Jesus and Miracles

[Neo-Scholastic]

Were the meteorites an unlucky coincidence...to bombard that particular strip of earth?...where along the line does God stick his hand into the universe?

As I understand it, God influences every single event at all times. I do not see God as a deistic watchmaker that set things in motion and stands aside.
Personally, I think analogies based on a mechanistic view of the universe are horribly outdated, although I occasionally make them myself.

Since ...every event to be naturally explainable...then it means ...God interfered *indirectly* when he set the universe in motion"....doesn't that mean that certain people ...were deterministically doomed?

Well, not from the very beginning of time, no. And not of necessity. The natural order seems to be much more dynamic that once believed, most certainly at the subatomic scale. It could very well be that very very small pertubations could ripple up with massively unpredictable results (from a human perspective at least). At least that's the idea behind chaos theory.

I realize I'm engaging in a large measure of rationalizing, i.e. this his how miracle might possiblely, just maybe work. At the same time, your view of natural law is already a deterministic one. Initial conditions of the universe have already established what my responses to you will be and vice versus. My point in I am not just defending my belief in God, but also my belief that "I am not a number; I am a free man."

Secondly, the dominant view of causality not so cut and dry as it seems on first blush. The dominant idea is that event A leads to B leads to C etc. I do not think that progression is justified. The past no longer exists, so how can something that does not exist act on that which currently does exist? I do not have the answer. I find the problem interesting. (You may recall my previous thread about the discontinuity of reality at the Plank Scale.)

Instead, I see the relation of cause and effect as one of identity. The lighted match being the cause of the fire and the fire being the effect of the match are actually the same condition differently described.