One topic related to supernatural intervention is the efficacy of prayer. Relatively recently, there was a statistical study of intercessory prayer, reported here, and summarized on Wikipedia here. In a rare instance of analytic philosophy becoming relevant, Richard Swinburne responded here. [Warning: for some reason, there are many typos in the pdf on Swinburne's site].

Swinburne points to a couple of dissimilar characteristics of traditional prayers and those used in such a study:

[W]hen we pray for another person, God knows far better than we do whether it will be best for that person and others affected by him, that he should recover immediately or later or not at all. Many Christians are aware of this when they pray for those in need that God would answer the prayer ‘as may be most expedient for them’; and a well-known prayer adds to this the clause ‘granting them in this world knowledge of thy truth, and in the world to come life everlasting’. No sign of all that in the secular orientation of the prayer used by those praying in the Benson study ‘for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications’! God seeks better goals for all of us; and may well provide them for those prayed for despite the poverty of the petitionary prayer. After all, Christians believe that the salvation of the world was brought about partly by God’s failure to answer the prayer of his Son in the Garden of Gethsemane, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.’

Steve Clarke writes an interesting post on the issue, discussing what it means to call the rescue miraculous but focusing particularly on what an argument for divine intervention might look like. I think he goes a little off the rails in saying that miracles “are typically invoked in religious contexts as reasons to believe that God exists.” I think it wouldn’t take to much investigation to discover that in religious contexts, in which God’s existence is taken for granted, miracles are invoked to inspire gratefulness to and awe of God. Only in secular contexts are miracles invoked as reasons to believe that God exists, especially by Christian apologists (e.g. William Lane Craig and Gary Habermas).

But my primary confusion in this area is what the claim of divine intervention looks like, or if there is such a claim being made at all.

I think there is a meaningful religious attitude which is something like thankfulness for the good and the beautiful around us. Something like this attitude, it seems to me, is encapsulated near the beginning of the Letter of James:

Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.

This passage comes in response to what we should not say, which is that when we are tempted to do evil, it is God who is tempting us. The letter says that evil temptations come from somewhere else – e.g. within our own persons, not the person of God.

Thus there is a picture of the world as created by God and as such fundamentally good, but infested by evil from sources either apart from God, or at least sources acting on their own, not as functionaries of God.

Thus it is that some religious believers might want to say that God is responsible for goodness in the world, without needing to claim that divine intervention has occurred in every good event.

So a phrase like, “Thank God for rescuing the Chilean miners” will on this view be something of a metaphor, or otherwise non-literal image, but not within Clarke’s framework. It might express, “Thank God for giving us a world with the potential for salient and beautiful instances of goodness.”

A couple of curiosities accompany this understanding of religious thankfulness for good events. The first is that there is a question about why God’s injection of goodness into creation extends to the Chilean miners and not to the victims of the Holocaust. To me, there seems to be something suspicious about attributing the one to God, but not the other. This issue might translate into a form of the problem of evil. A second curiosity is that every “Thank God” becomes equivalent. In each case of thankfulness, we are really just thanking God for the possibility of goodness which, every now and then, actualizes. But it seems as if thankfulness to God for events is quite particular. It matters (to the thankful) that these people were benefited at this particular time.

So, I suspect that most cases of religious thankfulness are in fact positing divine intervention as part of the event reported in the New York Times. I am (so far) incapable of believing this, and my incredulous stance extends to parallel instances of survival from car accidents, illnesses, and other dangerous situations. The facts of the case never include the divine intervention. Divine intervention seems to just be what some people posit in addition to the facts of the case, which does not make sense to me on even a conceptual level.

However, I can at least understand, and maybe experience myself 1% of the time, the more general, but also more philosophical and even more mystical, attitude which expresses gratefulness to God for goodness itself and beauty itself (and, if you like, truth). And so this gratefulness may arise within one whenever a particularly salient example of virtue, aesthetic brilliance, simplicity … emerges. I think this kind of gratefulness not only coheres, perhaps surprisingly, with secular experiences of natural scientists and mathematicians, but has good fit with both philosophical conceptions of God and the more living concept of God coming out of religious traditions, and most clearly in contemplative and instructional texts, like the passage from James cited above.

As for the two curiosities detailed above, the first would be handled however the problem of evil is handled – and in any case, it might follow from our other concepts that God’s responsibility for good works differently than his responsibility for evil, and that the former is the proper object of gratefulness. The second issue seems to be just a matter of biting the bullet and saying, “Yes, all instances of thankfulness are the same.” However, there is still room for joy over the particularities of cases. Moreover, I suspect that how salient a particular case of goodness is will affect the intensity of the gratefulness. Thus it is that our attitudes and beliefs about a good event for which we are thankful may be meaningfully distinct.

EDIT: In light of Bilbo’s comment, it is clear to me that some of my language about the “facts of the case” is too strident. I mean (or I now mean, and feel like I meant…) something more like “the facts which are detailed in available reports.” Of course someone might say I have just excluded via definition divine intervention from the facts, because of course divine intervention isn’t observed, much less reported, in the usual way. I may have committed this error, but I don’t know how to not commit it. Other than the kind of inferences detailed above (e.g. that the very possibility of good events comes from God) I don’t know how one comes to believe there was divine intervention in the event itself. It could be that one goes through reasoning similar to that detailed by Steve Clarke in the link above, but I think that will suffer from problems he mentions.

The highlight of this hearing was probably Colbert’s application of The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.

During a conclave with reporters, the NYT reports, the Pope gave a “direct condemnation” of “the sexual abuse crisis.” Playing its own Devil’s Advocate, the article immediately refutes itself, showing how the Pope issued nothing but non-sequitur. Raising the Christian persecution complex to new institutional levels, Ratzinger portrayed “the church” as a victim. Indeed, the Church is attacked “not only from outside,” but also from inside. That is to say, the anti-Catholic media and the clergy who molest children share a common victim: “the church.” Ratzinger thinks the church must “relearn” “conversion, prayer, penance.”

What is so obnoxious about these statements is that they amount to changing the subject. The object of public outrage is divided into a couple of areas: (1) the disturbingly frequent occurrence of child molestation and rape even at very high levels and (2) the cover-ups, transfers, and delays issued in response to the crimes when they were first brought to supposed spiritual authorities, including Ratzinger, now the “Vicar of Christ on Earth.” Will he ever address those topics with anything other than obscurantist generality? Notice that everything he says about this scandal would be true without it. When does the Church not need to relearn “conversion, prayer, penance”? Such fluffy theological language always applies. When is there not sin in the Church? Etc.

There are of course extra theological embarrassments, e.g. that Ratzinger is Pope partly due to getting some of the child rapist vote. In general, claims that the Catholic Church makes for itself and its Pope are so inflated that perhaps this scandal is what will put wavering Catholics over the edge. But lucky for Catholicism, much of its inflated membership is constituted by cultural Catholics, Catholics who show up once or twice a year, and so on.

I will end by stating the morally obvious: There are indeed identifiable victims; they are children who have been molested, raped, and psychologically damaged for the rest of their lives by Catholic clergy, including at the highest levels. Victim status actually can be shared by some outside parties – namely, the parents of the children. The Catholic institutions of authority and humans who populate them are the opposite of victims. Some of them are direct molesters and rapists, others are culpable for protecting and advocating for molesters and rapists (for the good of the “church”), others are culpable for looking the other way, others were ignorant of the whole affair, and the last group includes those who tried and failed to do something about the issue. Ratzinger, an accomplishment of whose is forgiving child rape (on behalf of …? did someone molest the church?), now says that “justice” is important. Therefore, he should take everyone in the first three groups above, including himself, and submit to civil authorities in the relevant domains. This ultimate fate, common for poor offenders, for cults, etc., will not befall Catholic officials.

The issue here is not some general spiritual combat involving the church. The problem is very particular, involving identifiable individuals and events. The only broad or general implication is that these individuals and events were supported and protected within the Catholic institutional structure. But unless you think that the church and its authorities are magical, it doesn’t strictly matter that it is the church. The same issues and objections would arise for any other institution founded and sustained by humans (say, the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts of America, or the United Nations). But the Catholic Church and its leadership, who are now making morally grotesque public statements with regularity, are so colossally arrogant that they can’t think of themselves in this lowly way.

Characteristically, the “Declaration” has a preoccupation with contemporary hot topics that rotate around sexual reproduction – marriage, homosexuality, abortion, and “embryo-destructive research,” all of which inspire disparate but genuinely “Christian” viewpoints. How far we’ve fallen from real declarations.

Foster addresses various conceptual problems in the post linked above. One sentence I find problematic is this one: “We believe [marriage] is divinely ordained, the only context for sexual intercourse, and the most important unit for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all.” First, if the relationship some people describe with the term “marriage” is divinely ordained, is state-sponsorship of that relationship divinely ordained? Are legal definitions divinely ordained? I’d strongly doubt both propositions. Second, the idea that a marriage is “the most important unit” for sustaining “welfare for all” is a little ridiculous. As far as I know, marriage has been present and culturally pervasive in virtually ever modern society, from the most oppressive to the most virtuous. I’m much happier with other sources of welfare, such as just laws, democratic institutions, etc. Moreover, in contemporary societies of apparently high levels of wellbeing, particularly in Western Europe, marriage rates are declining, and allegedly evil scourges like cohabitation are on the rise.

In any case, I can’t better Foster’s post; here’s the link again.