Hi Dale ~
Well, I just read the first of your two testimonies, which, if I remove anything referring to God, seems quite unremarkable: some of Rich’s friends thought he might be good at the new position, then another shared his admiration for an organization that had helped him with an adoption, and the organization turned out to be the same one Rich was considering (not especially surprising, since it was a large, well-established organization).
To me, Rich’s “shivers” indicate how primed he was to interpret ordinary coincidences as a message from God. This says a lot about Rich’s devotion, but nothing about the reality of its target. Please don’t take this as disrespect, but try re-reading his account and substituting the name “Rum-tum-tiggedy” for “God.” Without the latter label, and all the intellectual/emotional priors that accompany it, does Rich’s story feel different?
As for Maggie’s story, the lesson I draw is that scientists are people. Working for 84 hours a week (!) with the intellectual rigour and constraints that science imposes says nothing about how you think in your spare time. Saying that some scientists believe in god is no different than saying some people believe in God. The question remains: Why? It’s an honest question.
Maggie’s statement that “I had enough education and intelligence to eliminate some gods at the outset” is like saying “OK, you can be Creator Of The 13-Billion-Year-Old Universe, but only if you’re a white guy and not too short.”
Her suggestion that “There was no human way possible to meet any of these needs.” is a little extreme, don’t you think: basically she needed some money and a place to stay. She met an already-friend at the store, who happened to have a spare room available and was married to a biologist. Her bank made a mistake with her account (from my perspective that’s more of a certainty than a miracle!). She met a bank manager at another bank (!) who was impressed enough by her background to give her a loan.
Having decided that these events were miracles created specifically for her benefit must have been so comforting it justified 50 years of devotion to and intellectual buttressing of a seemingly very specific set of beliefs. Similar beliefs have provided hope and comfort for so many people in the most desperate of circumstances. But I knew a woman once who described how, as a poor single mom of four young kids, she shed dodged a lot of turmoil and pressure by simply flipping a coin to resolve any of the many fraught choices that came up relating to disciplining the kids, deciding which bills to pay, etc. As luck would have it, they muddled through (though my hunch is that part of whatever success she had was knowing - as a loving good-enough mother - when to cheat). And most people, whether Christian or Flippist, don’t rely on prayers or pennies when the car breaks down - they call a mechanic.
Miracles, it seems, are in the eye of the beholder. I’ve heard it said that any technology sufficiently beyond the ken of those newly exposed to it may be perceived as magic. Humans are notoriously bad at sensing probabilities but very good at filtering their experience according to prior expectations and biases.
Am I wrong in rejecting these two stories as providing evidence for a God? If so, can you suggest where? Maybe the criteria by which we judge evidence is different . . .