Brian2
Veteran Member
Some people see God, as the saying goes, as the Grand Clockmaker. Every natural process is thus one of the tools in the arsenal of the deity. You might be familiar with the famous saying "any science advanced enough will look like magic". The opposite is equally true any "magic" sufficiently understood and detailed is impossible to differentiate from a natural phenomenon. The idea of the Grand Clockmaker is to produce a theology from which magic and the supernatural is absent. There is only the Clock and all of its mysterious working and by understanding the Clock you can understand glimpse of the Grand Clockmaker. Those who hold on to such a belief don't feel that appeals to magic are necessary for their theistic beliefs.
A miracle is a miracle and looks like magic to us if you want to use the term magic. It does not matter if all of God's miracles may be understood one day, this day it looks like an appeal to magic.
What I don't like is the mocking that goes on by atheists who say we are appealing to magic and then to say that science has learned about things that used to be goddidit things and science will learn about anything else that is a godditit thing, but still say that believers make an appeal to magic, no doubt realising that miracles of God in the Bible are even magic to them and so they have to just deny that they happened.
Long sentence, I hope you could follow.