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?

my personal stance on Christmas brouhaha

After opining about the futility and pointlessness of the effort to promote Christmas as a solely Christian holiday, I noticed that I didn't clearly state my own viewpoint.

• Christians and any Christian/church-based activities and services should of course strive to make Christmas 1) less materialistic and 2) more Christ-focused, simply because those two goals really apply year-round to every activity of Christians: imagine expanding the "Christmas spirit" beyond one-twelfth of each year.
  
• Businesses that interact with any willing customer (i.e. one person's $ is equivalent to anyone else's $) are likely to take one of two attitudes toward holidays: total inclusiveness or cautious vagueness, and cautious vagueness is more cost-effective than total inclusiveness. To be perceived as offending or excluding any customer, regardless of whether his or her religion is in the majority, would be unprofitable. Hence, it's unrealistic to expect profit-seeking businesses to cater just to customers who hold a particular set of beliefs, although within an unrestricted marketplace each business and customer will "vote" with their dollars exactly how much this "principle" is worth, similar to the way that they decide how much good customer-service is worth; how much marginal cost is a buyer willing to incur for the sake of "rewarding" a business for compliance?
  
• Events/pageants/displays intended for the general community (as opposed to Christian outreach) should in my opinion reject the cautious vagueness/secularism that businesses adopt. I'd rather have such things fairly embrace authentic expressions of all the cultural traditions that people in that specific community wish to be included. If one of the cultural traditions of people in that community includes songs that praise one or more deities, the songs should be sung as is. And the same goes for the rest of the community's cultural traditions. When people object to uniform unbelief forcibly imposed onto public life, they're naive in thinking that the alternative result will necessarily be uniform belief.
  
• Motives matter greatly in all these situations because people who don't acknowledge Christ as lord are watching. Is peevish defensiveness a good witness? Is a warlike attitude toward anyone who disagrees with us a likely way to introduce them to the Prince of Peace?
  

the eternal "battleground" for Christmas

Sigh. In considering the attempts by well-intentioned Christian commentators to continuously reiterate to America that "Christmas is the observance of the birth of Jesus Christ, and nothin' else!", it should be clear by now that this "battle" won't ever be "won". The fact is, each person falls into one of the following two fuzzily-defined groups.

• People who are devoted Christians during the rest of the year. This group hardly needs any reminding of the importance of the Lord and Spirit whom they willingly serve each day, do they? Moreover, to this group, Jesus is real and alive and active. Although the mere historical event of His incarnate birth is unquestionably worthy of celebration, it's just one part of a larger, continuing story of His interaction with humanity. The whole issue is relatively insignificant for this group, who don't need to be any more convinced.
  
• People who aren't devoted Christians during the rest of the year. Note that in addition to devotees of other religions (including the "anti-religions") this group includes people who attend church services only on holidays and people who self-identify as Christians or church-goers yet don't exhibit life-permeating faith in Christianity. For this group, the failure to acknowledge the Christian parts of Christmas is probably not one of the core reasons they aren't in the first group! Thus, they aren't likely to transform into year-round devoted Christians just by viewing nativity scenes instead of Christmas trees. Since Christianity isn't a central hub of their lives, it's odd and pretty pointless to expect any item of Christianity to be the central hub of their Christmas festivities. The modern holiday of Christmas in America has Christian roots among others (e.g. European paganism), but this doesn't imply that all Americans who participate must emphasize the bits that are discernibly Christian. One might as well try to insist that everyone who goes to a modern American Mardi Gras must observe Ash Wednesday.
  

The "battle for Christmas" is a distraction. The "popular perception" of Christmas doesn't matter to the church's actual mission. People grudgingly assenting that "true" Christmas is "Christ alone" aren't thereby any closer to salvation.