Thursday, June 11, 2009

Quarks, Chaos & Christianity


SMcK foreword: RJS's question below stunned me this morning. Did God create in such a way that the laws of nature were how he created, so that expecting something outside the laws of nature is looking for the wrong thing? And I wonder how you define miracle: Is it an "interpretive" word or the event itself? Anyway, here's the post by RJS:

John Polkinghorne has written an excellent little book Quarks, Chaos & Christianity ruminating on questions related to science and religion. Polkinghorne is a theoretical physicist and an Anglican priest - and his thoughts are always worth considering. Today I would like to look at the chapter in this book on miracles. This discussion, I think, has bearing on the issues related to evolution, creation, and Intelligent Design.

Should we expect the effects of God's intelligent design of creation to be empirically discernible? Did God use natural or miraculous means?

First we must consider what is meant by "miracle." Polkinghorne considers three kinds of miracles in scripture. Miracles arising from normal human abilities possessed to an extraordinary degree, miracles involving the timing or occurrence of natural events, and miracles involving events contrary to nature.

More here-

http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2009/06/what-about-miracles-rjs.html

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