God, Quasars, and Coin Flips

[David Sklansky]

If there is a personal God who cares about human beings in a way he doesn't care about giraffes, and if that God is omnipotent in a way that means he can choose to obey or disobey the laws of physics at his whim, then why are there quasars and why has nobody ever achieved 40 consecutive passes at the dice table?

The point is that God is only relevant if he has the ability to, and sometimes chooses to, break the known laws of physics and probability. If he doesn't, he is the God of deism, which even Not Ready says is equivalent to atheism.

If God can make a universe out of jelly beans and have it behave as he wishes, why is EVERYTHING behaving as if he NEVER interjects himself? It is understandable that he doesn't interfere with humans thoughts so as to give them free will. It might even be understandable that he doen't perform modern day miracles so that irrefutable proof of him doesn't take the place of faith. But why bother with complex physical phenomenon a billion light years away that can be explained well by modern day physics but was totally unknown to people even 100 years ago. And why be constrained by the laws of probability such that rare events, when examined, seem to happen almost exactly as often as predicted? Quasars and the non occurrence of four Royal Flushes in a row are NOT needed to test peoples faith, as opposed to the non healing of amputees would be.

In other words, quasars and true probabilities are consistent with no God, or a disinterested God, or a non omnipotent God. They are not consistent with a God who is particularly interested in humans even if you postulate that he is going out of his way to make his existence less than perfectly obvious (because he wouldn't be obvious even if there were no quasars or if he did occasionally allow the quadrillion to one shot).