God does not interfere with the laws of nature (at least not in the normal course of events) becauuse God set up those laws and the initial conditions to give precisely the result God wanted. God designed the universe so that life would self-assemble.
Your response appears to be a mixture of science, faith and assumption. I will start with the assumption. You state that God does interfere with the laws of nature but that this is not the “normal course of events”. I would think that we’d need some science to determine whether it was normal or not. This point is absolutely critical to the work of evolutionists since if it could be shown that God does interfere with the laws of nature in the normal course of events, then this fact would need to be understood and seriously factored into the speculations of evolutionists (and other scientists).
All of material reality is potentially explainable through natural laws.
Since God does intervene in nature, then this statement is not correct. Not all of material reality is explainable through natural laws since we’ve already established that God is the explanation for some (as yet unidentified and unmeasured) aspects of material reality – those cases where He intervenes.
But only rarely and not in such a way that we can detect the effects now.
You state here that God only intervenes in the natural laws “rarely”. This is clearly a measurement – subject to science. “Rarely” is a means of comparison – measuring the rate of God’s intervention.
We can see in Catholic history that God has intervened in nature, overturning natural laws many times. Perhaps if we look at the documented records of all of those interventions, we could conclude that “God only directly intervenes rarely, because the documented records only indicate some activity”.
But this limits God’s interventions to those recorded in documents. It is quite a big assumption to claim that God has only directly intervened in the natural laws on the occasions where it was recorded in writing somewhere. Beyond this, these are observable interventions. Once we acknowledge that God has superceded His natural laws, even if “rarely” (although it could be “constantly”), then science cannot be certain that God is not always active in creating nature in ways that supercede the natural laws.
On the theoretical level, science cannot fully explain material reality since the natural laws alone do not explain it.
Jesus may have walked on water, but that has no detectable material effect here and now.
This is a guess on your part. No scientific analysis was done on that miracle – and some claim that none could be done (which is false). The supernatual act could have been tested by science. But what effect did Jesus have on the development of nature? Why would a scientist assume that all the effects that Jesus had are immediately (or would ever be) visible to mankind?
We see that he intervened and overturned the natural law. I cannot see where there is any basis to claim that this had no effect on nature, or that He never intervened directly in nature many ways to affect the outcome and development of life.
Transubstantiation has no detectable material effects here and now.
In order to draw that conclusion, you must be able to measure the effects of this supernatural action. But supposedly, science is not capable of doing that. So science would not know if transubstantiation has detectable effects or not. Eucharistic miracles (Lanciano), however, do offer very detectable material effects in the here and now.
But the question you raised still stands. “Why would God intervene with His own laws?”
Catholics must believe that God has done so. But we do not know if this is “rare” or not. We know from the writings of saints who also overcame natural laws that God does this to show that he is supreme and authoritative over the laws of nature. And the saints show us that in becoming holy, we can overcome nature (as we all must) and can actually change the course of nature.
