[Erin] Everyday miracles

It isn't a miracle--it's called providence.

Once removed from its *definitional* connection - an event where the laws of nature were temporarily suspended (or, perhaps more accurately, transcended), "miracle" is just a meaningless word for any fortuitous event.

It's also another occasion for the usual suspects to wail about God doing something nice, but not always.
Posted by: Sean | June 23, 2008 10:42 AM

According to the story, the two rescuers were Jim Cotroneo and Gary Ruiz.

-The human rescuers had nothing to do with the sustainment of life until they arrived. That is what God's providence is thanked for.

-"Letting off the hook" and hoping (in the theological sense) for eschatological redemption of all things are not the same thing.

-The problem of good is just as great, if not more so, for those without any sort of metaphysic as the problem of evil is for classical theists.

"The human rescuers had nothing to do with the sustainment of life until they arrived. That is what God's providence is thanked for."

Oh, I see. God is in the life-sustainment business, but not the finding-lost-people business. Thanks for clearing that up.

It's a complete non sequitur to make any connection between this lucky man's survival and the existence, much less the intervention, of god.

As Erin pointed out, these types of stories usually don't end well. Mr. Kennedy beat the odds. But had those volunteers found him dead, we wouldn't have heard a peep about this story on Beliefnet.

Scot
It isn't a miracle--it's called providence.

I know, traditionally, there's a difference between good things happening that could happen by chance, and good things that, according to the laws of physics, couldn't happen, with only the latter being a miracle.

But according the quantum mechanics, almost any conceivable set of events can occur, because everything is simply a 'probability'. So I think the old concept is somewhat outdated, as is the concept that God has to work 'outside physics'. If you know enough, and can manipulate the results of 'random' quantum events enough, nothing is 'outside physics'.

Hydrogen and oxygen atoms can, indeed, spontaneously decay, hit other hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and recombine into carbon, and they can all recombine into CH3CH2OH, and, hey, water into wine. (Well, water into pure alcohol, you'd need more molecules for wine, but, luckily, they're all made of C, H, and O.) It's also worth pointing out that water was so impure in those days it probably had plenty of carbon in it in the form of bacteria and soil.

It's so astonishingly unlikely to happen that it is about as close to 'never' as you can get...but so is a bound set of flattened wood pulp containing stained patches arranged in a meaningful pattern that multiple people interpret in the same way...and those happen all the time, we call them 'books'. They aren't 'unlikely', because they aren't happening by chance...someone's deliberately doing that.

And this is suddenly reminding me of an discussion I had earlier about the differences between fantasy and sci-fi and how the border is fuzzy because, honestly, we have no idea what the border of 'possible' is.

QM makes the border of providence and miracle very fuzzy for the same reason, and I think it was an artificial distinction in the first place. It implied that God had created a set of rules that He Himself could not figure out how to get certain results within, so was forced to 'cheat'. Which is not impossible, as all computer game programmers know, and could have been done deliberately by Him, but we don't actually have any evidence of it.

It's actually a sort of recent distinction in the first place, originating to the 'clockwork universe' concepts of Newtonian physics. Before that, people already assumed have the universe was a 'miracle' and didn't make a distinction either. Now that we know that, despite Einstein's outrage over the idea, that God does play dice with the universe, we need to reevaluate that distinction and realize we have no idea if and when the dice are loaded, or if he does any 'meddling' at all outside of that.

Susan,

My son has Asperger's, so he is much more manageable than a child with classic autism; nevertheless, his particular penchant is for getting lost. Two days ago, I made the mistake of taking him to a children's museum in a different city. When it was time to go, I started rounding up him and his siblings. I told him it was time to go and eat lunch. As usual, he resisted...but then he suddenly bolted.

I grabbed his sisters and went after him, but couldn't find him. Finally, I asked the lady at the entrance whether she saw a boy matching my son's description go running out of the museum. Sure enough, she said he had headed up the escalator. (The museum was in the basement of a larger building.) We ran up the escalator and still couldn't find him.

Here, the saving grace was that I know my son...he has photographic memory of where we parked the car, and never thinks twice about simply heading for the car...without us. I guessed that he was doing that now.

I was right. A glance out into the parking lot revealed a 4 year old in a blue and yellow shirt running across the lot. By the time I reached him, a parking lot attendant was chasing him as well. Thankfully, he was unhurt, but it took me a good 20 minutes until I could stop shaking enough to drive.

Suffice it to say that I will think very long and hard before sending him to any camps...