Biff the unclean

Luvluv I can't help but notice that this God story of yours ends with the girl skipping town. Sounds like God set you up to be dumped.

Back in the 70's I was giving a lecture on evolution at the Bronx Zoo in New York. I used small animals as props. Some were tame enough to let people handle (insurance regs weren't so bad back then) One woman looked a bit of a clutz and a little voice said don't give her any critters. But I didn't listen to it and handed her a Nine Banded African Armadillo; which she promptly dropped on the floor.
The smelly little thing took off running and I was in hot pursuit. I made a dive for it, missed, and continued chasing on my hands and knees. It ran into Dr George Schallers office and onto his assistant's tennis shoes. She caught it and handed it back to me and I feel in love with her on the spot.
We now have two grown children and are more in love with each other than we have ever been.

So should I thank Darwin?

ipa68

Me too. I met my husband after a serie of incredible coincidences. At that time we lived in different continents. He came for three days to Brazil and at the end of the third day we met.

I had prayed "to the universe" (I was in my New Age phase) that I find someone with such and such qualities and my husband fit perfectly. I never found anyone that fit my desires when I was praying to the catholic God.

So, how do you explain this? Maybe the protestant God intercepted my prayers to the "forces of the universe"? Why did he do nothing when I was praying to the catholic one? Just to confuse me perhaps...

Greetings

Teresa

PS: I'm sorry for my english

Ojuice5001

Jobar,

By directed chance I mean an event that is naturally indeterministic (chance), but directed by a supernatural cause. I can see why it sounds contradictory, but I think it's a good way to convey the concept's relation to both nature and supernature.

Now, if I had a better, equally short term, I would use it. Feel free to suggest one.

luvluv

Well, kids, I think you are missing an important ingredient in my argument.

My experiences are NOT simply fortuitous happenstances. They are accompanied by a MESSAGE which seems to me to be coming from an external source, which I have the opportunity to obey or disobey. I have the strong impression that I am being TOLD to do things, and when I do them good things that I have not forseen come to pass. That has been repeated hundreds if not thousands of times in my life.

Yes, absolutely, everyone of you who has experienced a happy "accident" should thank God. There isn't one doubt in my mind. God loves everyone and He has no qualms about blessing even you dumb schmucks with a good break every now and then.

Family Man, there is no hair on that story, my friend. In fact, it's been significantly shaved. You'd never believe the entire story.

Oxymoron

How many times had you prayed for such a thing before?
How do you know you wouldn't have met him otherwise?

Look, it's like this: prayer is meditation. People who pray turn stuff over in their head - which is good, because a lot of folk just stagger around without really sorting out their "head traffic". When you turn things over, inevitably choices appear that might have been lost in the fog. Maybe you decide to be a bit more pro-active looking for a lover - go to more promising locations, make a bit more eye contact, buy some new clothes and wear them, etc.

Whatever choices you made, you are saying you prayed and something changed, because previously you'd been out of luck. And I am agreeing with you! But the thing that changed had nothing to do with God and everything to do with small changes in your behaviour and (of course) a good dash of luck.

Ockhamite

If proof of answered prayer was more than anecdotal, i assume that theistic researchers would have been able to show statistical proof.....or maybe their prayers for the needed research results have gone unanswered.

luvluv

Family Man:

You'd have to trust me, I suppose. I have no reason to lie to you. I've got no reason to be doing a lot of the things that I'm doing other than the fact that I believe God has told me to do them. To be very frank, if my life had gone the way I wanted it to go I would not be talking to you here today. I wouldn't know anything about the anthropic coincidences or the cosmological argument or logical positivism or quantum mechanics. I was a film major, for goodness sakes. I fully intended to be a rich man too busy fornicating with my live-in girlfriend to argue with a bunch of smarties on the internet. But God had directed me here, and I find that I actually enjoy learning everything that I have learned debating you guys (I even now catch myself reading philsophy and science books that have nothing to do with religion!). I'm still progressing towards my occupational goals but once I reach them I will be much better equipped to be a public Christian than I would have been if things had gone "my way". And I figure I would rather be fornicating with my wife (whoever that might turn out to be) than with any of the twits I used to go out with before I was a Christian. (Not real offense to them, who else other than a twit would have had me?).

At any rate, I love the way my life has turned out despite the fact that it is not what I would have chosen without the suggestion of God. I am not untalented in what I do and have had SEVERAL tantalizing propositions for very lucrative employment that I was told, in no uncertain terms, to turn down. These occasions have been very painful. But in obeying God in those instances I have found myself to be a much more capable apologist and to be growing in artistic ability. One day I'm going to be making films and being a bang-up apologist. When asked how I got to know so much about how to defend the position of theism with only a BA in film studies, I'm going to mention your name on TV. Then you're going to have to come up with a naturalistic explanation for how I knew it was going to happen.

Clutch

Of course it would be foolish to overlook the possibility that you are lying, but I doubt that anyone thinks it terribly likely. It's rather a question of selective data interpretation, the salience of positive over negative cases, a greater sensitivity to confirmation than to disconfirmation in general... in short, the same sort of things that reinforce many kinds of empirically vacuous beliefs in things ranging from astrological prediction to the "hot hand" in basketball, even though statistical analysis disconfirms the alleged phenomena many times over.

In short, the cognitive and motivational factors that lead you to see divine influence in chance events have little or nothing to do with lying. Even setting aside lying, then, Family Man's question is a good one.

cricket

luvluv, we all say this to ourselves. Not the part about being a public Christian, but the rest of it. For every loss there is a gain, usually anyway, and we find comfort when we add up whatever we gained; whatever positives came about, when we didn't get what we really wanted.

Imagine for a moment there isn't a God. Wouldn't it still be a plus, that if things didn't work out "your way", you came to enjoy science books? Of course it would be.

Amazing how much this sounds like the recovering alcoholics I know. I can't count the times I hear them say "Who would have had me." I can't count the times they say "I was a drunk." Even those who were never drunks delight in saying this.

cricket

In what way were you told what to do? Did you hear a voice, or get a feeling, or ...?