How can a human have a relationship with God if God is invisible to scientists? Let's say Joe Schmoe claims to have a word of wisdom to buy futures in cranberry commodities and Jack Spratt claims that God says to eat no fat. If we have a large sample of these words of wisdom, then statisticians could say something about them. How can there be a relationship without something that can be tested?
To clarify, I'm not saying that God can't interact with the world in ways that scientists can detect, nor am I saying that one can never be justified in believing that God has interacted with the world in such ways. The point I'm trying to make is that because of God's unique nature and status as absolutely metaphysically ultimate being, the methods of modern science can't discover him
in particular as being the cause of such interactions.
Let's say that Joe Schmoe consistently makes windfall profits time and time again on every single investment he makes. Let's also say that Joe claims that “God” tells him when, where, and how he makes his investments, that his track record of success is so astronomically improbable that random happenstance can be safely ruled out, and that no better alternative explanation for his success can be found. Would science then have discovered that God exists and that he's telling Joe how to invest his money? I don't think so. At most, it would have discovered that Joe is somehow receiving messages from some unknown entity or entities that he refers to as “God,” and that said entity or entities somehow have the ability to convey to him information that has a causal relation to future market states, such that his responses to said information result in substantial profit for himself.
While it might be
possible for God to be the one who is giving him this information, I say that we would be unable to infer this from a purely scientific analysis of the evidence. The reason why science can't determine whether or not Joe's “God” = God is because the causal circumstances required in order to produce the phenomena in question would not
necessarily point to God as their
only possible explanation, and I think the same can be said of any other example we could come up with. I doubt we could definitively rule out, for example, that an alien intelligence vastly more technologically advanced than ourselves might have the ability either to successfully predict future market states or else cause them to happen, and then communicate the relevant information to Joe in order for him to make his successful investments, all via mechanisms that are unknown and perhaps undiscoverable to us in our current state of technological advancement. Furthermore, I don't think we could definitively rule out such a technologically-advanced alien intelligence scenario as at least an epistemically
possible scientific explanation for any set of phenomena our wild imaginations could conjure up -- the rub here is precisely that no alien intelligence of any degree of technological advancement, nor any other causal mechanism that operates entirely within the confines of natural, physical law can possibly be identified with what
I call “God,” who is necessarily timeless, immutable, impassible, metaphysically simple, and the ultimate origin and end of all things beside himself.
