Is God a miracle worker?
When the great 17th century English physicist, Isaac Newton, charted the mathematical laws that seem to govern the physical universe, he explained the workings of our world with absolutely no appeal to the god hypothesis. So it was that thunder, lightning, hurricanes and tornados came to be understood apart from God’s judgment or the divine need to punish and frighten fearful people. With adequate non-theistic explanations for natural phenomena, the liturgical practices of offering sacrifices to change the shape of reality or to quell the anger of the deity ceased. Meteorologists appear today on television stations around the world to give weather reports never mentioning the god who was once thought to be directly in control of weather. These natural phenomena have been secularized. The only vestigial remains of the assumptions of our religious past are found in the language of insurance companies which continue to refer to events which have no human cause as “acts of God.
