So for me it’s not a slippery slope. I use to be very worried , for years, that in order to believe in God I had to have some kind of evidence that was concrete. If not examples of design in evolution then surely there must be something in abiogenesis , once we even land on a solid theory and then I was like well maybe it’s not biology or chemistry that I need to look at but the cosmos. Surely with the size of space, all the laws that seem to hinge on mathematical precision and in the correct order there will be this sign in the stars that a designer is needed.
But with each rabbit hole I followed it landed on one of two positions.
- There is a naturalistic explanation.
- There is currently no answer and it’s a field still being studied and so there is a gap. With that gap I could fill it in with God or I could fill it in with belief that eventually science will have an answer.
I found myself like the incredible shrinking man going from 6 foot to 5 foot tall to 1 foot tall to 7 inches tall to 1/2 an inch tall thinking…… eventually I’ll be 1/16 of an inch tall and then I’ll just disappear. So I felt that there was this floor that I was going to hit where either science held all the answers or that something would scream a god is here. But then like the shrinking man i realized I was thinking of it all wrong. The end of the shrinking man ( spoiler alert but in my defense it’s been out since 1956 ) he realizes that it goes forever. There is 1/99th of an inch. There is 1/999,999,999,999,999,999 of an inch. That even though he was getting smaller, his world was in fact not only getting bigger but would change until he was smaller than the smallest microbe and who knows what he will find then.
So by that example I mean that science will never be finished. There will always be another layer but that’s not important. What’s important is that we realize our problem is not coming to a forked position where it demands on way or the other.
So your view that the bigger science grows the smaller god is but the space is infinite. Science can get 100x times bigger and still not force God to shrink.
On the side is this.
We hear a lot of wild claims about the supernatural. Often we can do the same thing. Statistically speaking there will always be a naturalistic explanation for something that is more probably than a supernatural one. Even is someone came back from the dead three days later. We would be able to speculate on what the doctors misdiagnosed or what’s possible with medication, technology or even a weird gene that resulted in this man appearing dead for days. All of that is more probable than him dying and something supernatural occurring. For every miraculous story we hear of a Christian witnessing something like speaking in tongues, we hear of a fake. For every person who claims special magical powers, they fail tests. Does not matter if it’s a pagan magician, a Christian healer, a Jewish mystic or a Buddhist monk at the top of a mountain. My default position because of the doctrine of cessationism is that I simply don’t believe anyone who claims magical abilities.
But we hear of stories that are not about a person with magical abilities. We hear of stories here the miracles seem to come from nowhere. These stories comes from all around the world. Muslims girls who said they met a man with glowing eyes that told them to follow them through a path only to find out that place was covered with land mines and the chances of just walking through it was so slim. We read of indigenous people who have a specific spiritual animal seeing it cawing to them and they follow the crow and it takes them 1/2 a mile away to a lost kid who needs immediate help. We read of Christians being stopped by some random man who begins to talk to them. They stop what they are doing to indulge the homeless man because it’s the loving thing to do. They are in a dead end alley and they turn around for me second only to find the man is gone. Only to find out 30 seconds before they get where they are going to open up the store in the morning there is an explosion. They believe it was angel.
With these stories I’m far more likely to believe it. I still don’t accept it as concrete evidence but when a billion people have 1-2 stories of things that are just so strange , I have faith some of them are not just pure coincidences, and some of them are not just pure statistics and that some of them are not delusions or lies. Accepting these stories does not go against my belief in cessationism and they don’t undermine science.
The distinctions between science and theology and methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism need to be recognized and not conflated.
