As a scientist and as a Christian, I have pondered the question of why God does not make his existence and his purposes more visually obvious to us humans. I can understand why scientists who are agnostics stay agnostics: where is the physical proof that a Being, who is in some sense personal, created and sustains the universe or has some particular purposes for my life? I (naively) think that if I were the Supreme Being that I might maintain flaming letters over every national capital saying “Seek God”. Or something like that.
Now, there are powerful philosophical arguments that an omnipotent, eternal, intentional, nonphysical Being does sustain the physical cosmos. See the “Thinking About the Existence and Attributes of God” section of Christian Apologetics Insights from David Geisler, Ray Ciervo, and Prem Isaac [2020 NCCA, 9], including footnotes 1 and 2, for a brief discussion of these issues. Also, we have documentary evidence, which is strong by historical standards, that Jesus of Nazareth taught and did extraordinary things, and that many of his closest followers experienced decisive encounters with him in his resurrected form ( see Historicity of Jesus). But for many people today, these considerations seem somewhat abstract. We hunger for something more immediate and tangible, and something enduring or reproducible: even if we witnessed a miraculous healing, we could always think of some way to explain that one event away. We want something we can capture and analyze on our terms.
This issue is referred to as the “hiddenness” of God. I don’t claim to have all the answers here. One thing that has struck me is that, on the whole, the treatment of God’s self-revelation in the Bible is pretty consistent with the experience that we have in our lives. Yes, there are miracles described in the Scriptural narratives, but they are few and far between. For most biblical characters, most of their days they did not see miracles. They had to plod through life like us, working with second- or third-hand testimonies of God’s works.
This hidden characteristic of God manifests strongly in the life and teachings of Jesus. Presumably, he consistently represented God’s ways, and he typically was reticent about stating baldly what he was about. Publicly, he spoke in parables and responded to intellectual questions with counter-questions, not facile answers. Casual or skeptical inquirers went away frustrated. Jesus did not give himself away cheaply.
However, those men and women who valued Jesus enough to walk with him did get the explanations of the parables. But even these disciples had a hard time grasping the nature of his mission – – Jesus had to show, as well as tell, what the kingdom of God was about. It was something to be “caught”, over time, more than merely taught. Apparently, there is no quick, shallow shortcut here, and (in ways it may be hard for us to analyze in ourselves) the attitude with which we approach God determines how much we will receive.
I recently purchased a copy of The New Apologetics, edited by Matthew Nelson. This recent volume has 41 essays on many aspects of reasons for faith and challenges to faith, written by Roman Catholic authors. One chapter deals explicitly with the issue of divine hiddenness. I found many of its points to be helpful, and so I will reproduce a large excerpt of that chapter below. I bolded certain portions that I thought were key.
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What follows is an excerpt from “The Argument from Divine Hiddenness”, a chapter by Fr. Gregory Pine, OP, in The New Apologetics, ed. Matthew Nelson. Bolded emphases are mine.
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…Seen from the vantage of Christian revelation, though, there is purpose in the mystery. God does not torture or tantalize. The key lies in the recognition that wherever we find him in communication with man, he is saving—saving from sin, saving from death. In fact, what the agnostic takes to be an argument against the existence of God [i.e, his “hiddenness”] actually manifests the deep wisdom with which God makes himself known. For there is a profound correspondence between the manner of his revelation and the mystery of our salvation.
God’s revelation is intended for us: for human persons with all our metaphysical lack and limitation. Rather than somehow filling our minds with an intuitive awareness of his existence, God seeks entrance to the sanctuary of each human heart in a way best suited to our condition. He enlightens and emboldens us along the way such that we attain to our end in due course.
Throughout salvation history, we see this at every level of his dealings with man. He gives a law to outline the boundaries of communion. He institutes the sacraments to provision us with embodied grace. He establishes a Church wherein his sacred humanity perdures. Mystical transports of an extraordinary sort may make the occasional appearance, but the daily fare is often as ordinary as are bread and wine. Like a good teacher who uses image and metaphor to communicate perennial truths, God leads by simple indications to wonderful realizations. And all throughout, we find that he conceals to reveal and reveals to save.
This movement is concretized in the Incarnation. In the fullness of time, he hides himself in human flesh “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19: 10). In all that he does and suffers—from the Annunciation to the Ascension—lies concealed the salvation he seeks to communicate. When he is conceived of a virgin, he is saving. When he goes to the mountain to pray, he is saving. When he teaches in parables, he is saving.
The parables, especially, help to focus this question of divine hiddenness, for here the Lord is involved in a peculiar paradox—at once revealing and concealing: “For those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that ‘they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven’” (Mark 4: 11–12). What is the point of manifest obscurity? What is the sense of hidden disclosure?
In his campaign of salvation, Christ will settle for nothing less than the communication of God. But to ensure that this communication be received, he accommodates it to our nature. And though we are made for God, God is far greater than our hearts. The medieval theologians repeated often that, before the radiance of his glory, we are as bats at noonday. It is for this reason that, in revelation, God constrains himself to our limitations—to the compass of our human frailty….And so, God not only hides himself in human flesh, but also hides his revelation in human imagery that, thereby, we might be led to him.
The divine hiddenness is not intended to confound but to save. We are pilgrims who come to our perfection step by step in the flow of time. Along the way, we feel acutely the limits of our nature. We possess our lives only moment to moment. We suffer the vagaries of gain and loss. But left to our own devices, our fallen selves rebel against our existential poverty. Rather than set out in pursuit of the mystery, we are constantly tempted to go in for the overly simplistic answer, the ready-made solution, the conceptual idol that promises to save us the effort of watching and waiting, of striving and struggling. And so, God, in order to keep us from settling, pulls us into his divine fullness through a kind of reticence.
In the parables he preached and in the parables he lived, the Lord draws us by both known and unknown. St. Jerome writes, “Jesus mixes what is clear with what is obscure so that through the things we understand, we may be drawn toward the knowledge of the things we do not.” In the Gospels, whenever the Lord speaks figuratively or allegorically, he is met with confusion: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied” (John 14: 5, 8). To each demand, the Lord answers with deep riddles, which prove more satisfying than the shallow answers we sought at first: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”; “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14: 6, 9).
As human beings, we are too weak and wounded to receive his luminous revelation and accept it on its own terms. We need think only of the Lord’s contemporaries, whose basic indisposition we share. It’s for us then to present ourselves with a humble estimation of our ability to grasp his revelation. For though his ways may seem unnecessarily difficult, they are perfectly suited to our healing, to our growing, to our flourishing. If we are indeed wounded, it will do us no good to be healed quickly and superficially, especially when the disease is shut up within, where it rages fiercely. And so God, in his love, delays the healing by parables, so that, by those same parables, he may heal more deeply.
For the agnostic, then, who finds God’s hiddenness to be vexing and his pace to be plodding, a word of encouragement: Take heart. There is still some clarity to be had in the contemplation of God’s silence, provided only that one looks to the end. For God’s goal in his dealings with man is neither transparency nor dispatch. Rather, his end is salvation, a goal better accomplished by parable than by proof.
Letters to Creationists 
” there are powerful philosophical arguments that an omnipotent, eternal, intentional, nonphysical Being does sustain the physical cosmos”
As pointed out many times, this concept has no explanatory value because it only trades one mystery for another. “God did it” as an explanation for the universe is equivalent to “? did it”, because no ones knows where ? came from, what it is made of, or how it works. It is pure philosophical sleight of hand. The claims of being omnipotent, omniscient, etc. raise the number of unknowns about how it works to infinity, whereas we can test the universe itself and find out its limits, such as the speed of light and conservation laws.
It is still conceivable that the unconceivable exists, paradoxically, but it is also conceivable that things can come into existence randomly, without cause and effect, and for that we have actual evidence from the study of quantum mechanics, such as virtual particles.
We can open the Christian Bible randomly (King James version) as I did once, and read this story (from memory, probably with misspellings):
There came a famine in the time of King David, and he asked the prophets why God was angry. They told him that the tribe of Genorites (?) was upright and righteous in God’s sight, and King Saul had done injustice upon them. So King David sent to the Genorites to ask them how amends could be made, and they replied, send us seven descendents of Saul’s line, to suffer for Saul’s sin. King David then chose seven of Saul’s line, but he excepted the line of Jonathan who was David’s friend.
The Genorites tortured and killed the seven and laid their bodies on a hill, and lo, God was pleased, and the famine ended.
Hi Jim,
You raise some worthy issues. Without getting too deep into it…
( 1 ) Re: “…it only trades one mystery for another. “God did it” as an explanation for the universe is equivalent to “? did it” “ – – I provided a link to an article where I discuss this issue, and why these two cases are not equivalent. From footnote (2) of that link:
“ The alternative notion, that the physical universe “just is” (for no reason whatsoever) is argued to be incoherent, e.g., by Ed Feser in the YouTube interview “Edward Feser | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 17”.
Atheist materialists claim that stopping the explanatory chain at the fundamental physical laws is just as good as adding a Creator and then using that as the end of the explanatory line. In both cases, the explanations stop with some fundamental Fact or Being, which “just is”. Thomists explain why these two cases are not equivalent. An immaterial, omniscient, omnipotent, intentional, necessary, non-contingent Being is a more ontologically appropriate ultimate basis than a physical space-time continuum with energy and particles and a set of laws that could just as well be something other than what they happen to be.
William Lane Craig in Reasonable Faith discusses why the universe (or multiverse) does not exist by a necessity of its own nature. It is the contingency of the universe—eternal or not—that distinguishes it from God, who, as a non-contingent being, cannot have an external cause.”
(I’m not expecting to convince you, just noting that a lot of people have pondered this issue for many years, and concluded that the existence of “An immaterial, omniscient, omnipotent, intentional, necessary, non-contingent Being” follows logically from the existence of the observable physical universe in which changes/motions occur; an infinite regress of merely contingent causes is not viable.).
( 2 ) re: “ it is also conceivable that things can come into existence randomly, without cause and effect, and for that we have actual evidence from the study of quantum mechanics, such as virtual particles.”
In the popular press, there are claims of virtual particles coming into existence from nothing or without cause. But that is not really accurate.
Virtual particles are just a calculational proposal, to describe the (actual) properties of the quantum vacuum. They do not really exist or come into existence. See , for instance:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/07/ask-ethan-do-virtual-particles-really-exist/?sh=2a606e871059
“So the quantum vacuum really does have observational effects, and those effects have been observed experimentally on ~micron scales and astrophysically over stellar scales. That doesn’t mean that virtual particles are physically real, however. It means that using the calculational tool of virtual particles in the vacuum allows us to make quantitative predictions about how matter and energy behave as they pass through empty space, and how empty space comes to possess different properties when external fields or boundary conditions are applied. The particles, however, are not real, in the sense that we cannot collide or interact with them…. The effects of the quantum vacuum are real; the virtual particle visualization is useful, but the particles themselves are not real.”
Similarly, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle notes that “…Although widely used, they [virtual particles] are by no means a necessary feature of QFT, but rather are mathematical conveniences – as demonstrated by lattice field theory, which avoids using the concept altogether.”
In the same vein, we cannot predict when a particular radium atom will split, but (a) we know in general the cause that radium atoms split (the radium has too many protons in it for it to be stable), and (b) we can predict precisely the splitting of large numbers of radium atoms (which allows us to design nuclear reactors, etc.). . Being probabilistic or observationally random does not equate to being causeless.
So the notion of physical events being causeless has not been demonstrated to be coherent. Science and human reasoning and discourse in general works in the framework of causality, i.e. things just do not happen or exist with no cause. If you found a big gouge in the side of your car, presumably you would not shrug and say that we live in the kind of universe where gouges can just magically appear. Rather, you (and perhaps your insurance company) would start asking questions about who drove this car and where was it parked, in order to understand the cause of that gouge.
Edward Feser in the linked interview above notes that when when holding consistently to causality seems to lead to the notion of a God-like being as upholding the physical universe, at that point atheists may suddenly say, well maybe some things do happen with no cause. Not because they have a good reason to believe in non-causality, but because they don’t want God. This feeds into why an immaterial, noncontingent Being is a more appropriate explanation for the whole physical universe/multiverse than saying maybe it came from nothing. (Again, not wanting to start long debate, just noting that I am aware of your position and have my reasons for not embracing it).
( 3 ) I don’t have a happy answer to all of the nastiness in the Old Testament. My position is that Jesus best represents the nature of God, so I center on the New Testament. There are several lines of explanations for why some things in the O.T. are what they are, including progressive revelation, and God often working at least in part within the existing cultural frameworks, rather than expecting 21st century Western sensibilities (which have been largely leavened by Christianity; the bare physical world presents us with no ethical norms).
The Gibeonites in II Samuel 21 had been promised a protected place within Israel, in a solemn covenant before God. Saul had, it seems, committed genocide against them, with widespread murder and driving them from their homes. Under the legal/moral norms of that time, this bloodguilt could not be expunged by someone just saying “Whoops, sorry”. They did ask for seven of the sons of their murderer, and they did kill (not torture) them, as an atonement for Saul’s killings. Not the way we do it today, agreed. And not the way it was done later even in the Old Testament – – there is a passage in one of the prophets (Ezekiel, maybe 600 BC or so) specifically saying that in the past, it was common for children to suffer for parents’ sins, but that was not to be the practice going forward.
For what it is worth, the notion of group guilt and atonement is not necessarily a bizarre notion confined to the far distant past. There are serious proposals today for all people with skin color A to make reparations to people with skin color B, for misdeeds committed perhaps 50 or 200 years ago by some people who happened to have skin color A (whether or not the perps were even direct ancestors of the people today with skin color A).
Not that these points all make me feel really good about the Gibeonites and Saul’s seven sons, but just to note that we all judge things from our limited cultural moment.
Reply: the Forbes article is behind a paywall on my PC, but I used to read Dr. Siegel’s ScienceBlog, and as I understand it he is not a working particle physicist or theorist. Matt Strasser at “Of Particular Significance” (blog) is, and has written about virtual particles, explaining that at high resolution, calculations of quantum interactions by every method show moving secondary disturbances in the quantum fields which correspond to the exchange of virtual particles in Feynman diagrams. Also, the first item I got in an Internet search for “virtual particles” is:
The idea of virtual particles came from the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which describes a fundamental property of nature on its smallest scale. Experiments to measure the Casimir Effect show that virtual particles do exist. The space inside a vacuum is not empty, we are surrounded by a sea of virtual particles!
faculty.washington.edu/seattle/physics541/ 2010-reading/virtual-5.pdf
Virtual Particles – University of Washington
Also there is the famous calculation by Stephen Hawking of black hole evaporation due to virtual particle pairs being separated at the event horizon, which is quite generally accepted.
Of course, virtual particles are not the only evidence we have of random events from quantum mechanics. See the Stern-Gerlach experiment for another example.
The main point about randomly-caused events is that it is a conceivable notion. (Jack Vance wrote a short story about it many years ago.) People such as Aristotle just refused to accept it, since on the macroscopic level things tend to average out. I feel that a bit of underlying randomness is a good way to design a clockwork (programmed) universe, so that things which fall into holes (stability traps) have some small chance of getting out. I learned this long ago writing and testing game programs on the Apple II. Since it is logically conceivable it rules out the syllogism that every effect has a specific cause. That is, a cause for every effect is just an assumption, not a logical requirement.
Saying that the God Theory explains why we have the specific physics (particles, etc.) we have strikes me as more slight of hand. Why could not an omniscient god produce any set of particles and laws? Humans certainly can, and have, conceived of other particle theories than the Standard Model, such as super-symmetry. The string-theory “landscape” is a huge multiverse of possible particle sets and rules for them. In fact we do not know how or why this supposed god picked the particle set we have. “Who can know him,” as the saying goes. That which cannot be known/tested cannot explain anything. Or, as another saying goes, that which can explain anything explains nothing. (Since it can make no testable predictions–whatever happens can be accommodated by it.)
It is convenient to not focus on the Old testament god, but as I understand it this is the god that Jesus believed in and claimed to be the son of, and never repudiated. The same one who caused a father to sacrifice his daughter to it, in another story I read. It all reads to me as a made-up god to foment and justify the atrocities of a tribe in brutal times, similar to Odin and others.
People are and should be free to believe whatever shape they wish to impose on the unknowable, as long as they don’t claim it is the only one which makes sense.
I appreciate your informed and informative response. I hope to provide a few clarifications, since it seems to me that we agree more than perhaps you think.
( 1 ) I agree that there are, as far as we can tell, random events on the quantum level.
However, I think we are using different meanings of the word “caused”. We don’t know when a particular isolated radium or uranium atom will split. In a narrow sense of “cause”, we might say that the fission of a particular atom has no “specific cause” (a phrase you used). However, I have been using a broader sense of “cause”, in the sense of “explanatory source”. Radium and uranium nuclei are known to be unstable, and are known to decay at a very well-defined rate, on average. So the “explanation” of their fission is the instability of the nuclei.
The exact position of the electron around a given H nucleus a second from now is random, in the sense of being unpredictable by us, but its average position is governed by well-defined laws of quantum mechanics.
I am not an expert on virtual particles, I was just going by what I read on the internet. If they are to be considered real, still they do not appear from nothing. They appear within the quantum vacuum, which has specific properties (esp. positive energy). That positive energy and other properties of the space-time quantum vacuum is the explanatory source (“cause” in the broad sense) of the virtual particles, even if (as is generally true of quantum events) we cannot predict the specific time/place of their appearance.
( 2 ) I agree that invoking God does not automatically tell us what the specific forms of the laws are of our universe. That would be to make God a physical theory or hypothesis.
But for theism, we are talking metaphysics, not physics. The issue we are addressing is not why the laws of our universe are what they are, but why is there a universe/multiverse at all, with whatever specific laws it has? You noted, and I agree, that one might conceive of an alternative universe with different laws. But that is to acknowledge that the observed natural order is not necessary, but is contingent.
As such, the universe/multiverse cannot explain itself (at least, this is the argument made by philosophically-trained theologians, which I am not). What would explain the universe/multiverse is an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, non-material, necessary, non-contingent, intentional Being. The existence of this necessary, non-contingent Being (unlike the universe) is self-explanatory.
I hope this (metaphysics vs physics) helps clarify our agreements/disagreements.
( 3 ) On the Old Testament: Jesus was actually pretty nuanced regarding the O.T. He did not blanket endorse everything in the O.T. He had a high view of the Scriptures in general, but he was quite selective on what passages he cited. Also, he actually critiqued it at times. The O.T. had strict dietary laws that were ostensibly valid forever, but Jesus effectively threw these laws in the dumpster by declaring all foods to be “clean”. (When he taught that it is not what goes into a man, e.g. food, that makes him unclean, but what comes out of the man, e.g. impure behavior from an impure heart, that makes him unclean).
Also (without getting too deep into it), he critiqued the practice of divorce in the Mosaic law, saying something like, “Moses gave you this practice to accommodate your hard hearts, but this was not the deepest intent of God.” This relates to God accommodating to some extent to existing cultural practices in the O.T., particularly in the earlier parts, by way of bringing in revelation progressively, rather than presenting ancient people with the highest/best practices before they could realistically adopt them.
Regarding the man who sacrificed his daughter, that was not something that God commanded him to do. In fact, the law of Moses (Leviticus 20:1-2) has strict prohibition of sacrificing children. Jephthah (in Judges 11) made a rash vow, that if he was victorious that he would sacrifice whoever came out of the door of his house, which turned out to be his daughter. Jephthah apparently had a Canaanite mother (child sacrifice was rife among Canaanites), which may partly explain why he made such a vow that would necessarily involve the sacrifice of some human, contrary to God’s Israelite law. The text of Judges records this incident, but does not endorse or approve it, as with many other flawed characters in the O.T.
What is the specific cause for an electron’s spin direction to be positive with respect to a vertical magnetic field when first measured in the Stern-Gerlach experiment and then sometimes positive and sometimes negative in the next measurement? The standard physics explanation is that spin direction is a random variable regardless of external causes. In fact, quantum randomness is regarded as quintessential randomness, prized for use in cryptography as being totally unpredictable.
Again, a God who could do anything could decide the result of any quantum interaction in all of space an infinite number of times per instance, in way that we could not distinguish from randomness, but we would never have the faintest idea of how. Again, “It rains because the Rain God makes it rain.” is not a useful or meaningful explanation. If it is a question of philosophical world views, I find natural randomness dividing nothing into plus and minus somethings until some stable configurations evolve literally infinitely more simple than the above.
I take it the most definitive statement Jesus made about the Old Testament was “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” I think a lot of destruction would have been beneficial. Another example is God hardening Pharaoh’s heart so that innocent first-born sons could be killed to demonstrate God’s power. No doubt there is some apologetic (pun intended) explanation for that also. It reads as telling contemporaries that had better toe the line of the priests and prophets or else. That is, more understandable as cult mechanics than celestial mechanics.
I have seen apologetic explanations of Donald Trump’s actions also. I probably have done the same for some of my heroes, such as Mickey Mantle.
(Getting back to this after a medical break). Again, you bring up some meaty issues.
( 1 ) re: “It rains because the Rain God makes it rain.” is not a useful or meaningful explanation.
I agree with that statement, from a physical or mechanistic point of view. But (see above) I am discussing the ontological basis, not the mechanical details. The issue is why is there a universe/multiverse at all, in which (by whatever mechanism) rain falls? What holds a single silver atom (or its constituent sub-particles) in being right now? I have argued that an eternal, omnipotent, non-material, necessary, non-contingent Being (which most folks would recognize as God) is a consistent and satisfactory explanation for both the past and present existence of the universe/multiverse; a necessary, non-contingent Being would, of course, be expected to exist as opposed to not exist. Whereas to say the universe/multiverse (which could have different properties than it actually does) “just is” is no explanation at all.
I understand that folks with a prior commitment to physicalism/naturalism might rather have no explanation than an explanation that entails something like God.
( 2 ) You raised a good question earlier that, even if we granted a Creator, could we deduce anything about his/its characteristics? I don’t want to try to unpack this here, but philosophers have teased out the implications of an eternal, omnipotent, non-material, necessary, non-contingent Creator, and derived further properties such as intentionality, being purely actual vs potential, etc. (See links in footnote 2 of my other article). So, we can make some headway here.
Similarly, the Apostle Paul stated (Romans 1), regarding the revelation of God in nature, that the Creator’s basic “power and divine nature” are evinced : “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools… They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.”
However, trying to go beyond the basic attributes like “eternal power and divine nature” , I agree with you that we could not tell much about the benevolence or intentions of such a Creator just from looking at this complex, nuanced world, with its intense mix of nice things (flowers, healthy children, friends, mostly good health, physical and intellectual pleasures) and horrors (suffering, injustice, death) . Further information about the Creator would require more specific self-revelation by the Creator. I believe that has in fact occurred in the evolution of the spirituality of the nation of Israel and especially in the teachings and actions of Jesus, as backed by strong historical documentation – – See https://letterstocreationists.wordpress.com/historicity-of-jesus/ and https://letterstocreationists.wordpress.com/2021/07/25/jesus-in-old-testament-prophecy-class-handout/ . But again that would be a huge subject to try to unpack here.
( 2 B ) All that said (i.e., the pointers to a Creator to explain the physical universe/multiverse and the near-eyewitness testimonies about the life of Jesus ,and his fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies), I recognize that these evidences do not constitute air-tight mathematical “proofs” that any rational adult must accede to. I have put forth some reasons I have, but respect that you may weight other factors and come to different conclusions.
The topic of the blog post here is the acknowledged “hiddennesss” of God. Jesus (it is said) did perform numerous miracles of mercy (healings, feedings), but refused to perform miracles to satisfy skeptics. He often asked people that he healed to keep it quiet. As I wrote in the article, Jesus “typically was reticent about stating baldly what he was about. Publicly, he spoke in parables and responded to intellectual questions with counter-questions, not facile answers. Casual or skeptical inquirers went away frustrated. Jesus did not give himself away cheaply.”
My readings of the New Testament suggest to me that God has intentionally provided enough evidence for someone who wants him, but not so strong to bludgeon the unwilling into following him. The relationship he seems to value is one that is freely chosen, based on love and valuing and honor, not unwilling slavery. The main metaphor between God and people is of a parent and child; and occasionally even of a husband and wife.
( 3 ) Re: “If it is a question of philosophical world views, I find natural randomness dividing nothing into plus and minus somethings until some stable configurations evolve literally infinitely more simple than the above.” Maybe “ natural randomness dividing nothing into plus and minus somethings until some stable configurations evolve” is indeed a good scientific, law-like description of how matters proceed in this universe.
But that doesn’t touch the issue of why this universe (with deterministic and probabilistic aspects), with its quantum vacuum with positive energy that enables the appearance of virtual particles, exists at all. Again, although individual quantum events are typically random (at least as far as we can tell), they are typically law-like phenomena in large numbers (probabilistically) , and occur as part of a space-time universe as a whole that exists. So quantum events don’t come from true “nothing”. If there were no quantum vacuum with positive energy, and its associated quantum fields and their properties, there would be no virtual particles.
( 4 ) re: “ I take it the most definitive statement Jesus made about the Old Testament was “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” I think a lot of destruction would have been beneficial.”
Christians like myself would largely agree with you about “destruction” of the law. As I noted earlier, Jesus endorsed some portions of Mosaic law, and specifically abrogated others. He actually redefined the whole Law down to just two commandments: Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.
We can see from Jesus’ actions and words that the sense in which he meant that he “fulfilled” the Law was to fulfill the true meaning and purpose of what the Law was about. Again, huge subject, here is one snip that gives the flavor of this:
“Where the Law said do not lie, do not steal, do not commit adultery (Exodus 20:1-17), etc., Jesus obeyed the moral law perfectly. He never sinned (1 Peter 2:22). Where the Law talked about sacrifices and requirement of shedding of blood for the forgiveness of sins, Jesus was the high priest (Hebrews 3:1; 4:14; 5:10; 6:20) who shed his own blood for the forgiveness of our sins (Hebrews 9:12, 14; 10:10, 19; 13:12, 20). Where the Law talked about the coming Messiah, Jesus was that Messiah, the one born of the virgin (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:18, 25), who is the seed of Abraham (Genesis 22:18; Matthew 1:1), who was to be a prophet (Deuteronomy 18:18; Matthew 21:11), a priest (Psalm 110:4; Hebrews 5:5-6), who was crucified (Psalm 22:1, 11-18; Luke 23:33), and rose from the dead (Psalm 16:10; John 2:19-31; Matthew 28:6-7; Luke 24:6).”
(from https://carm.org/about-jesus/what-does-it-mean-that-jesus-fulfilled-the-law/ )
( 5 ) Since you bring it up, yes, there is an apologetic for God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. It’s not the case that Pharoah was a nice guy but God twisted his will to evil. Rather, Pharoah’s actions show him to be a very cruel and hard-hearted man throughout. It is common in Scripture to have the same events described as being responsible human choices or plain natural events, but also caused by God. (It’s part of the duality of providence, which I don’t want to unpack here. ) Pharaoh is repeatedly described as hardening his own heart. In this case, God let his evil disposition have its way. There are other passages noting where God “gives [men] over” to their own evil hearts. See e.g., https://www.christianity.com/wiki/bible/did-god-really-harden-pharaohs-heart.html for more on this.
Regarding the innocent first-born sons dying: Naturally, we squirm at the thought of little babies dying, but we all die in the end. I used to be less sensitive towards old people dying (“I guess it was just his time”) but now that I am old myself, the dying of old people is becoming more poignant to me.
It is not man’s prerogative to arbitrarily take human life. But each breath we take is a sheer gift from God. He does not owe anyone any particular quality or length of life, whether one day or one hundred years.
I am sorry for your medical break. I have had some of those and expect more. I hope you have good doctors who can help you.
It seems clear to me from your reply that regardless of how the universe worked in its specific details and rules (even including the fundamental randomness of quantum-level events) that you would claim this as evidence of a creator-god, which is my main point: that which could explain anything actually explains nothing (not my own words except for rephrasing, a well-known phrase in science); that is, it is worthless and useless as a scientific explanation because it provides no grounds for predictions, or any way to understand the mechanisms of what was done.
You are of course entitled to, as my friend Mario likes to say, “believe whatever it takes to get you through the night,” but I must object to claims that it has any compelling logic and philosophical thought behind it. It explains nothing and in fact adds a new, unknowable mystery on top of the mystery of the universe.
As for historical evidence, as I understand it there is none that the legend of Moses ever took place, nor did any neutral observer among the 40-some historical sources of that era in Judea support the claims made about the life of Jesus, which are similar to many other ancient legends. Many people have claimed to reproduce some of these feats, especially healing, but when investigated turn out to be frauds. Controlled, scientific studies of prayer have been negative. I was brought up to be a Christian but it never made compelling sense to me. I feel that if a god wanted me to believe in it I could have provided much more compelling evidence. The best way of hiding is not to exist.
Yes, surgeon fixed my most pressing problem. Other issues remain. Getting old… I am grateful to live in a age with this level of medical interventions. Best wishes for your next round of “stuff”.
Briefly:
( 1 ) I have already stated that I agree that accepting a Creator of the overall physical order does not translate into increased understanding of the mechanisms of the physical order. That was never my point.
( 2 ) I agree about little or no external evidence regarding Moses.
( 3 ) Regarding mention of Jesus in extra-biblical sources: From my article https://letterstocreationists.wordpress.com/historicity-of-jesus/ :
… There is no particular reason why the death of a rabbi in Judea in 30 A.D. would be written up in chronicles of the time. Writing of any kind was much rarer than today, and only a small fraction of what was written in the first century has survived to be discovered today. For the vast majority of men and women in the ancient world, even those who had some public visibility at the time, we have no accounts, especially records written within the lifetime of the person.
Bart Ehrman in “Did Jesus Exist” observes of the ancient world in general, “We have no records, not only of Jesus but of nearly anyone who lived in the first century. We simply don’t have birth notices, trial records, death certificates – – or other standard sorts of records that one has today” . For instance, Pontius Pilate was arguably the most important figure in Roman Palestine for the decade (26-36 A.D.) during which he governed Judea. Ehrman notes, “And what record from that decade do we have from his reign – – what Roman records of his major accomplishments, his daily itinerary, the decrees he passed, the laws he issued, the prisoners he put on trial, the death warrants he signed, his scandals, his interviews, his judicial proceedings? We have none. Nothing at all.”
[Ehrman continues:] “… I might add that our principal source of knowledge about Jewish Palestine in the days of Jesus comes from the historian Josephus, a prominent aristocratic Jew who was extremely influential in the social and political affairs of his day. And how often is Josephus mentioned in Greek or Roman sources of his own day the first century CE? Never.”
So the fact that Jesus is not mentioned in extrabiblical sources until about 100 A.D. is a total non-issue. On the other hand, we have letters written (beyond all reasonable doubt) by the apostle Paul within 30 years of Jesus’ lifetime, referring to his contacts with Peter (Jesus’ closest associate) and James (Jesus’ own brother), writing to audiences who already personally knew or knew of Peter and James. Plus four gospels written within 40-60 years of Jesus’ lifetime. So the life of Jesus is far better attested than most things in the ancient world. Again, see my article if you want to pursue this further. For these other miracle-working figures (Apollo, etc.) you never (to my knowledge) have this kind of specific documentation from within the lifetime of eyewitness.
I quite understand if you reject the accounts of Jesus because they involve miracles, but there is no reason to doubt them on general historiographic grounds.
Re: “There is no particular reason why the death of a rabbi in Judea in 30 A.D. would be written up in chronicles of the time.”
From dimly remembered Sunday School days (Sunday School, Sunday church, Sunday evening Youth Service, Daily Vacation Bible School, and Thursday afternoon (1 PM to 2:30 PM) Release-Time Religious Education all through Junior High and High School–how was that legal for a public school to do, I wonder now), there were signs and portents during that death which might have been worthy of historical note.
From the Wikipedia article, “Crucifixion darkness”:
The crucifixion darkness is an episode in three of the canonical gospels in which the sky becomes dark in daytime during the crucifixion of Jesus for roughly three hours.[1][2][3] Most ancient and medieval Christian writers treated this as a miracle, and believed it to be one of the few episodes from the New Testament which were confirmed by non-Christian sources; modern scholars, however, have found no contemporary references to it outside the New Testament.
…
The text of the Gospel of Matthew reads: “From noon on, darkness came over the whole land [or, earth] until three in the afternoon.”[12] The author includes dramatic details following the death of Jesus, including an earthquake and the raising of the dead, which were also common motifs in Jewish apocalyptic literature:[13][14] “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.”
–excerpts ended
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, to your point, but it is also not evidence, and for extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence is required.
Why should something exist rather than nothing?–supposedly the question the God Hypothesis answers.
Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder on her Back Reaction blog (and Youtube channel) recently made a post on nothingness. (In which in passing she affirms the existence of virtual particles.) In describing all the things, including laws of nature, which have to be removed to arrive at nothingness, she seems to support my own philosophical speculation which is that when there is pure nothingness, with no laws, there is no way to prevent something from happening. There is afterall, no Law of Nothingness which has to be obeyed. (If there were, nothingness would contain that law and not be empty of everything.) I.e., starting from pure nothingness, anything can happen.
Then it becomes a question of how stable and complex that anything is, and given an eternity, sooner or later something interesting is bound to occur and endure as long as it is capable of enduring. (Currently there is some evidence that our universe will end in a few trillion years by being torn apart in the Big Rip. We and Earth will be long gone much sooner.)
I suspect that, as usual, the actual source of this universe is beyond anything I could conceive and I don’t claim any exact knowledge of it. However, I consider my worthless speculation to be slightly less worthless than the God Hypothesis, which is a subjective opinion of course.
Mainly, as previously stated, because the GH contains all the same unanswered questions as the universe itself: why does the God exist, how was it created, how does it work, why and how is it non-contingent, et cetera.
Hello from the UK
Many thanks for your post. As to “…why God does not make his existence and his purposes more visually obvious to us humans.” I say because He has and keeps on doing so. Creation when examined closely makes it plain certain of His characteristics as Paul in Romans says.
However, people can be so wrapped up in themselves they forget to step back and take in the bigger picture, to see the wood for the trees.
If you are down in a valley you won’t see what is on the other side of the hills. Go to the top of a hill and new vistas open up and things make more sense.
Fly above the hills and what seemed perhaps obstacles become reduced and flattened in perspective.
SO life is all above your vantage point.
God the heaven Father revealed His nature in Jesus Christ. Many believed Jesus’s words. Others hated Him and He was crucified as a consequence, albeit it was planned from the beginning of time.
We exist in the mind of God and we must plumb the mind of God each as the Spirit of God searches His mind to find out the truth. Life would be boring without a challenge and God wants those who will search Him out. Then He will reveal Himself more fully.
Kind regards
Baldmichael Theresoluteprotector’sson
Please excuse the nom-de-plume, this is as much for fun as a riddle for people to solve if they wish.