Actually, the watchmaker argument is that God created it, then put his feet up and let it go it’s course with no interference. That’s your position, Al, from all your posts that I’ve read.
No, that’s not my position, and you have not read well. God cannot ‘put His feet up and walk away’, that is metaphysically impossible, according to Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, which is also the underpinning of much of the theological thinking of the Catholic Church.
With regard to God “tinkering”…I’ve read a couple of books lately from the “revealed to us” perspective rather than the “what science tells us” perspective, and I’ve come to conclude that God not only tinkers, he involves himself with every aspect of our lives, from the very basic “keeping us in existence” to managing and arranging affairs of our daily lives, and making the course of nations and histories.
Of course God involves Himself intimately.
Below is a short essay that I recently wrote that should address all the points.
Intervention by God
As I see it, there is a natural and a supernatural order.
In the supernatural order, God intervenes frequently. We have divine revelation to the Jews and later the gentiles, we have God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ, we have the sacraments, above all the Holy Eucharist in which God is physically with us at all times in the most loving and selfless manner possible, and we have the special creation of an immaterial rational soul for each human individually. God interacts with the human soul and has a relationship with us. God can work physical miracles to fulfill prayers, but that happens rarely. More often, I believe, God hears prayers by moving souls, including our own. He can inspire actions in humans that they otherwise might not take. Our relationship with God in general, if we choose to have one, consists more in us being moved by His grace than in a ‘conversation’ in the sense that it occurs in human relationships. As for God helping us with physical needs, I don’t see why this cannot occur along natural channels rather than by supernatural means (even though that does happen, though very rarely). For example, upon prayer God can direct us to a doctor who can help us effectively with sickness, instead of healing us directly.
In the natural order, God appears to intervene rarely, at least in a measurable way. This is even logically necessary, otherwise we would not know what to expect from our physical world. Imagine stepping into an airplane without predictable laws of nature … Physical miracles are rare. The Catholic Church is quite explicit about that. Even in the long history of Lourdes, for example, there are only some 60+ confirmed miracle healings, even though the claims run into the thousands or even ten thousands (regardless of what you think of Lourdes and miracles in general, the point is that miracles are considered rare). By the way, as far as I know, Catholics are only required to believe in the miracles of the Bible, not in any of the miracles after that time. If miracles were not rare, how then could we distinguish them from the regularities if nature? The concept of ‘miracle’ would lose its meaning. The idea that theists believe in ‘miracles everywhere’ is an atheist caricature that simply does not hold, except perhaps for some extreme evangelical branches of Christianity.
As far as other physical intervention is concerned, God set up the universe to develop on its own – as some would say, God made the world make itself. We have a seamless line from physical evolution of the universe after the Big Bang through chemical evolution resulting in the origin of life to biological evolution resulting in higher species and our bodies and brains (again, the immaterial soul is part of the supernatural order, and by definition cannot fall within the realm of physical evolution).
Even though God appears to intervene rarely in the natural order, He is necessary as the sustainer of the created world. Study classical metaphysics (Aquinas) and you will see why that is so. It is also a ‘de fide’ article of the Catholic Church. In that sense, God is constantly active in the natural order as well, even though not in an obvious ‘interventionist’ manner. This alone excludes a deist view.
It is actually biological ID people who appear to have a deistic view of God – they disregard the view of classical theology of God as the sustainer of everything and instead believe that God is only active when He demonstrably “intervenes”. Therefore, to escape the putative consequences of their false theology, they need to show for themselves that God “intervenes as much as possible”.
(cont.)
