What is the difference between miracle and providence

A good example of divine providence would be praying for needed cash and suddenly apprehending it one way or another. There were no vehicles near us but Carol found some large bills as soon as she got out of her door. It was a miracle. Example: The metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly is a fascinating process.

But it is not a miracle. From the very beginning of creation, God designed the butterfly to morph from a caterpillar. It could be either. During Biblical times they occurred mostly in the era of Moses and the prophets Elijah and Elisha, and again centuries later in the time of Jesus and the apostles. The account of the burial of Christ is found in all four of the Gospel records. The differences between the accounts indicate that they do not share exactly the same sources.

Mark's account is generally considered earliest and his sources even earlier. This account talks about the high priest Caiphas without using his name, indicating that he was still high priest at the time it was compiled.

Since Caiphas was high priest from A. Nor is it likely that Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, who buried Jesus in his new tomb, was just made up by the writers of the New Testament. This is especially true considering the fact that the whole Jewish council had sought to put Christ to death in the first place Mark , 64; There is no other burial story. If his burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea were not well-known, no doubt the Jews would have spread about some other story, but it just was not possible.

They did what they could do given the facts. Since Christ was buried, the tomb had to be empty for the Gospel to survive. The Jews as well as the Christians no doubt knew where it was located. They could easily have refuted the story of the resurrection by exhuming the body of Jesus. The discovery of the resurrection by women makes the account believable. Women possessed a low status in Jewish society and had a lack of qualifications to serve as legal witnesses.

The male disciples were in Jerusalem that weekend and there seems to be no good reason for the Gospel writers wanting to humiliate those were the apostles of the church including two of the writers themselves. In fact, the women found the tomb empty as the Bible relates. The earliest story that the Jews told admits that the tomb was empty. And if this come to the governor's ears, we will persuade him, and rid you of care. So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying was spread abroad among the Jews, and continueth until this day" Matthew This was the earliest try of the Jews to explain away the empty tomb: His disciples stole the body.

Notice how illogical their story is given the facts: they bribe the soldiers to say they were asleep, even though that was a capital offense. The soldiers agree once they are guaranteed protection from the governor.

The soldiers are at the tomb for the very purpose of keeping the disciples from stealing the body -- what they said happened. And if they were asleep, how did they know what happened? Sleeping witnesses are a contradiction in terms. If they were asleep, how do they know the body of Christ did not rise from the dead and walk out of the tomb? In the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, we have a list of witnesses who said they saw Christ after he was raised from the tomb.

This testimony from Paul is seldom called into doubt even by liberal scholars. It is generally acknowledged that he got his information from Peter and James within three to eight years following the death of Christ.

Thus, this material is extremely early, too early to be the result of legend or myth. Paul lists among the post-resurrection witnesses Cephas Peter , with whom he met and from whom he must have received this information; the twelve; five hundred brethren at once; to James, the brother of Christ; to all the apostles; and last of all, to Paul. He does not mention, but could have, the appearances to Mary Magdalene John , the two on the road to Emmaus Luke and the repeated appearances to the apostles Acts He appeared to single persons, two persons, twelve persons and crowds of people, more than at one time, the great part of whom were still alive and could still be interviewed.

He appeared at night and in broad daylight. He appeared indoors and outdoors. He invited them to touch him Luke He ate with them Luke He taught them as he had before his crucifixion Acts They knew whether or not it was Jesus. They were not deceived. Were they deceivers? If ever there were honest men, these men were honest men.

Read their words. They are the standard by which we judge honesty. And they gave their lives for their testimony. They had no earthly reason to lie and many unearthly reasons to confess the lie, if lie it was. But what they said at the first they said at the last. They could not be convinced by poverty, unpopularity, threats, imprisonment, beatings, torture or death to retract a single word of the Gospel. There is no reasonable explanation of the conversion of two leading men of the first century church, except the truth of the miraculous resurrection of Jesus Christ.

James was the half-brother of the Lord, but he was originally a skeptic and an unbeliever. But following the resurrection of Christ, James became a believer in and a follower of Christ. He later became a leader of the church in Jerusalem and was a major spokesman at the great conference in Jerusalem recorded in Acts The risen Christ appeared last of all to the persecutor Saul.

Nothing else could have changed this rabid Jew. But change him it did for life. He himself performed many miracles in the name of Christ and suffered much. He recorded much of this suffering in 2 Corinthians His life and martyrdom cannot be accounted for without acknowledging the appearance of Jesus Christ to him on the road to Damascus. The very existence of the church, the New Testament, and the weekly observance of the Lord's Supper add corroboration to the resurrection account.

These are things that would otherwise not exist. Much more could be said. I realize that what is contained in this paper does not cover the subject of miracles adequately, but time and space, much less the purpose of this paper, does not permit.

How important it is for us to remember, as you have pointed out, that philosophy is not just an intellectual game, but a serious pursuit of the truth, and for the Christian what matters is the purpose of the miracles: faith in Jesus Christ.

If He did exist alone temporally prior to creation, then God is not timeless, but temporal, and the question is settled. Suppose, then, that God did not exist temporally prior to creation. In that case He exists timelessly sans creation. But once time begins at the moment of creation, God either becomes temporal in virtue of His real, causal relation to time and the world or else He exists as timelessly with creation as He does sans creation.

But this second alternative seems quite impossible. At the first moment of time, God stands in a new relation in which He did not stand before since there was no before. We need not characterize this as a change in God; but there is a real, causal relation which is at that moment new to God and which He does not have in the state of existing sans creation. At the moment of creation, God comes into the relation of causing the universe or at the very least that of co-existing with the universe , relations in which He did not before stand.

Hence, even if God remains intrinsically changeless in creating the world, He nonetheless undergoes an extrinsic, or relational, change, which, if He is not already temporal prior to the moment of creation, draws Him into time at that very moment in virtue of His real relation to the temporal, changing universe. So even if God is timeless sans creation, His free decision to create a temporal world constitutes also a free decision on His part to enter into time and to experience the reality of tense and temporal becoming.

The classic Thomistic response to the above argument is, remarkably, to deny that God's creative activity in the world implies that God is really related to the world. Aquinas tacitly agrees that if God were really related to the temporal world, then He would be temporal.

So Thomas denies that God has any real relation to the world. According to Aquinas, while the temporal world does have the real relation of being created by God, God does not have a real relation of creating the temporal world.

Since God is immutable, the new relations predicated of Him at the moment of creation are just in our minds; in reality the temporal world itself is created with a relation inhering in it of dependence on God. Hence, God's timelessness is not jeopardized by His creation of a temporal world. This unusual doctrine of creation becomes even stranger when we reflect on the fact that in creating the world God does not perform some act extrinsic to His nature; rather the creature which undergoes no change but simply begins to exist begins to be with a relation to God of being created by God.

According to this doctrine, then, God in freely creating the universe does not really do anything different than He would have, had He refrained from creating; the only difference is to be found in the universe itself: instead of God existing alone sans the universe we have instead a universe springing into being at the first moment of time possessing the property being created by God, even though God, for His part, bears no real reciprocal relation to the universe made by Him.

I think it hardly needs to be said that Thomas's solution, despite its daring and ingenuity, is extraordinarily implausible.

It seems unintelligible, if not contradictory, to say that one can have real effects without real causes. Yet this is precisely what Aquinas affirms with respect to God and the world. Moreover, it is the implication of Aquinas's position that God is perfectly similar across possible worlds, the same even in worlds in which He refrains from creation as in worlds in which He creates. For in none of these worlds does God have any relation to anything extra se.

In all these worlds God never acts differently, He never cognizes differently, He never wills differently; He is just the simple, unrelated act of being. Even in worlds in which He does not create, His act of being, by which creation is produced, is no different in these otherwise empty worlds than in worlds chock-full of contingent beings of every order. Thomas's doctrine thus makes it unintelligible why the universe exists rather than nothing. The reason obviously cannot lie in God, either in His nature or His activity which are only conceptually distinct anyway , for these are perfectly similar in every possible world.

Nor can the reason lie in the creatures themselves, in that they have a real relation to God of being freely willed by God. For their existing with that relation cannot be explanatorily prior to their existing with that relation.

I conclude, therefore, that Thomas' solution, based in the denial of God's real relation to the world, cannot succeed in hermetically sealing off God in atemporality. The above might lead one to conclude that God existed temporally prior to His creation of the universe in a sort of metaphysical time.

But while it makes sense to speak of such a metaphysical time prior to the inception of physical time at the Big Bang think of God's counting down to creation:. Not only would we be forced to swallow all the bizarre and ultimately contradictory consequences of an actual infinite, but we would also be saddled with the prospect of God's having "traversed" the infinite past one moment at a time until He arrived at the moment of creation, which seems absurd. Moreover, on such an essentially Newtonian view of time, we would have to answer the difficult question which Leibniz lodged against Clarke: why did God delay for infinite time the creation of the world?

God's bringing the initial cosmological singularity into being is simultaneous or coincident with the singularity's coming into being, and therefore God is temporal from the moment of creation onward. Though we might think of God as existing, say, one hour prior to creation, such a picture is, as Aquinas states, purely the product of our imagination and time prior to creation merely an imaginary time in the phantasmagorical, not mathematical, sense!

Why, then, did God create the world? It has been said that if God is essentially characterized by self-giving love, creation becomes necessary. Insofar as He exists sans creation, God is not, on the Christian conception, a lonely monad, but in the tri-unity of His own being, God enjoys the full and unchanging love relationships among the persons of the Trinity. Creation is thus unnecessary for God and is sheer gift, bestowed for the sake of creatures, that we might experience the joy and fulfillment of knowing God.

He invites us, as it were, into the inner-Trinitarian love relationship as His adopted children. Thus, creation, as well as salvation, is sola gratia. The biblical worldview involves a very strong conception of divine sovereignty over the world and human affairs, even as it presupposes human freedom and responsibility. While too numerous to list here, biblical passages affirming God's sovereignty have been grouped by D.

Carson under four main heads: 1 God is the Creator, Ruler, and Possessor of all things, 2 God is the ultimate personal cause of all that happens, 3 God elects His people, and 4 God is the unacknowledged source of good fortune or success.

On the other hand, the conviction that human beings are free moral agents also permeates the Hebrew way of thinking, as is evident from passages listed by Carson under nine heads: 1 People face a multitude of divine exhortations and commands, 2 people are said to obey, believe, and choose God, 3 people sin and rebel against God, 4 people's sins are judged by God, 5 people are tested by God, 6 people receive divine rewards, 7 the elect are responsible to respond to God's initiative, 8 prayers are not mere showpieces scripted by God, and 9 God literally pleads with sinners to repent and be saved.

Reconciling these two streams of biblical teaching without compromising either has proven extraordinarily difficult. Nevertheless, a startling solution to this enigma emerges from the doctrine of divine middle knowledge crafted by the Counter-Reformation Jesuit theologian Luis Molina.

Although whatever God knows, He knows eternally, so that there is no temporal succession in God's knowledge, nonetheless there does exist a sort of logical succession in God's knowledge in that His knowledge of certain propositions is conditionally or explanatorily prior to His knowledge of certain other propositions.

In the first, unconditioned moment God knows all possibilia, not only all individual essences, but also all possible worlds. Molina calls such knowledge "natural knowledge" because the content of such knowledge is essential to God and in no way depends on the free decisions of His will.

By means of His natural knowledge, then, God has knowledge of every contingent state of affairs which could possibly obtain and of what the exemplification of the individual essence of any free creature could freely choose to do in any such state of affairs that should be actual.

In the second moment, God possesses knowledge of all true counterfactual propositions, including counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. Whereas by His natural knowledge God knew what any free creature could do in any set of circumstances, now in this second moment God knows what any free creature would do in any set of circumstances. This is not because the circumstances causally determine the creature's choice, but simply because this is how the creature would freely choose.

God thus knows that were He to actualize certain states of affairs, then certain other contingent states of affairs would obtain. Molina calls this counterfactual knowledge "middle knowledge" because it stands in between the first and third moment in divine knowledge.

Middle knowledge is like natural knowledge in that such knowledge does not depend on any decision of the divine will; God does not determine which counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are true or false. Thus, if it is true that If some agent S were placed in circumstances C, then he would freely perform action a , then even God in His omnipotence cannot bring it about that S would freely refrain from a if he were placed in C. On the other hand, middle knowledge is unlike natural knowledge in that the content of His middle knowledge is not essential to God.

True counterfactuals are contingently true; S could freely decide to refrain from a in C , so that different counterfactuals could be true and be known by God than those that are. Hence, although it is essential to God that He have middle knowledge, it is not essential to Him to have middle knowledge of those particular propositions which He does in fact know.

Intervening between the second and third moments of divine knowledge stands God's free decree to actualize a world known by Him to be realizable on the basis of His middle knowledge. By His natural knowledge, God knows what is the entire range of logically possible worlds; by His middle knowledge He knows, in effect, what is the proper subset of those worlds which it is feasible for Him to actualize.

By a free decision, God decrees to actualize one of those worlds known to Him through His middle knowledge. Given God's free decision to actualize a world, in the third and final moment God possesses knowledge of all remaining propositions that are in fact true in the actual world, including future contingent propositions.

Such knowledge is denominated "free knowledge" by Molina because it is logically posterior to the decision of the divine will to actualize a world. The content of such knowledge is clearly not essential to God, since He could have decreed to actualize a different world. Had He done so, the content of His free knowledge would be different.

The doctrine of middle knowledge is a doctrine of remarkable theological fecundity. Molina's scheme would resolve in a single stroke most of the traditional difficulties concerning divine providence and human freedom. Molina defines providence as God's ordering of things to their ends, either directly or mediately through secondary agents.

By His middle knowledge God knows an infinity of orders which He could instantiate because He knows how the creatures in them would in fact freely respond given the various circumstances. He then decides by the free act of His will how He would respond in these various circumstances and simultaneously wills to bring about one of these orders. He directly causes certain circumstances to come into being and others indirectly by causally determined secondary causes. Free creatures, however, He allows to act as He knew they would when placed in such circumstances, and He concurs with their decisions in producing in being the effects they desire.

Some of these effects God desired unconditionally and so wills positively that they occur, but others He does not unconditionally desire, but nevertheless permits due to His overriding desire to allow creaturely freedom and knowing that even these sinful acts will fit into the overall scheme of things, so that God's ultimate ends in human history will be accomplished. Molinism thus effects a dramatic reconciliation between divine sovereignty and human freedom.

Before we embrace such a solution, however, we should ask what objections might be raised against a Molinist account. Surveying the literature, one discovers that the detractors of Molinism tend not so much to criticize the Molinist doctrine of providence as to attack the concept of middle knowledge upon which it is predicated. It is usually alleged that counterfactuals of freedom are not bivalent or are uniformly false or that God cannot know such counterfactual propositions.

These objections have been repeatedly refuted by defenders of middle knowledge, [30] though opposition dies hard.

But as Freddoso and Wierenga pointed out in an American Philosophical Association session devoted to a recent popularization of libertarian revisionism, until the opponents of middle knowledge answer the refutations of their objections--which they have yet to do,--there is little new to be said in response to their criticisms.

Let us consider, then, objections, not to middle knowledge per se, but to a Molinist account of providence. Robert Adams has recently argued that divine middle knowledge of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom is actually incompatible with human freedom. Although inspired by an argument of William Hasker for the same conclusion, Adams's argument avoids any appeal to Hasker's dubious--and, I should say, clearly false--premiss that on the Molinist view counterfactuals of freedom are more fundamental features of the world than are categorical facts.

Suppose it is not only true that P would do A if placed in circumstances C; suppose that truth was settled, as Molinism implies, prior to God's deciding what, if anything, to create, and it would therefore have been a truth even if P had never been in C--indeed even if P had never existed. Then it is hard to see how it can be up to P to determine freely whether P does A in C. Granted that this summary is admittedly very rough, still it is frustratingly ambiguous.

Is Adams saying that once the content of God's middle knowledge is fixed, P is no longer free with respect to A in C? If this is the argument, then it is just the old bogey of fatalism raising its fallacious head in a new guise, as Jonathan Kvanvig points out effectively in his critique of Adams's similar argument against the temporal pre-existence of "thisnesses.

Analogously, the Molinist could hold that it is within our power so to act that were we to do so, the truth of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom which is brought about by us would not have been brought about by us.

But perhaps this is not what Adams intends. The hypothetical Molinist against whom this objection is directed holds ex hypothesi "that in the case of a true counterfactual of freedom with a true antecedent it is the agent of the free action described in the consequent who brings it about that the conditional is true. Just as irreducibly tensed facts are needed in the former case, conditional subjunctive facts are needed in the latter. Be that as it may, however, Adams's intuitive reasoning provides no grounds for rejecting either the view that the truth of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom with true antecedents is brought about by the agents described or the view that the truth of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom of any kind is not brought about by the agents described.

Having summarized the intuitive basis of his argument, Adams develops the following more rigorous formulation:. According to Molinism, the truth of all true counterfactuals of freedom about us is explanatorily prior to God's decision to create us.

Therefore it follows from Molinism by that the truth of all true counterfactuals of freedom about us is explanatorily prior to all of our choices and actions. If I freely do A in C, no truth that is strictly inconsistent with my refraining from A in C is explanatorily prior to my choosing and acting as I do in C.

In his critique of Adams's earlier anti-Molinist argument, Alvin Plantinga charged that the argument is unsound because the dependency relation involved is not a transitive relation.

The notion of "explanatory priority" as it plays a role in the argument seems to me equivocal, and if a univocal sense can be given it, there is no reason to expect it to be transitive. Consider the explanatory priority in 2 and 3. Here a straightforward interpretation of this notion can be given in terms of the counterfactual dependence of consequent on condition:. Both 2' and 3' are metaphysically necessary truths.

But this sense of explanatory priority is inapplicable to 1 , for. According to Molinism, if all true counterfactuals of freedom about us were not true, God would not have decided to create us. Molinism makes no such assertion, since God might still have created us even if the actually true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom were false or even, per impossible, if no such counterfactuals at all were true. The sense of explanatory priority in 1 must therefore be different than it is in 2 and 3.

The root of the difficulty seems to be a conflation of reasons and causes on Adams's part.