Topics Religion

Question If God exists, is there any proof that he involves himself in human affairs? It seems most if not all debate in contemporary philosophy centers around whether a deist God exists.

Accepted:
July 3, 2013

Comments

Great question, but just a short answer to start. By "involvement" you probably have in mind something like "miracles" (say, violations of the law of nature). But questions of "miraculousness" are VERY hard to prove, and so (I'm guessing) discussion of their occurrence is probably mostly limited to those who already are believers -- it's only AFTER you believe God exists that you're likely to treat some event as a miracle. (After all there is much we don't know or understand about the world, so the mere fact that something unusual or unlikely occurs is not very good evidence that a miracle has occurred, and thus itself not good evidence that God exists.) But you should also be aware that there is a long tradition of thinking of God's "involvement" in different ways. For example, it has traditionally been argued that God "continuously creates" the world -- see Descartes, Malebranche eg -- that God's activity is necessary to keep the world in existence, even while there is also good reason to believe (see the same) that God creates the world to operate via exceptionless laws of nature (i.e. no 'miracles' in the sense above). There is also a long tradition of arguing that the course of the world has a point or purpose or direction (ie 'teleological' arguments), that the world has been designed in order to operate in certain orderly ways eventually reaching certain desirable outcomes -- even if there are no 'miracles' along the way, that is a form of God's involvement. Now this latter might be all you mean by referring to "deism"; and in fact your "deism" might even be consistent with "continuous creation" -- but what I'm suggesting is that it's worth focusing more closely on why a philosopher in particular (someone interested in reason/evidence/argument) should desire any kind of divine "involvement" BEYOND those two forms ...

hope that's useful to start --

ap

Question If God exists, is there any proof that he involves himself in human affairs? It seems most if not all debate in contemporary philosophy centers around whether a deist God exists. Accepted:July 3, 2013

Question If God exists, is there any proof that he involves himself in human affairs? It seems most if not all debate in contemporary philosophy centers around whether a deist God exists.

Accepted:
July 3, 2013