#STRask - How Do We Know if the Good Things We Experience Are the Result of God’s Actions?

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Questions about how we know if the good things we experience are the result of God’s actions, whether something can be considered a miracle if it can be explained scientifically, and how to respond to atheists who are mocking a Christian’s prayers for rain.   Believers credit God for the good things that happen to them, but good things happen to non-believers also, so how do we know if the good things we experience are the direct result of God’s actions or would have just happened anyway without his involvement? Can something still be considered a miracle from God if it can be explained scientifically? Recently, a Christian who said he was praying for rain in a drought was mocked by atheists who said prayer won’t create rain. How does one respond to this when the drought continues despite many prayers?

Welcome to Hashtag STR Ask, a podcast brought to you by Stand to Reason. That was nice, Amy. I don't always mention the website, but I do want to remind people at str.org, you can hear all of our past episodes because I think on all of our podcast apps, you can only go back a year. But this show goes back to, I don't, is it 2016? At least 2017. Well, Melinda was the first host for about a year until the end of 2017. So at least 2016, maybe even before that. So that's, you know, eight years at least that we have.

And that's a lot of questions we have covered. And in fact, whenever I get questions when I'm at a reality conference, our student apologetics conference, I always think, you know what? We have got, we answered this one. If you want to hear Greg's answer, in addition to my answer, go look it up on our website. So I just want to remind people, if this brings up any other questions for you, check out our website. We've answered a ton of different things. Or you can just send us a question. Or you can just send us a question. Or you can send another.

We come around to the same issues again and again because they come up again and again. And maybe we have something new to add. That's true. And it's not my answer. It's mine and Amy's and we don't always agree. Or Amy adds a whole bunch of stuff that – really smart stuff that I totally left out. All right, Greg. Let's start with a question from anonymous. When a good thing happens to a believer, they credit God for it happening.

But good things happen to non-believers as well. How do we know if the good things we experience are directly a result of God acting or would have just happened anyway without his involvement? Well, okay, the key word there is directly. I'll come back to that in a minute. James says that every good and perfect gift comes down from heaven from the Father of lights in whom there is no variation or shifting of shadow. Okay, the idea there is God is good, and he shows goodness to everyone. All of the things that are good are from God. When God made the whole world, he made it a certain way to function and operate together

just so, okay? Everything was just the way it was supposed to be. And when everything is just the way it's supposed to be, operating just the way God's noble mind intended, that is just another way of saying that everything God made is good. So, everything that is good is a result of God establishing the world in such a way that we can benefit, enjoy, and flourish. All right? The things that are bad are the things done as a result of others' disobedience. I almost said done by others, but that's not all-encompassing enough. A lot of times it's not the bad that befalls us is not done by others,

but it's a result of something done by others, okay? And so there are all of these evil things that happen that are less than good because they violate and are inconsistent with God's original plan for things. So, it is fair to say all of the good things that happen to anyone can only be the case if God had constructed the universe in a particular way to bring genuine goodness to someone else. Now, sometimes the genuine goodness is, you know, an expression of somebody doing something wrong, and it isn't good at all. It's pleasurable, and that some things can produce pleasure is a function of the way God made the world, but we might be experiencing the pleasure in an illicit way, and this is—sex comes to mind right away. So, everything good

can be attributed to God because of the way God made the world. Everything bad in the sense of moral evil. I don't mean just mishaps or hardships or difficulties, but moral evil, things that ought not be that way. These are things that are not a result of God's actions, but in one way or another a result of man's. Now, I want to come back to this word directly. So there's an overview. But that's why we can say, as Scripture does, God reigns on the good and evil alike. grace that God provides that is for everyone's enjoyment because he made the world for human flourishing, and humans still flourish even though they are living in a way that are inconsistent

with God's wants in many ways. Okay, there still is flourishing, and any flourishing that is true flourishing is a result of God's mercy and grace. Okay. Now, the directly is a—I want to talk about that because I think the question is something like, did God do this directly, or is it just the way things happen? Could you read that last phrase again? How do we know if the good things we experience are directly a result of God acting, or would have just happened anyway without his involvement? Okay, so this is, in a certain sense, it's a false dichotomy.

Let me put it this way. God works immediately, immediately, directly, and immediately through other things. All right? So, let's say a person, let's see, you know, a couple has a baby. They're not Christians. And they experience the joy of childbirth after the pain. And then it's, wow, it's such an emotional moment. Okay, well, God did that.

But he didn't, you know, do a miraculous conception. but he didn't, you know, do a miraculous conception. It was the natural process that he had ordained initially for human good that produced this good in their life. So it wasn't a direct or immediate act of God. It was immediate act of God, an indirect act of God, a secondary cause, not a primary cause. So the response then to that portion of the question is just, we don't want to be dismissive of God's role and the good that came about simply because

it was the result of secondary causes and not necessarily primary causes. Most of the goodness we experience is secondary causes. God sets things up in a certain way. So that's good for us. We go and have a good meal, but tastes wonderful. And God did put the taste in that particular pizza last night for me at Black Bear, Highway 70 here in Wisconsin. No, that was a mediated cause, but he did make food delicious and made human tongues capable of enjoying that. So we can give grace and we can give honor and thanks to God for all of the good things we experience. And people who are not—everybody should do this. That's the whole idea of giving thanks, that all men ought to give thanks. But they don't. I think it's Romans 1 saying, that all men ought to give thanks. But they don't.

I think it's Romans 1 to say they didn't honor God or give thanks, but they worship the creature rather than the creator, who's the one who ought to have been thanked. Yeah, I think you've hit all the main points here, Greg. The idea that, first of all, just the question sounds like God doesn't do good things for non-believers, but as you pointed out, God has common grace. He sends rain on the just and the unjust. He's blessing all of us here with goodness all of the time. And it is kind of tricky to distinguish something that's miraculous versus something that is just God working all things after the counsel of his will. Because I do believe God's sovereign over everything. And we should thank him for every good thing that happens, even if it's not a miracle. And by

miracle, I just mean something that is where there is some sort of direct action of God, like a healing or something like that. But in reality, God is working all the time in everything, even in the bad things. All we have to do is look at Joseph's brothers to see that God was working through that for a purpose. And God is always working towards this story that he's creating in the world, this story of redemption. And he's working for the good of those who love him, as Romans 8, 28 says. He's making them like Christ. He's moving everything that happens for that. And because of that, that really means if you are in Christ, everything is a good thing that happens to you, even if it's bad and painful, is a good thing that happens to you, even if it's bad and painful, because we know it has a purpose.

We know it is heading somewhere. It's making us like Christ, which is why we should be thanking God for working in our lives no matter what happens. So I just wanted to expand our idea of God working good in our lives through everything and also giving pleasant things even to people who are not Christians. All right, Greg, this leads into the next question from Jazzy. Jazzy. Jazzy. Yes. Got it. That's Jazzy. That's a snazzy name, Jazzy. Sorry.

Should something still be considered a miracle from God if it can be explained scientifically? You know, in questions like this, I always am thinking for a little bit about refinements or distinctions that need to be made. It says in the book of Exodus that God parted the Red Sea using what the western wind or the eastern wind or using the wind. So here you have a natural element that is being employed by God to accomplish something unusual. Would somebody be able to describe that event as being able to be explained scientifically? Now, scientifically, I think the proper way to understand that word here is that you can specify the natural forces that account for the effect. You can specify the natural forces that account for the effect, okay? What makes the parting of the Red Sea unusual or miraculous is not that there weren't any natural forces involved that accounts for the effect,

but they were involved at a very specific time in a very specific way to accomplish a very specific end. Now, that makes it a miracle. God intervened to use a natural phenomena to create an unnatural escape route for the Hebrew people when they were about to be devoured. And when they passed over on the other side, to be devoured. And when they passed over on the other side, that wind stopped and the sea closed in and destroyed the armies of Pharaoh. So these are all the marks of divine intention to accomplish this act, even though there's a natural element that's involved. So the way the question was asked is that those two areas are not exclusive. A lot of people will call a birth of a child a miracle. I think that's actually a misuse of the word. I'm not trying to take away anything from the magnificence and the transcendence, the amazing thing that two living cells can join to make a separate being. But that's all secondary causation.

That's, as I was talking about before, it's indirect or you have primary and secondary causes. God established a biological sequence of events that would lead to this, so God's responsible for it. But I wouldn't say that that was God's immediate intervention to cause that baby to be born. And I think a miracle is going to be more like that, God's immediate intervention. Sometimes a miracle is a result of something that can't be explained in any other way. It is a total intrusion, okay? A person has cancer, people are praying over that person, and the tumor disappears. All right, so that's a miracle. Because presumably, God is the one who has answered the prayer and done this work.

There was no natural process that was involved. It was a supernatural process. But sometimes miracles are done using supernatural process, and the miracle has to do with the timing and the nature of the event. That no natural process would have done that, had that effect at that time for that purpose. Yeah, that's exactly what I wrote down. Timing, answers to prayer, where God is glorified and he does something unusual and steps in. But to me, this is so tricky because God is always working. line as maybe people think, because maybe they think either it's the case that God does something supernaturally, or it's the case that things just would happen on their own. But I think there's a

sense in which God is always working, and everything that we should, and this is why we were saying, this is why you should be thankful and know that everything has a purpose. So I guess some of this just comes down to the definition of what a miracle is. Yeah, yeah, it does. I just, I thought of two other illustrations that are actually close to each other. They're in the Gospels, and one I just read about in John 6, I think it is, and there is Jesus walking on water, all right? And when he's walking on water, there's no natural explanation for that. That isn't the kind of thing that happens on a semi-regular basis and then, or occasionally, and then it just happened that he was walking on water right by the boat that he could get into, Now, when he did that, the boat was immediately at Capernaum because they had gotten into the Sea of Tiberias, the Galilee, and they kind of headed across a quarter section north to get to Capernaum.

And that's where they were rowing and heading towards. And there's Jesus, you know, strolling on by. and then he gets in the boat, and they're automatically there. Now, boats arrive at their destination. That's not an unusual thing that a boat would arrive at its destination, but that had happened instantaneously is evidence of a miracle, or storms on the Sea of Galilee start up and then they stop. So the stopping of a storm is not itself miraculous, but it becomes a miracle when this otherwise natural event happens as a result of a command of Jesus, be still, and all of a sudden, boom, it stops. So there's another example where you have two cases, one case where it's clearly an act of God to cause that event. Secondly, you have normal events that happen in an unusual way that lets us know that this is also a miraculous intervention.

And not just unusual, but meaningful. So it was serving the purpose of revealing Jesus and showing his authority. So it's not even just that it hardly ever happens, is that you can see a meaning in it. Like when somebody prays for someone and then their disease is gone. Yeah, well, that's certainly the case with the calming of the storm. Who is this man that controls the forces of nature idea? I'm not sure if that fits the same. Like, oh, they just arrived at the shore. What's that all about? Oh, we don't have to row anymore.

I don't know, but I get your point. It's a good point. So let's go into a question from David. The local news posted a story about the bad drought we are having here in West Virginia. A person commented that they were praying for rain. They then were mocked by atheists who said prayer won't create rain. How do you respond when the drought continues despite many prayers? My response is that prayer could create rain. Why wouldn't it? It can only not in principle

create rain if there is no God. But of course, that's the atheist worldview. And I address this actually multiple times in the story of reality. You cannot judge the claims of one worldview in light of the realities of a different worldview, unless you fully verify the worldview that is in conflict. If there is no God, the worldview that is in conflict. If there is no God, then there are no answers to prayer. So you can't pray rain down, obviously. But what's in question is whether there is a God. Now, we have good reasons to believe that there is a God. There's a whole host of arguments for that, and evidence of God's intervention in the world in miraculous ways. And there's a whole host of evidence for that.

Keener. Craig Keener. Craig Keener, thank you. Craig Keener has written two solid volumes, a very esteemed theologian, two solid volumes titled Miracles, Volume 1 and 2, where he chronicles this from the early ages all the way to the present. These things happen with some regularity, which, you know, I mean, contrary to what people claim. So if it turns out we live in a magical world and not a sterile world of molecules in motion, the cosmos is all there is, ever was, or ever will be, Carl Sagan.

If we live in a magical world, then praying for rain is a reasonable thing to do. Now, does that mean it's going to happen? No, because when, and Lewis is responsible for this insight, when you are praying for something, you're making a request of a person, and the person could say no. It's not a mechanical enterprise. I think sometimes the so-called word faith crowd in the broader Christian circles treat these things as mechanical. You use your words in a certain way, and you can manipulate reality. Abra, cadabra, open, sesame, speak friend, and open, Lord of the Rings. But that's not the way the world works. We are making a request.

Words don't have power in themselves. That's an occultic view of language. We are making a request of a person to do something on our behalf, and that person can say yes or no, or they might say later or something like that. And so that's why there may be drought, and God has his own reasons for not answering those prayers. I think you're exactly right here, Greg. The question says, the atheist said, prayer won't create rain, and then he wants to know how to respond when the drought continues.

The atheists, I think they think of Christianity like they would think of some sort of pagan religion where you do certain things and you can create rain with your prayers, with the words that you say. But they're right. The prayers won't create rain. It's God who will create rain, and we're entreating a person for the rain. But since he's not a vending machine, since it's not our words creating the rain, and it's a person who decides he's not a vending machine, since it's not our words creating the rain, and it's a person who decides whether or not to give that rain, that's why we can't know, you know, if he doesn't give rain, that doesn't prove he doesn't exist. It just proves that he didn't want to give us rain for whatever reason. And so I think there's a lot of misunderstanding

with atheists about how Christians view God and prayer and all of those things. Well, atheists might say, well, that's so convenient. Oh, if it rains and you give credit to God, if it doesn't rain, you say, well, he didn't say yes. It's just so convenient. It's not convenient. It is consistent with the worldview because there's a prior issue. Is there a God? Okay, that's a separate issue. The atheist says, no, there's no God. Okay, nothing. Well, of course, it's going to sound convenient for the Christian in a situation like that because rain can happen naturally and serendipitously, and it can stop naturally and serendipitously. It can be withheld. You can have drought periods like in West Virginia. So if operating from a worldview like that,

it's not going to be, rain's not going to work. I mean, prayer is not going to work for rain. So it depends on what reality is actually like. And if it turns out we have good reasons to believe there is a God who does answer prayer, and those are separate. There are reasons to believe there's a God. And there are miraculous answers to prayer, which means he sometimes does and he sometimes doesn't. And so when we ask a prayer in light of that nature of reality, then it's proper to say, well, he said no. He didn't answer the prayer. It all depends on what kind of world we live in. Nobody says yes to everything people ask them to do.

It doesn't prove they don't exist if they say no. And we just have to keep in mind God has his own purposes. And we can know a lot of what those purposes are by reading the Bible. But again, if you think of them as a vending machine, this is why all of those studies that people have tried to do with prayer, I always think you can't measure the existence of someone by how often they say yes or no. That just doesn't make sense. Yeah. I think it's fair to do an analysis, but you have to be careful how you do it, because those studies kind of suggest that prayer itself is efficacious. People who use words

of supplication get this percentage of a thing. But the idea is, in Christianity, we're not just using words of supplication as if they're the magic element. We are making a request of a person to act or not act, depending on the nature of the prayer. Notice, by the way, in 1 Kings 18, we do have Elijah after a long drought, which was an act of judgment on those people. I'm not saying that all droughts are like that, but this was. It was specified. It was an act of judgment that when Elijah prayed, it rained. Now, it didn't rain immediately. He went back and prayed a number of times, and then it poured. It absolutely poured. And then there was another miracle because it says that he girded up his loins.

That means he picked up his skirts, and he outran the chariot as the storm was coming. Anyway, so it rained as a result of prayer there in 1 Kings 18. Well, thank you, Anonymous and Jazzy and David. We appreciate hearing from you. And we hope to hear your question on X with the hashtag STRask or at our website at str.org. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.