To this, my response is, “Oh? Why?”

Begetting implies involvement. Sorry, but the Christian definition of Jesus as God’s only begotten son kind of precludes a scientific definition of artistic control of only one moment in time. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that you are implying that God has not/does not involve himself in the history of Humanity. But stretching the “thermodynamic miracles” to cover over the long range the act of begetting is a bit over ambitious I think.

The waste comes not from scarcity or the use of resources, but creating more than is necessary – much, much, more. God could have created a universe containing only this solar system – that would have been efficient. That the universe extends beyond our light-cone, thus beyond our detection, means that God did not create the Universe for Man, but for his Children. Ergo,
Man is not God’s only child.

In response to my statement “Anyway, the logical consequence of the Christian idea of God is that artistic control over the Big Bang is all it takes,” you say:

“Except for one thing… the begetting of Jesus.”

To this, my response is, “Oh? Why?”

To clarify: There’s nothing particularly more miraculous (on the physical level) about the begetting of Jesus than about, say, earlier resurrections (e.g. of the son of the widow at Zarephath) or the vanishing of Enoch or Elijah into heaven.

The materialist thinks that the very patterns of thoughts in our brains are no more than firing neurons entirely attributable to physical causes, themselves caused by earlier causes, standing at the near end of a chain of physical cause-and-effect started at the Big Bang.

But “thermodynamic miracles” (what a choice of terms!) are accepted by science: For a “particle” to, on very rare occasions, interact with others in an unusual way is predicted by the standard model.

So what (on, again, the physical level) is required to produce a virgin birth? The sudden creation of a trillion quanta-worth of atoms in the correct patterns to produce the other half of the DNA needed to make an egg fertilized, right? God can “start” the Big Bang in just such a way as to cause the particles in Mary’s womb to produce this effect, and the thing is done.

Or one can go non-deterministic and call every miracle, the physical part of the Incarnation included, an instance of “quantum weirdness” producing interactions that normally don’t occur.

Or one can go trans-dimensional and attribute the “lightning-like” appearances of angelic beings to their intersection with our plane of existence (with a nod to Edwin Abbot’s “Flatland”).

Or all three. Whatever you do, God has authority over the current physical state of the universe, including the ability to affect angelic visitations, multiplied loaves, and the Incarnation, without any need to violate anything science has shown to be true. The thing which makes Christianity anathema to materialist scientists, then, is not that it contradicts what they know of science — far from it! No, it’s only that it contradicts the materialist philosophy that they’ve adopted on faith.

The lesson here is a general one: Materialists are enamored of the scientific method, in which we conduct experiments on the physical world while holding the working assumption that nothing but physical causes will contribute to the outcome. But they’re so enamored of it that they “take their work home with them”; that is, they transform their working assumption into a universal axiom, held by faith.

The working assumption, after all, is fit for the lab only because of probabilities (how likely is it, given the rarity of spectacular miracles, that your experiment will be altered by one?) and because of God’s character (why would He choose to interrupt your experiment, anyway?), and because of the scientific culture of repeatable testing (should God choose to interrupt your experiment, He presumably will leave alone your colleagues’ repetitions of it, and your bad results will be written off as experimental error).

But in materialist philosophy, the starting assumption all events in the history of space-time are physically caused, not caused by mind (God’s, or anyone else’s). This axiom is untestable, unprovable, and unfounded, but it is adopted because they like it and it produces a lazily dog-like mind inured to the notion of meaning or intent behind the physical cosmos.

What they miss, however, is that their assertion that all events have physical causes does not preclude all physical causes from being ultimately intended by God.

They assume an entirely physical universe in an attempt to preclude God, and end, not in precluding God, but in the validity of their own thinking, including the thinking by which they came to those conclusions. God, meanwhile, retains an untouched sovereignty even in their redesigned universe.

In the end, the only way they can reject God is by looking for another cause for the Big Bang, in a larger multiverse (“the loaf,” as some theorists like to call it). But, amusingly, this is just an “anything-but-God-of-the-gaps:” They can’t exclude God from the Big Bang onward, so they say that whatever triggered the Big Bang was “anything but God.” So they postulate physical causes (colliding universes and so on). But this fails because if those physical causes themselves existed in anything like a time-continuum, then they themselves must have been caused, and the problem remains: What caused THEM? But if they are outside anything like Time, they are therefore causeless, eternal.

Which is a problem because an uncaused eternal first cause sounds very like God. At this point the materialist has nothing with which to reject God other than the assertion that, whatever else this uncaused eternal first cause might be, “it isn’t a Person.” When a Theist answers, “Why not?” the only honest answer a materialist could give would be, “Because that would make Him God, and I don’t like the implications of that.”

You’ll notice that in all of the above, I focus purely on the physical attributes of the miraculous. Of course I don’t think the Incarnation was NOTHING BUT the unexpected creation of some DNA in Mary’s womb. But that is what the materialist cares about: He rejects the notion of God mucking about with the physical chain of cause-and-effect in the universe. Obviously Jesus was (is!) far more than an unexpected body!

“Why would God create such an enormous waste of billions of galaxies with billions of planets just to provide Man a home on Earth? Either God is the worst engineer imaginable, or he has other children on other planets.”

This is a false dilemma. (1) “Waste” only makes sense if one is bound by scarcity, i.e., limited resources. No theist thinks God was using pre-existing stuff to create the universe, so “waste” simply doesn’t apply to his creation of the universe. He wasn’t at risk of running out of protons.

(2) Proliferation of life is only one among countless possible reasons God could have for creating a large universe. E.g., maybe he wanted us to be in awe of its magnitude or to be able to detect the redshift of distance galaxies and thereby infer that the universe had a beginning. Or maybe he likes pretty galaxies. Or maybe he wanted life to be uncommon relative to the size of the universe for millions of unknown reasons. Or ……..

On related by different point. Making inferences about our significance and God’s purposes from the size of the universe is usually quite shaky. Our smallness relative to the universe as a whole is, by itself, of no more significant than our hugeness relative to protons.

Anyway, the logical consequence of the Christian idea of God is that “artistic control” over the Big Bang is all it takes.

Except for one thing… the begetting of Jesus. There’s a hole in your argument.

Since the Christian God is outside Time, He is free to perceive all times as Now. Put another way, if God is omnipresent in space, and space is unified with time as “space-time,” then God is omnipresent in time, also. He is simultaneously observing the formation of the earth, the death of the sun…and my birth, my third birthday party, and my death. These are all “now” to God.

And of course the Christian God has (by definition) complete control over the creation of the universe in its first moment…or else He is not what Christians call “God.”

The implication of these Christian truisms is that if God wished to produce an exact outcome in the universe at the present day, He needed only to establish, at the Big Bang, the correct physical laws and “starting state” of the universe which would produce that outcome.

Moreover, even the non-deterministic nature of physical laws would not prevent this: If a particular starting state and set of laws happened, through the randomness of quantum events, to not produce exactly the intended outcome, He could “adjust” the starting state and physical laws “until” it did so…while observing (in perfect ease) all the successive moments which represented the outcome of each “experimental” combination of starting state and laws. He could in fact keep “tweaking” the start of the universe “until” He “got it the way He liked it”; that is, until all successive events in the history of our universe looked the way He liked them to look.

There is in fact no reason at all why every Christian miracle could not be historical fact — no reason not to say that God is entirely, providentially, sovereign in the universe — EVEN IF He never intervened in the universe at any point later than the Big Bang. Grant Him “artistic control” over that one starting event, and utter sovereignty over every other event necessarily follows.

There is a sole exception: He could voluntarily choose to delegate authority to free-willed souls. To whatever extent that God has granted temporary stewardship over physical bodies to souls with actual liberty (or, as Christians say, persons made in His image), that grant of stewardship places limits on His providence. But they are very limited limits, voluntarily embraced by Him, and not incompatible with divine omnipotence as Christians understand it.

Anyway, the logical consequence of the Christian idea of God is that “artistic control” over the Big Bang is all it takes.

As a result, it’s nonsense to believe in a “watchmaker” god after the Deist model, presuppose that “watchmaker” to be an omnipotent creator, and call the result a more rational alternative to the Christian God. For a “watchmaker” god forced to create the universe in a particular way is not omnipotent, and must in fact be himself derivative (not a creator but a creature). But a “watchmaker” god with authority to create the universe any way He pleases is simply God: He offers no defense against miracles or divine providence: None at all.

It seems to me that some of the arguments over Theistic evolution and Design neglect the above. I don’t know why this is. To call it lack of “doing one’s homework” seems churlish: These are very bright people. More likely it is mere neglect of pursuing a particular idea to its necessary, but unexpected, consequence.

That being said, it’s all moot. Any God that is capable of creating miracle (in programming terminology, “debugging the universe”) is able to tweak the probabilities or cause “just the right” mutations to direct evolution wherever He wanted, slowly tweaking the canvas of the world’s DNA until the lilies had just the right colour, and the cats had just the right fur softness, and the monkeys had just the right curiosity, and humans had just the right character.