I think that most threads I've seen over the years end up dead because the spirit of inquiry is absent.
It's a pity, but it's the nature of the forum, and on balance...
There is an intriguing issue here that isn't being touched, and that is the capricious nature of divine intervention.
I actually composed a long post on this aspect of the discussion, and then dumped it
Apparently in most of our stories about miraculous events God decides to intervene sometimes and sometimes not. Sometimes someone is saved, but many of us have lived long enough to see many who fell prey to evil things without anyone to save them...
The question of Theodicy is as old as Abrahamic monotheism — the Book of Job is an extended contemplation on this question — and the later books of the Christian Bible, the apocryphal Jewish texts — also treat of the issue.
The Jewish view of God as active within world history in general and Hebrew history in particular, so we end up with the view that when good things happen to Israel, it's God's reward, and when bad things happen, it's God's punishment ... this really is not far from the idea that thunder means God is angry ...
My Catholicism is 'Christian Neoplatonism', and I fall back on the words on the Course Director of a very traditional and orthodox Catholic university — 'Christianity is the Salvation History of Judaism in the light of the Greek philosophical tradition' — and that's a phrase that requires a lot of unpacking!
But I struggle with, and do not accept, the idea of miracle as proposed in the text that DA cited, nor can I agree, theologically and philosophically, with the position of NJ or AT, although I do hold to the idea of the miraculous ... I just don't accept the idea of God micromanaging events or, as you point out, given to arbitrary or capricious actions.
If I may paraphrase:
where evil ... things exist in a world where we believe in miracles, and because of their nature, we often have to construct a system of apologetics in which normal likelihoods can be suspended.
Yes, but that apologia is something of a sliding scale, with the hard rule of reason, logic, rationality at one end, and superstition and/or sentimentalism at the other.
All of us tend to build narratives, we "storify" things. That is a very strong human tendency. I'm doing it right now! The problem is that if I wasn't aware of that I could begin to argue when someone else tells their story, or in other words, their point of view.
All true, but that does not negate dialogue nor reason.
Devil's Advocate makes an excellent point that we can spin a story around things even when there isn't any evidence to support our conclusion.
That's an investing position, but we should proceed cautiously. I listened to a debate in which a secular sociologist was discussing the rise of Christianity. Her position was
something happened, something extraordinary, to result in the explosive expansion of the religion ... whether one believes in what happened is another story.
Folks with an authoritarian background often have strong feelings about ambiguity and cling to ideas that make them feel safe.
Oh absolutely! I recall discussing with someone how many people flee one authoritarianism, and fly to another, which they perceive as freeing them from the first! This can have tragic consequences, are we're witnessing with Daesh at the moment.
Questioning that outlook normally causes a feeling of angst...
There is an element of people posting on forums such as this to get their narrative validated ... and they quickly vanish when that validation does not happen. Similarly, the lack of 'orthodox' contribution points to how quickly the topic ceases to be what is being discussed.
Whilst we all storify, the contemporary assertion that my story is valid because it's my story, is a dangerous nonsense, but it's often surprising how strongly people will defend that view, which flies in the face of common sense and common experience. Blair took the Uk to war on just that principle.
