the fallacy of "more mystery, more supernatural"

I've previously taken the time and effort to remind everyone that God isn't luck, God isn't weather, and God isn't (ever) absent. I'm continually flabbergasted by the striking discrepancy of Christians in attributing events to the supernatural. Some people give off the impression that God carefully orchestrates all good events, but does this mean that when horrible events occur then He must either be taking the day off or carrying out incredibly circuitous/unintuitive plans (the much-commented "mysterious ways" and "all things working together for the good")? There's a similar discrepancy in evaluating the deeds of people with free will: great acts merit no personal appreciation because God is "working through" someone but responsibility for despicable acts is solely personal. Hence, many believers' perception of the ongoing relationship between the natural and supernatural realms appears to be conceptually hazy at best and baldly self-interested at worst.

Recently I noticed another aspect of this mental assignment of natural or supernatural causes to events. The more mysterious something is, the likelier an observer will apply a supernatural interpretation. And in my opinion the strength of the correlation is undeniably devastating to the logic underlying the whole practice. In fact, its entire credibility is thrown into question.

Medicine has to be one of the best examples. Every day physicians and patients confirm that microscopic bacteria and viruses play a large role in disease, but for centuries few people had even guessed at that fact. Christians and unbelievers alike often used supernatural spirits or forces to explain the mystery of disease.

However, Christians in the present who're fully aware of the biological basis for disease continue to pray for divine prevention and healing as if a disease's cause and resolution are entirely supernatural. Really ponder the meaning of this prayer for healing: either the patient's immune system cells suddenly transform into more effective shapes or the disease-causing organisms just vanish. Would the same Christians pray that their car engines spontaneously have an additional cylinder or that a tree in the car's path blink out of existence? The only conclusion is that the difference is one of scale, and this is an instance of the general fallacy of explaining mysteries using supernatural causes. As long as an event's scale makes it more mysterious through being unobservable to the normal senses, people more readily place it into the "supernatural" column!

Further note that the same phenomenon of scale is at work in the previously covered categories of "luck" and "weather". Luck and weather occur at a huge scale involving many complex individual interactions, and it's a daunting task verging on impossible to collect and analyze enough data to accurately predict specific outcomes. Thus the scale makes luck and weather events more mysterious, and therefore likelier to be assigned supernatural causes according to the fallacy.

If a chance encounter happens at the local store between people who haven't talked in years, and as a final result they marry (or save from Hell the unbelieving person in the pair, etc.), a supernatural design/intervention certainly feels satisfying. Yet it's worthwhile once again to really ponder the detailed engineering effort this conclusion of design implies. If person "A" had to go to the store because he or she ran out of milk, then A must have bought and consumed the supply of milk in the exact quantities necessary - including buying a half-gallon instead of a gallon, not drinking milk at all one day, using a lot of it to prepare a recipe on a different day, etc. Also, for A to arrive at the store at the right time, A's usual schedule might have needed to shift, perhaps because A needed to work for an additional half-hour. Needing to work for an additional half-hour was caused by a customer making a complaint which in turn was caused by a slight manufacturing defect which in turn was caused during production by the normal wear-and-tear on the plastic-molding machine in the factory...

The list of details as well as each detail's cascading chains of causation could be continued, but the more relevant questions are simply at what point(s) in space and time the supernatural adjustments happened to "put the plan in motion", what the adjustments were, and observers' experiences of the adjustments (with the optional follow-up question of how often we personally witness similar adjustments). When person A originally opted to buy the half-gallon of milk, was that decision the result of a supernatural mental "nudge" or carrying too little cash? When the plastic-molding machine produced a defective product, was the machine's wear-and-tear a result of supernatural "tapping" on its atoms or the routine action of corrosive/frictional forces?

I believe such divine actions are possible but I still find it very curious that people happen to more eagerly apply supernatural reasoning to anything mysterious. Mystery is subjective since it depends on the observer's knowledge and understanding. Then why should mystery have any bearing on the objective question of whether the cause of an everyday event is supernatural?

My third example is the statement that prompted me to write this blog entry. Elsewhere on the Web, someone questioned if an economic downturn could be a judgment (or "discipline") from God. I think this is a strange question to ask. Fundamentally speaking an economy is a system of participants and resources. Therefore in order to cause a downturn in this system of participants and resources, God would need to somehow tweak the participants' actions or afflict the resources. That is, override a participant's decision from "buy" to "sell" or abruptly cut off the worldwide supply of a vital resource (via catastrophe?). If someone thinks it's far-fetched to blame God for a job firing, surely it's more not less far-fetched to blame God for an "economic downturn" of many job firings?