Divine Intervention

[Chesterton]

I've seen scientific TE's disdain or dislike the idea of God intervening in natural processes. Why is that?

The only two things I think I've seen expressed are a moral problem (such as, if He intervenes at one point, why not at other points, such as saving a child from death), and a "style" problem - that once natural processes are set in motion, it might be somehow clumsy or undignified to have to "step in". Those two things seem to me easily answerable; so is there another problem I'm not thinking of?

 

[a.d.ivNonasNovembres]

I'd like to hear the answer to the moral problem if you may, although I don't doubt there probably is one.

 

[gluadys]

I've seen scientific TE's disdain or dislike the idea of God intervening in natural processes. Why is that?

The only two things I think I've seen expressed are a moral problem (such as, if He intervenes at one point, why not at other points, such as saving a child from death), and a "style" problem - that once natural processes are set in motion, it might be somehow clumsy or undignified to have to "step in". Those two things seem to me easily answerable; so is there another problem I'm not thinking of?

I don't think either of these is the problem. We do think God intervened in natural process at various points in history. e.g. the miracles of the Exodus, Jesus' miracles, and above all the miracle of the resurrection.

I think you are looking at a question of definition. The point is that by definition an "intervention" of this sort is a miracle. And so by definition it is no longer natural process. Natural process is the absence of miracle. But it is not the absence of God's providential activity.

I think the heart of the question is this: "Are miracles necessary to keep natural process going?" Or "Are there entities which are now part of nature that no natural process could have brought into being?" Here is where I think the "science-minded" are inclined to answer in the negative on both scientific and theological grounds.

By contrast a proponent of intelligent design would answer the second question in the positive.

 

[Mallon]

I don't know of any evolutionary creationists that have a problem with divine intervention. Gluadys provided several examples of miracles we can all agree on.
The problem comes with positing miracles when perfectly natural, testable, and demonstrable explanations are available. We don't need to cite instantaneous creation of individual lifeforms when a naturalistic process does a much better job of explaining the repeated patterns we see in God's creation. This is a lesson Christians learned with the Galileo Affair, though it seems some have since forgotten.
Actually, the relationship between a Christian's belief about origins and divine intervention is something I've been giving some thought to lately. It strikes me that there has been a disturbing trend among fundamentalist evangelicals to withhold medical treatment from their terminally ill loved ones while praying simply for divine intervention instead (faith healing). You can read about a number of recent cases here:

Faith healing church parents charged over toddler's death | World news | The Guardian
Judge rules family can't refuse chemo for boy - Yahoo! News
Death by prayer - Isthmus | The Daily Page

My question, then, is the opposite to yours: Why do fundamentalist Christians insist so strongly on divine intervention when God has already blessed us with the means to account for both our physical origins and our physical well-being? It strikes me that the fundamentalist opposition to everything and anything produced by the sciences has become so overblown that it puts the minds, lives, and faith of our children in danger.