@the_outspoken_angel - 

I realize my audience is probably as cursory and A.D.D.-prone as I am while on the computer, so brevity is a high priority for any post I share with others. But besides that, I write ambiguously so that you will know exactly what I am talking about.

Our total experience is comprised of a vast number of individual elements, like you mention. What is the relationship, then, between scientific and theistic explanations of things we experience, like people, art, or the universe?

Every Christian there has ever been has believed in the regularity of the laws of nature; if they didn’t, they would not have been able to make their dinner in the evening. What that means is that Christians throughout the past have known there is a way of describing the world that does so by describing their immediate natural causes. Perhaps it was not until Galileo that someone felt like observing repeatedly and then writing down how fast things fall to the ground, but everyone before Galileo still knew that things fell, and had a rough idea of how fast they fell also.

So people have always known of the existence of scientific explanations, that we live in a world where fire will cook our meat, or the cold will preserve our food. They did not ever say it the way we do, “There is some state of affairs A and law of nature L, such that it either guarantees or makes highly probable some event E.” But that is the same way it works for anyone: we analyze what we already know through general perception, to make our knowledge of it more exact.

But there is another kind of explanation that Christians believe as well, that is, theistic explanations. These kinds of explanations fall under the category of personal explanations, which is a sort of explanation we use all the time. For example, I will call my girlfriend on the phone so that I can talk to her. Or, as a less misleading example, I will go up to a girl and talk to her so that I can ask for her phone number. These explanations describe a situation in which agent X has some intention I, and this coupled with the ability to bring about that intention A, means they will bring about some event E.

Your question is essentially can there be both a scientific explanation and a personal explanation of a given phenomenon? I think that there are many cases where this is so. For instance, , Darcy’s death by poisoning can be explained by describing poison’s lethal effects on the body. Or it can be explained by the fact that Atticus put the poison in her drink. In this case, each of these is a true explanation of why Darcy died. My ability to move my hands can be described in terms of physiological ability as well as my intent to do so.

So clearly scientific and personal explanations of the same phenomena are compatible. The experience of music is physically caused sound waves hitting our ear drums, and then being processed in our brains. But that is not to say we do not experience music because God intended for us to experience it, because it is a good and beautiful thing, and to use it to praise him (which you do so well). The explanation of me being in a context where I may experience music at all may very well be because of God.

So Christians do not deny that science can be used to explain much of our experience (indeed, Christians are the ones to whom we are indebted for our best scientific knowledge, great thinkers like Maxwell Clerk, and Faraday). But these are relative, nonexclusive causes of phenomenon, and our experience of life, people, the world and universe in the way we perceive them as individuals do cry out for a another, parallel explanation that is meaningful in nature. It does not seem true that the only reason we happen to be here is because our parents copulated, and purely scientific means then brought about our development as physical organisms, and that is all. The explanation of life seems to be personal at its core. That is what I meant by ‘But He is presently here as well, in all you see around you.’

There does seem to be a deeper implication of your question, however. There can clearly be multiple ways to explain a certain phenomena, but once we explain everything in terms of scientific causes, we don’t, strictly speaking, *need* God, do we? Couldn’t it just be the case that science is all that is true, and the category of personal explanations is empty? I have already suggested that even if it were the case that we *could* account for much of our experience scientifically, it would still seem to be fundamentally nonsensical if there weren’t a meaning to it, and it simply evaporated at death. But in reality, I do not think that all the elements of our experience are explicable in scientific terms, and that in some cases a scientific explanation is impossible.

For example, you have a body. But why do you have your body, rather than someone else? There is no scientific explanation for that. Or, like mentioned earlier, some event E may be explained by a prior state of affairs A and law L, but if science always analyzes things in terms of previous states of affairs then it is impossible for there to be a scientific explanation for why there are any states of affairs at all, or why there are the natural laws that exist, for those are presupposed in the scientific accounts. There are many such things. Consciousness, our ability to reason, the resurrection of Jesus, our ability to apprehend moral truths, our ability to apprehend spiritual truths, the existence of living things, and the specific way our lives are composed, with us being in the middle of a web of relationships in which we are in the position to make significant choices in which our characters are either affected for good or for bad.

None of these have very good scientific explanations, but they all make sense if God exists. And just like detectives, the clues about the case add up, until all of them only make sense on one hypothesis in a coherent manner. If a bank has been robbed, and someone saw Sylvester around the bank at the time of the crime, Sylvester’s fingerprints were found on the safe, a large sum of money was later found in his garage, and furthermore Sylvester was in need of a good deal of money, the best hypothesis quickly becomes that Sylvester robbed the bank. In the same way, God explains our experience from start to finish in a way that accounts for the facts in a coherent way.

So although scientific explanations of our experience are true in a way, the ultimate explanation of why we have an experience at all and it is the way it is is to be found in God.

Like you say, this is just logic, so I am open to discussing any of this.