ill by their brothers, sisters, parents and teachers because God steps in and miraculously prevents any malice from having its effect on another, then God would thus be preventing free will from operating - the free will involved in choosing to do evil to someone. But of the small amount of understanding we have of God's design, we know that free will is critical to His plan, so that there are free acts of love. St. Francis said that one humble person stooping to pick up a piece of straw from the road, if done in perfect and complete love of God, outweighs entire lifetimes of good works done in mediocre love: God's math is for quality more than quantity.

I wonder why Tony is so confident that we human beings can never, ever tell whether something is good for us or not.

I think you're mixing apples and oranges, Jasper. Of course we can tell the difference between something good and something bad. And we are also OK on setting forth a hierarchy of goods, so that we can tell that eternal salvation is better than a lifelong human friendship, and a lifelong human friendship is better than a mediocre job, and a mediocre job is better than small boat, and a small boat is better than a pineapple - all other things being equal (admittedly, I would rather have a small boat than a mediocre job if I were drowning in a lake). What we cannot tell with certainty is the full set of long range consequences of lesser goods and bads when the long range consequences involve many contingencies. We know that health is better than illness - all other things being equal. We know that healthy food is good, and malnutrition is bad. We cannot for certain tell whether eating this food here and now will include evil outcomes 20 steps down the road that we would have gladly avoided at the cost of giving up this food, but we can weigh likely outcomes at 3 and 4 steps of causality and make judgments based on those results on the balance of the goods and evils. Since we are unable to foresee the consequences of contingent causality 20 steps down the road, taking those consequences into account in OUR judgments is uncalled for - but it is not uncalled for with respect to God. So, when we pray for something specific, we pray for something that is good within the limits of our capacity to see, not knowing if it is a good that is good all the way out to then end of all effects. But when God grants the good, he does foresee all the future effects.

For instance, I do assume that there are _many_ cases in which a young child dies a slow and agonizing death, and this is not "good for us". Not good for the child, not good for the parents, etc.

When we pray for a child to be healed and instead he dies, we know that health is good and death is an evil. I am not saying that we cannot discern that painful death is an evil, of course we can. But death is not the ultimate evil, so we don't know if (or how) his continued life would have contributed to other evil results, or how his death will contribute to later goods.

But then wouldn't it always be irrational, on your view, to pray that a 2-year-old be cured of cancer? Why not just pray that whatever God wills be done? But then why pray for that, since on your view that will happen no matter what and necessarily?

Come on, dig in a little, I think the answer is sitting right there behind your words. Of course it is not irrational to pray that a 2-year old be cured of cancer, as you already know. God gives us free will and our energetic capacities primarily so that we can love Him and in doing so be participants, co-creators with Him, of good: good for ourselves, goods for many others. Being INTELLIGENT co-creators means foreseeing a good result by doing X, and choosing to do it. But being limited creatures implies not having omniscience (not even the angels foresee all consequences), so it is per se necessary that our agency for good operate on limited information and limited capacity to see later consequences. Good is still good within those 3 or 4 levels of results we can see, and our intelligent co-operation with God on those actions and the few consequences we foresee just is God's design for us humans, that's what acting well for humans means.

But we can also see clearly THAT we cannot foresee all things, cannot even foresee results after 20 contingent causes get involved. So, it is not part of God's plan and design for us to work out and act on the knowledge of vastly later effects, just as it is not his design for us to plan out and act on whether the Alpha Centauri went supernova last month. Therefore, as intelligent co-operators, it behooves us to seek his aid on those things that we cannot do on our own steam, which includes things like His planning, as a result of foreseeing my prayers, and preparing all of the natural order so that by natural causes alone Billy is cured of his cancer, or interjecting a miracle so that Billy is cured, and also seeing the future effects and determining that Billy's cure fits with his overall plan for good. This is why a truly good person spends all his day admitting to his severe limits to his capacity to accomplish good, and asking God to fill in for what is lacking in his capacity. And thus, by accepting our finite nature for what it is, God allows us a kind of remote participation in the doing of things that are beyond our direct capability but not beyond our desire, our insight, our love for good for others. So when we pray that Billy be cured of cancer, we are seeking a good that we can see is a good within our narrow limits, we are seeking God's help in achieving it because we cannot be sure natural causes at our disposal will handle the job, we are allowing God His own special role of foreseeing and fitting a cure into the world plan He has, and accepting the outcome (whether a cure or not) as befitting God's overall design for good for Billy and all those he affects.

"If we had a way to believe in God without faith, well, isn't that a good thing?"

No, because faith = trust, and trust is a vital component of any relationship based in love.

No, because faith = trust, and trust is a vital component of any relationship based in love.

This seems like a way of trying to get out of the real issue here-that God could make it so that we all know he exists at any time. I mean, why not remove doubt? Because it would remove trust? I'd trust somebody more if he removed all doubt of his existence. Wouldn't you?

Or is it about free will? In that case wouldn't anybody who is convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt have theoretically lost their free will? Because that's all I'm talking about-convincing somebody.

Saying "We can't know God exists because then we wouldn't need faith" seems like a dodge to me.I think it's probably just best to say that we DON'T know why God doesn't just tell us flat out-but we do have good reasons to believe Christianity is real and that God exists, so we need to trust that not knowing the reason doesn't mean there isn't one.

It's similar to the answer to the problem of evil. We know there's an answer. That we don't know what it is isn't relevant.

But in any event, what does it mean to say that God as the subtle source of all human creativity and genius is frequently _interrupting_ human activity?

To have a natural order in any meaningful sense it must be orderly and independent and not a constantly shifting reflection of God's intrinsically supernatural actions.

I mean, why not remove doubt?

Uncertainty is required for all magical thinking. You don't know how the magician made the card disappear or reappear, and you don't really want to know if you wish to be amazed by the trick. Furthermore, our dopamine anticipation system becomes hyperactive when an event is rare and unexpected.

This follows up on my comment from last night. One might wonder, if we can never foresee the long range consequences of a good we are seeking, and therefore we only ask it of God "so far as it conforms to His total plan", why it has any evidentiary value at all when the event transpires through natural causes.

Taking Lydia's point and expanding on it just a little: remember, this discussion is on the basis that we already have excellent reason to believe in God. One leg of the multi-legged system of that excellent foundation is some of the miracles witnessed and then spoken of - miracles the apostles saw, etc. The witness of Christ risen, eventually before more than 500 people, for example. But Christ's miracles were far from the earliest of miracles, there was a long history of them for special witnesses to God's power and benevolence throughout history.

Taking one of these special friends of God, like Isaiah, here's what is observed: He has and exudes a distinct, all consuming love for God. That love consists in his own will being entirely united to God's, so that as soon as Isaiah perceives that God wills that he do something, he wills also to do it. But that goes vice-versa, to a certain extent also: the whole animating source and power of the love of God is from God residing within Isaiah's soul, so that it is God himself moving Isaiah both to will and to do. Thus God inspires Isaiah to want and to will things throughout the day - obviously, things in conformity with God's will. So, what we see in practice is that Isaiah is asked by a mother to pray for her sick son Billy, Isaiah prays for his recovery, and it happens. Then Isaiah is asked by a friend to pray to God for the success of a new business venture, and Isaiah recommends to the friend that he adjust the venture in some small measure, and it comes out well precisely because of that small adjustment. And on, and on, with all sorts of matters. But in addition to these things that happen by apparently natural causes, Isaiah also does a few things here and there that defy expectations from natural causes, such as this: "Lord, let this coming rainstorm not put an end to this group's picnic today, for it is the only recreation together they will have." And they find that the rain comes all around them but not on the picnic - until they wrap things up and leave, and THEN it rains on where they were picnicking. (This is an actual event happening to a friend of mine.)

So, the miraculous or unexplainable doings, which are by themselves more than merely negligible evidence of God's handiwork, lend to Isaiah's other acts of "successful" prayer a credibility of a sort because of their general similarity - always coming forth from the will of a man in union with God. The additional credibility for each one instance is quite small, almost vanishing, it is the entire body of work of these saints that is not small evidence. There are "wonder workers" who were fashioned by God to go around doing these deeds of gift-giving on God's behalf all day long, seemingly. It is not probable (in evidentiary terms) that a person who prays for 1,000 requests and gets 2 of them fulfilled - by natural causes - is showing that it was God all along. But when a person prays for 1,000 such (individually chance) items and finds 300 of them happening, that's improbable as a body of evidence on a purely chance basis.

And these works by God's chosen ones also lend a small increment of credibility to our own acts in which we pray like them. That is, the evidentiary support our own small events provide to the entire body of works is miniscule, but just as a whole physical body is made up of microscopic cells, so also the Church is made up of all of us microscopically adding our little pieces.

To have a natural order in any meaningful sense it must be orderly and independent and not a constantly shifting reflection of God's intrinsically supernatural actions.

Step2, please don't try to tell me that science would be paralyzed if we believed that God has the capacity to subtly influence our minds, direct our attention to particular thoughts, clarify our thinking, and so forth, and even that he often does so. Because, frankly, that's baloney sausage. I know it wouldn't. You know it wouldn't. The whole point of God's doing many things subtly is _precisely_ that it doesn't have some sort of shaking, overwhelming epistemic effect on human free will and on the web of natural causes. Occasionally he _does_ do obvious and overwhelming things. We note these as miracles. But his interacting with us in quieter ways does not have the same epistemic effects. A scientist can just as well pray that God would help him to think clearly about his scientific problems (or a doctor about his cases) as engage in meditation techniques or take a long nap for the same purpose.

Saying "We can't know God exists because then we wouldn't need faith" seems like a dodge to me.

MarcAnthony, I, for one, don't say that. I'm an evidentialist. I believe that God _has_ provided ample evidence of his own existence. People have to look into the matter, and they will find it.

However, I do think it's frivolous and unreasonable, even irrational, to demand that God turn the whole world into a kind of on-going Miracle Circus, with constant messages in the sky and so forth. You'll recall the words Jesus puts into the mouth of a character in one of his parables, "They would not be persuaded though one rose from the dead." I think Jesus _had_ to know the reverberations that line would have beyond the immediate context of the parable. Jesus _did_ rise from the dead, and he left _exactly_ the sort of testimonial evidence, and a goodly chunk of it too, that we would expect for such a miracle. And of course there's plenty more. God has created a whole world teeming with life and eloquent of his designing hand on multiple levels. God made our own minds, which we can't account for in any materialistic fashion. And so forth. Yet the skeptics sit around popping popcorn, scoffing and dismissive, and demand that God write his name in the sky for them, allegedly "to remove all doubt." That's not only blasphemous, it's childish and silly. God has given them lots of evidence. They need to get off their duffs and find out more about it, not make up their own little "tests" for God.

The Gentiles are "without excuse" for not seeking God, because He has made His existence evident both in the natural world and in the law written on our hearts . . .

I know it wouldn't. You know it wouldn't.

What I know is that neuroscience is a science and this mental guidance you are talking about isn't. Frankly, if you do believe this I have no idea why you aren't a Calvinist, since the only reason a person could fail to be believe in an omnipotent deity who directs and clarifies their thoughts is if the deity chose it.

I agree with Lydia, but this comment strikes me as a way to dodge the question. If we had a way to believe in God without faith, well, isn't that a good thing?

MarcAnthony, although Lydia answered this, I would venture a more complete answer to add to hers, by making a distinction in what we mean by "faith". In a first sense, "faith" is believing, on Divine testimony, in all those truths God has revealed to us by revelation. In that sense, faith is a response of our intellects of adherence to the true propositions of "the faith", not on account of the natural light by which the intellect pursues truth under its own steam, as in science or history, but on account of an inner movement of grace from God working hand in hand with an exterior collection of Divine works attesting to these truths. In this sense the object of faith is mainly propositional. And in this sense, again, faith is not an eternally necessary feature of the good life: when we are in heaven, faith and hope will pass away. You don't need to "believe in" truths that are IMMEDIATELY PRESENT to your intellect directly, so in the Beatific Vision faith is no longer necessary or even possible.

In another sense, faith isn't so much propositional as much as a living presence within us - the life of all 3 persons of the Trinity taking up its abode in our soul. When we have this living faith and living hope, then indeed we have God giving us both to will and to do, enlivening our own acts of choice and operation for supernatural purpose. In this sense, our faith will not so much pass away in heaven but be perfected so that there is no longer any veil between Him and us. But here, while we are still working out our salvation in fear and trembling, the veil exists and our faith must carry us forward to the higher, spiritual modes of living, the unitive way of Christian life. Since this is not really propositional but a facet of _supernatural_ life, no amount of (highly successful) natural intellectual activity on true propositions can take its place. We need the life of grace, of which faith is the first layer or foundation, to achieve the life of sanctity.

As with all things God does, He establishes this advanced life of grace well by allowing a kind of easing into it (for some people, at least). While most people will never understand all of the sophisticated nuances of philosophy needed to truly understand and know that there is a God by the argument from an unmoved mover, and thus will need faith in that proposition that there is a God, nevertheless God allows the adepts and the wise to come to solid natural proofs for the existence of God on behalf of all the rest of us (just as we all rely on scientists and historians to report on truths to us that they have grasped through difficult study). So, on some matters, there is cross-over material for the truths of the faith: God has revealed them to us supernaturally, AND God has allowed nature to reveal them to us naturally. This makes it possible to start out first with faith in those truths, and then later come to scientific adherence to the very same truths, thus establishing the concordance between faith and reason for everyone else who has not come to those truths through reason. This then assists the weaker ones of us to be more ready, more willing to believe in the other parts of the faith, matters that are simply revealed by supernatural means and not supported directly in the world of science. Eventually, to reach the summit of the life of grace we will have to let drop these crutches grasped in death grip, this reliance on supporting testimony from nature, and live in faith wholly, but God allows us to get there slowly, gradually.

if you do believe this I have no idea why you aren't a Calvinist since the only reason a person could fail to be believe in an omnipotent deity who directs and clarifies their thoughts is if the deity chose it.

Um, because he doesn't do it in an overwhelming and irresistible fashion and doesn't use it as a way to force people to believe in him. Did I really need to spell that out?

What I know is that neuroscience is a science and this mental guidance you are talking about isn't.

Neuroscience has a long way to go to be able to explain all that some claim for it, but in any event I never claimed that God's guidance is a science or is examinable by science. Very much to the contrary. If it were, it would be more obvious. Since when does everything we talk about or that happens in the world have to be either a science or somehow contrary to or at war with science? Lots of things are neither.

Um, because he doesn't do it in an overwhelming and irresistible fashion and doesn't use it as a way to force people to believe in him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconditional_election

Yes, but I don't accept the doctrine of unconditional election. And not a single thing I have said about God's nudging people's mental elbows implies it. At all.