God exists outside of time, but I don’t recall hearing that He was limited to acting only outside of time. And I don’t understand how your lack of free will claim follows from the premise. Our free will has nothing to do with what God does or does not do.either God acts within time, not outside of it as theists claim
Not at all.The very idea of prayer being “effective” presupposes the possibility of a deterministic outcome, which there cannot be given the “nature” (for lack of a better term) of God.
If God answers prayers differently when people are recording the results than he does when no one is, that’s a measure of control.The basic problem remains that, since God cannot be measured or controlled
Just an observation, but it may simply be that this isn’t a rational question. Because it’s not that God doesn’t intercede in the “natural” order of things, it’s that God is constantly interceding in the natural order of things. In fact God may be the very reason that there’s an order to things in the first place. So it’s not that there are no miracles, it’s that every frickin’ things a miracle.Does God intercede in the ‘natural’ course of life based on prayer?
All fair points, to paraphrase another saying though, ‘if everything’s a miracle, nothing is’. I would say most often God appears to be presented as one who responds to prayer, so I took that as a presupposition in my argument. The ‘blind clockmaker’ argument of a God who set things in motion and then remained hands-off isn’t often presented here.So it’s not that there are no miracles, it’s that every frickin’ things a miracle.
It’s easily substituted though, we can even imagine a vending machine that due to some unknown internal condition is unpredictable in how it dispenses things. Often it dispenses nothing, sometimes it dispenses what you want, sometimes it dispenses something else entirely. But no matter how much or little we understand of how it works, or why it works, if pressing the buttons and making a request is in any way correlated with receiving something, enough data should show that in some way, it should show some difference between that and a control group of people who didn’t interact with the vending machine.I generally use vending machine as it is a more direct quid pro quo situation. Which isn’t how prayer works of course.
It’s not that they aren’t miracles, it’s just that they don’t look like miracles. They’re not what we expect from miracles. And it’s not that God doesn’t respond to prayer, it’s that He responds to every prayer. He doesn’t pick and choose. So in the course of human events some things will look miraculous, but most things won’t. They’ll look, well…natural.All fair points, to paraphrase another saying though, ‘if everything’s a miracle, nothing is’. I would say most often God appears to be presented as one who responds to prayer, so I took that as a presupposition in my argument.
If God and prayer were more consistently presented that way I don’t think this discussion would even be happening, I honestly think your view is the much more likely to be true version, and it’s much more consistent with God’s other attributes. Ironically, if God always does what’s best, then we’d predict no correlation between prayer and outcomes, and given that’s what we see it arguably supports the point, or at least doesn’t contradict it and is entirely compatible. Essentially in my line of questions above, the answer to ‘are God’s responses to prayer distinguishable from chance?’ may in fact be ‘no’, since there’s simply no way to determine what is or isn’t, or as lelinator suggested, it’s just all God. I think the issue especially to an outsider is that prayer absolutely looks like asking for things; bless this person, help that person, lift up the surgeon operating on Nana tomorrow so he does a good job. The serenity prayer feels like an outlier, as it’s about imparting the speaker with courage, peace and wisdom, it’s internal if nothing else.But the real point is that God does what is best regardless of what we actually request, and that the point and purpose of prayer is not to get stuff or even help others, but to learn to focus on God rather than us.
I don’t think so, finding lost car keys is a miracle if you’re late for something and inclined to believe in miracles.So maybe that’s the problem, people are expecting big flamboyant miracles, so that they can go hey look, that proves there’s a God. That proves I’m right. But maybe God isn’t quite so ostentatious. And maybe He doesn’t really care to prove that you’re right.
There’s the radiocarbon testing that put its creation in the middle ages, which disputed, but those disputes then refuted. Could be why the Catholic Church declines to take an official stance on its authenticity. I’ll fully admit it would take a lot to convince me, but the church should be much easier to convince and they haven’t been it would seem.After several years of analysis, the conclusion of the scientists was that they had found absolutely nothing that would preclude the cloth form being the 2000 year old burial shroud of Jesus.
Or the piece of cloth we call the shroud now isn’t the same piece they had in the 6th century.Since the Shroud was extant in the 6th century, a 14th century radiocarbon date is obviously not correct even if the C-14 evidence seems to so indicate.