The Greater Miracle

What is more miraculous?That through a slow and well understood process with significant evidentiary support, a crude and very limited intelligence emerged in the universe and that intelligence crudely imagined and then believed that it was created by a greater intelligence than itself.OrThat a Great Intelligence simply exists, without any cause, explanation or process that brings into existence - and with all that Great Intelligence the Intelligence creates a mostly barren universe, creates life in a tiny subset of that universe and ushers it into an intelligent species that will last something like 0.0000...002% of the time the universe created to house them does and exists in only and 0.00000000000000000000...0000001% of the space created to house it. Oh and when that intelligent species looks at the evidence rigorously it concludes that it most likely happened naturally. A more casual/naive examination of the evidence ends up with the conclusion that the Great Intelligence Did It. And the casual/naive/easy methodology just happens to produce the correct results.Don't know about you, but the argument that an Intelligent Creative agency exists that explains all those things we haven't explained yet - seems much more miraculous than positing that chemical reactions happened, and that we aren't sure of what all of them were.

I don't think we do disagree. I don't have any commitment to the belief that the universe or 'creation' as you call it exists by chance. I'm not entirely sure that strictly speaking it makes sense to even say that: you think that creation happened by 'chance' in the sense that the creator 'just happened to exist by chance' and that 'by chance' it created us (as opposed to creating something else). On the other hand, I think that if we had access to the real answers we'd find that the universe could be no other way than the way it is, and that 'chance' is merely an illusion. Or we could flip it the other way around. Maybe you understand the antithesis of your position and you are taking a poorly chosen linguistic shortcut. Or maybe, you don't and you really think that 'it exists by chance' is a geniunely good summary of it. Either way - I don't think your summary is meaningful if it can be used to dismiss both actual positions.Better, perhaps, would be to suggest that it takes more faith to believe that the universe (probably wise to avoid 'creation', for what its worth), exists without an intentional agent causally responsible for this state of affairs. That seems like a more accurate portrayal, would you agree?I believe that intelligence and complexity existing without a universe or the like is highly improbable on the face of it. And that an intelligent agent with universe creating powers simply 'existing' is more miraculous than the universe gradually changing through simple physical reactions to have intelligence in it that goes on to erroneously conclude that an intelligent agent like itself but better was behind the whole shebang. Scientists do the math. Theologians just wave their hands. That's why I am happy for the scientists to carry on doing their thing, and why I criticize theologians for pretending to be anywhere near capable of developing an explanatory framework with the same power that scientists do.But your last sentence is precisely my point: we don't know much. In fact we often make mistakes.So what is more likely: that the pre-scientific common-sense, intuitive notion that there is agency behind the universe is a mistake. A false positive on the old agency detector so to speak is triggered when dealing with concepts for which our brains were not evolved to handle.OrThere is an agent that for no reason simply exists, and it created us or 'by chance' it happened to be the type of agent that was inclined to create a universe that looks like this with agents like ourselves in it.Take a look at this picture. Which is more miraculous:That the image is moving, but never goes anywhere, despite it being an image format with no animation in it and it continues to move even after you print it on paper...OrThat the brain is taking a cognitive shortcut which leads to a very convincing perceptual mistake that the picture is moving - even when on another level you are sure that it isn't.And we're only discussing one miracle - the deist's miracle, or perhaps a sequence of inter-related miracles (the right intelligent agent to create us (that is, the agent we have seems to be fine-tuned to create universes that are fine-tuned to create life like us), happens to be the one that, in reality exists, and not only is it capable and inclined to create such a universe, but actually goes ahead and does it! Miracle upon miracle!) . The religious rarely stop there, the intelligent agent sometimes creates things in a fashion that miraculously defies the known laws of physics, of the evidence discovered by geologists and biologists. It embodies itself the body of one of the lesser entities on one of the planets with intelligent life to give platitutes disguised as wisdom, perform some local miracles to credulous observers, raising from the dead, changing properties of physical matter, defying gravity/increasing surface tension of liquids, flying around on impossible chimerical beasts.What's more miraculous: That one of these religions happens to be right? Or the 'god of the gaps' or near hands off deist-deity is right? Or that it's all a product of our clever, but very imperfect brains?Feel free to disagree - but do more than that - give us an argument.

You can probably verify that in a lab, and failing that it should be straightforward enough to verify it 'in the field'.What I am suggesting though, is not that we discount knowledge that isn't scientific. I am giving you a reason why it might feel like theologian's ideas about 'God dimensions' are more quickly dismissed that physicists ideas about 'tiny' dimensions. The physicist's do maths and make predictions and have to get everything precisely working and design experiments that test their predictions and so on. And physicists have a track record of using only physical principles and coming up with 'crazy sounding' ideas that lead to computers, lasers, PET scans and Satellite Navigation. Theologians have a track record of using theology to dispute the truth of bleeding edge scientific ideas until they are verified beyond dispute and then they use theology to explain how that was exactly the way their religion saw it all along (it was just misguided fools that hijacked their church that argued against it to begin with).The two pursuits are very different.The problem with trying to gain an understanding of the nature of nature by appealing to ideas that are untestable is that you have no way of knowing if you are just engaging in an entertaining mental pursuit or if you are actually onto something. You do realize that those same type of notions made us think there was agency behind crop failures, the success of wars and boat journeys, the weather patterns, eclipses, and swarms and so on? Science has done a lot to change that point of view. It seems very God-of-the-gaps that we are now talking about the ultimate origins of everything rather than why Fred had a good crop after appeasing Osiris with a sacrifice and I didn't after praying really hard to Min. Well we are only really looking at what the 'greater/lesser miracles' are. When it comes to the deist god, it seems less miraculous that the universe just exists than God just exists and also created the universe. Hmm, this seems to muck about with causality though, which is one of the arguments for postulating a creator to begin with. We might find another greater miracle lurking around here if we delved deep enough. I considered passing this up out of a mixture of modesty and national pride. If you heard what passes for English around here in 'sunny' Manchester...why the stories I could tell you {/curmudgeon}. I'm not criticising so much as I am throwing down a gauntlet or slapping you harmlessly with my glove. "You sir, are a cad, prepare to defend your honour!" etc.