If god were perfectly understandable, if his miracles were repeatable, and if you could devise a perfect algorithm to elicit miracles from god, then how would “god” be distinct from “the natural world”? Wouldn’t it be more parsimonious to say, “We have gravity that says if you do X then Y happens, we have electromagnetism that says that if you do X then Y happens....and then there’s this “god” rule to the universe which says if you do X then Y happens.”
Of course, if you approach the Christian god in this way, Christians will immediately object and say that “god does not like to be tested,” as if they have a priori decided that they don’t want to think of themselves as living in a predictable universe. Strange preference, that....
I don’t mean to say that you should be able to perfectly predict god, but if unless you have some idea of what he’ll do you can’t really get any evidence of that theory over the theory that stuff happens at random.
If god were perfectly understandable, if his miracles were repeatable, and if you could devise a perfect algorithm to elicit miracles from god, then how would “god” be distinct from “the natural world”? Wouldn’t it be more parsimonious to say, “We have gravity that says if you do X then Y happens, we have electromagnetism that says that if you do X then Y happens....and then there’s this “god” rule to the universe which says if you do X then Y happens.”
Of course, if you approach the Christian god in this way, Christians will immediately object and say that “god does not like to be tested,” as if they have a priori decided that they don’t want to think of themselves as living in a predictable universe. Strange preference, that....
God is sentient.
I don’t mean to say that you should be able to perfectly predict god, but if unless you have some idea of what he’ll do you can’t really get any evidence of that theory over the theory that stuff happens at random.