That’s kind of sad that you have not experienced any, or even know of any, of God’s providential interventions. You should read about George Müller or Maggie. In his orchestration of all of those cool providences no natural laws were broken by the God who is wonderfully sovereign over time and place, timing and placing. I agree, you are clueless – no argument there!
Not as much as someone else who will remain monikered ‘Buzzard’. 
That makes the same mistake as @Buzzard, and as Ron @rsewell noted well, things operate normally from day to day:
It also makes the same mistake as YECs notoriously do in ignoring Jeremiah 33:25:
This is what the LORD says: If I have not established my covenant with the day and the night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth…
Jeremiah had a naturalistic mindset? I don’t think so.
That does not mean supranaturalists cannot be mistaken about the validity of God’s use of evolution.
Where in the world did you get that notion?
Besides which, evolution can be studied and understood, while rising from the dead can’t be studied – so which is more impressive is meaningless.
And that’s exactly what we should expect given the truth that God is faithful: He doesn’t go about whimsically changing the rules He chose for the universe.
How can it not be since what you were responding to was the proposition that “the sublime elegance of nature” points to a Creator?
Okay but that’s not what was said – what was said is that the basic rules of nature point to a Creator. Lewis would not call that evidence of a naturalistic mindset since he believed the very same thing. Nothing was said about nature being “solely based on some basic rules and forces of nature”.
You’re making a leap to a conclusion that doesn’t follow from what he wrote. I would have to agree that none of us “have a clue” whether God “always [has] to perform a supernatural miracle” in order to answer prayer, because none of us knows enough about the ‘natural’ world to make such a judgment. Plainly some answers to prayer involve supernatural miracles, e.g. how a lawn mower I was using ran for quite some time on an empty gas tank, much longer than could be accounted for by gas still in the line or the fuel filter or even fumes.
I’m not so sure of that.
It’s not a leap to conclude that God’s ‘customary’ M.O. in communicating special providences does not apparently violate the natural order – witness the aforementioned examples.1 Those who decry God’s sovereignty denialistically, whether believers or whatevers, typically say, ‘Oh, it’s just coincidence’, even when there are whole compound, complex and interrelated sets that are beyond probabilistic explanation. It’s not a coincidence that the naysayers clearly demonstrate their denialism.
Granted, we do not and cannot know how he orchestrates those which do not violate the known natural order any more than we can explain supernatural miracles that obviously do. Perhaps both involve a quantum interface between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’ which God uses in his supradimensionality?
1 One fun pair that I’ve referred to elsewhere is not all that long ago from Jim @jstump. The second one is especially delightful, when he was providentially literally turned around. The natural order, from what we can know, was not interrupted – what ‘scientific laws’ were violated?:
I bumped into someone online who maintained that God IS the quantum interface.
Quantum mysticism?
My first thought on seeing that picture was, “Wow, someone still crafts rail fences well!”
Jeremiah was a 21 century scientist? I don’t think so.
According to Lewis, supernatural acts don’t break natural laws, they use them or regulate them.
Many biblical miracles plausibly make use of natural laws but have exceptional timing. A landslide can block off the Jordan, allowing crossing. Exodus cites the wind God used to part the sea. One of the fish species in the sea of Galilee tends to pick up shiny stuff. In other cases, as far as we can tell, natural law is set aside, but such incidents seem to be minimized. The axe head floated but then had to be fastened back on better in the ordinary way. Water turned to wine had to be served just like usual. Visions are used to get Peter and Cornelius talking with each other.
Whether or not you happen to be predestined to accept the Westminster Standards, they represent a theological summary written in the 1640’s, before modern scientific issues were prominent. Ch. 5, point 3 states “God, in His ordinary providence, maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at His pleasure.” The Bible sees things that happen by natural law as being from God, e.g. Ps. 29 sees God behind a storm.
Evolution, like any other scientific model, should thus be seen as an attempt to describe God’s ordinary working in creation. Whether it is a good scientific model can be left to scientists. Dawkins’ claim that evolution enables intellectually satisfied atheism should be taken as an insult to the intellect of atheists, not as a credible philosophical assessment. Even on his own terms, evolution does not explain earth history nor the universe, so major gaps in physical understanding of origins remained after the development of evolution by natural selection as a model of biological origins. But he is also committing the circular reasoning error of claiming that because he says that nothing exists beyond the physical, therefore physical explanations explain everything, therefore everything is explained physically and nothing beyond the physical exists.
I’d love to see Dawkins’ response to that! And for that, matter, to this–
Oddly enough I’ve never seen him called on that one.
I just read the introduction and first essay and have to say it is well worth the read! My only negative comment is that the ebook version is ludicrously overpriced.
As an atheist I would describe Dawkins’ claims as cringey. I think they are far more insulting to theists, as if theists wouldn’t also be intellectually satisfied by learning how biodiversity is produced in nature. Dawkins seems way more focused on beating down a religious strawman than he does understanding his fellow human beings.
Personally, I couldn’t care less about Dawkins’ religious screeds. However, I do find it fascinating that quite a few ID/Creationists follow Dawkins’ theology instead of the theology shared by other Christians on this site.
Dawkins is a bit more nuanced than that, if memory serves. At times he seems to admit that there could be something outside of the physical that he is just ignorant of, but his subsequent screeds betray what little nuance he attempts to create. He can be a good communicator when it comes to scientific concepts, but a philosopher/theologian he is not.
Yes, it is quite strange reasoning by many ID and YEC partisans to invoke Dawkins et al. as proving their theological claims. Dawkins does indeed sometimes admit to other possibilities at times, but in this particular argument he’s not doing so; like the ID and YEC errors, he’s often focused on what seems to support his target rather than examining the quality or consistency of the argument.
I agree with all of this post and accept the Westminster confession.
For me, it’s sort of a joke that Dawkins states that all we say is just a meme but that makes what he is saying also just a meme, which means, no reason to assume to be true. However, he seems to believe his own statements, which means that he doesn’t believe that his statement is just a meme, only result of his genes that programmed him to do this way in order to increase his genes to survive and multiply. Completely selfdefeating.
However, as student, it cost some time to realize that, and I had a bad time, when I read Dawkins book the selfish genes. For me it was completely dystopic.
This is something more pertinent to a different thread, but the Westminster Confession makes a valuable point:
Nevertheless we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word
It doesn’t say that those without any inward illumination can’t understand the scriptures, it only says that theirs will not be a saving understanding.
I suppose I ought to post this over in that other thread.
Here’s an important part that gets misused by many, including some here on Biologos:
The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture, is the Scripture itself; and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it may be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.
When taken to mean that no study of anything outside one’s own preferred translation is needed, this sends people down a rabbit trail that ends up trying to force the scriptures into a modern worldview – and thus into a backwards application of intelligent design and a search for irreducible complexity.
I think this is a misunderstanding of what Dawkins meant by the concept of “meme” (which is a term and concept he invented). A meme is an idea or concept that propagates in a culture and as a shared understanding serves to bind a worldview together.
In his own words:
The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.
Wikipedia actually has a great summary:
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
Just BTW, I get a chuckle over the fact that Dawkins got the Greek sloppy; the word is μίμημα, rendered as mimema, and there is no “mimeme” form.
God creating an organism from inanimate matter in an instant is the same miracle as God raising someone from the dead in an instant. Personally I think either of those miracles is more impressive that a natural process like evolution.
Lots of miracles are described in the Bible, but evolution didn’t even rate a mention.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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