I want this to be a fun thread for people who have had an experience that made them wonder: Was this coincidence or do I have a Guardian Angel? Ofc, that's tongue in cheek and I'm not at all sure this will get traction but I'll start w/ two recent examples that happened to me and see if others have similar and want to share them.

A couple of weeks ago Javelinas (look them up on images, they look like mini-boars) knocked over my garbage can for the third damn time. Garbage was strewn all over and I needed a dust pan and I keep it in a certain place but when I went to get it it wasn't there. Damn! So I used two brooms to get the big stuff into the can but I was definitely going to need a dust pan for the last part and wondering what to do and then I saw it: At the very bottom of the pile was a box that the beasts had torn in such a way that it served very well as a dust pan and it made my situation much easier.

The other day I did my bills the old fashioned way which is check/envelope/stamp. I tried doing the online way but it actually took me longer so don't say it. There were a dozen bills including a bank credit card. It turned out that I had to go into the branch for multiple transactions and, on a whim, leafed through the envelopes and a single one, out of a dozen, didn't have a stamp and 'hallelujah' it was the one for the bank credit card so I opened it up and paid at the counter.

These sort of things happen so often that I wonder: Coincidence or Guardian Angel?

Anyone have a story to share?

"That's something that people not familiar with the Law of Large Numbers might call a coincidence..." Sheldon Cooper

I wouldn't even call what you experienced a coincidence let alone a sign of a higher power. It's a sign of something though.

That's a quote that people not familiar with the law of large numbers might interpret as being meaningful in this setting.

On a dirt bike ride in the bush, my brother got water on the spark plug and was stranded. In the dirt a few feet away was a spark plug wrench, allowing him to dry the plug and be on his way.

He's born again, I remain a committed atheist.

If there were a god, there would have been no wrench, sparing me of listening to evangelism.

Thanks for sharing your non sequiter.

^^^This is the religion page. If you want logical consistency, science is thataway -->

We don't need to go into details on the backstory, but at one point in my life I had get somewhere fast to save someone's life. So there I was doing maybe 100-110 mph on a narrow single-lane road at night.

Then I remember seeing glints of deer-eyes in the woods, so I slow down and around the next corner there is a car that has slid on the wet tarmack and rotated so its lights weren't visible before going round the corner.

Now I'm fairly certain I wouldn't have hit the other car, I don't drive that recklessly without line of sight and I would have reduced my speed some regardless at a blind corner - but I would most certainly have had to hit the ditch and crash.

But now I didn't have to, and as a result I got to where I needed to go in time.

I guess that's the closest I have ever been to a sense of a "guardian angel".

Oh, yes, the old "Science vs. Religion False Dichotomy Fallacy" rears its ugly head once again.

^^ You are referring to empiricism's difficulties in establishing a stable theory of knowledge? At least one system aspires to logical consistency, the other has no rules of evidence, just faith.

The "Faith versus Evidence False Dichotomy Fallacy" rears its ugly head once again.

Hey, Bill, do you plan on committing elementary logical fallacies in every one of your posts?

edit: I used to be a logic teacher, so I can't let you get away with it.

While there is no fundamental dichotomy between religion and science, they can co-exist just fine, that's mostly due to the term religion being very broad. A person can have faith without it interfering with scientific approaches to knowledge.

But very few religious persons are simply "religious", instead they follow a specific religion and most commonly a revealed religion.

A lot of revealed religion is at odds with science. You yourself have defend "young earth creationism", one of the religious views that most strongly contradicts a massive amount of scientific knowledge and evidence from a very wide range of disciplines.

And it's not just an intellectual stand-off. Many religious organizations invest a massive amount of money, resources and influence into fighting the science they see as adversary to their theology. This creates a huge problem in scientific communities, as I can tell you right now that the vast preference among scientists is to keep scientific endeavors apolitical.

So when you see someone claiming that there is a conflict between religion and science, they are right. That doesn't mean it's all-encompassing or that it has to be that way. But it's the reality of things.

I agree that there can be (and often is, as you know all too well ) a conflict between religion and science, but there is no inherent conflict between religion and science.

There is conflict between some interpretations of quantum physics and the laws of logic (e.g. the law of excluded middle), but there is no inherent conflict between quantum physics and logic.

As a Biblicist and also as a proponent of science, I believe that when both the Bible and science are properly understood, that they will ultimately never contradict each other. If there is an apparent contradiction, then either there is a misunderstanding of what Scripture is saying or a misunderstanding of our interpretation of the scientific evidence.

Peace.

Yes there is, no they can't, and no they can't.

They are mutually exclusive means of acquiring and understanding knowledge. Only with your definition of science so vague as to be completely meaningless is that not true.

Thanks for confirming your willful ignorance to everyone again.

If you believe that there's something fundamentally at issue with people having faith and scientifically approaching knowledge, then you are simply claiming that a large number of scientists are idiots that don't know what they're doing.

Also,

No, you're not. No, you don't. You just want to believe you're right. You continue to prove both of these things every time you go down this path again.

What is the "religious" way of acquiring knowledge?

The paradigm that claims that there's a supernatural god. There's not much point asking the question 'what else could have created the universe?' when the only meaningful and acceptable answer is 'god', so all knowledge acquired in the religious paradigm is shaped and understood through that lens.

Even if this were a meaningful description of a "paradigm" (which it's not), the fact that you have to boil this down to a single question (which is rather peculiar and arbitrary) and then pretend as if other "paradigms" of learning *aren't* shaped and understood through the lens of the paradigm itself is utterly bizarre.

It would also be an outright rejection of all the scientific progress made by theists *AND* deists throughout history, as they've all come from such a paradigm.

But this only goes to show how far you need to distort other people's way of seeing the world in order for you to maintain your beliefs. This has little to do with an honest conversation and you show no predilection towards learning when you set yourself up in this manner.

Edit: One might say that your anti-religious paradigm is preventing you from acquiring knowledge in the exact same way you believe that the "religious" paradigm (using your definition) is preventing others. The only difference is that you actually believe in your paradigm and nobody believes in the "religious" one you've put forward.

"Religion" doesn't dictate a belief in god(s), so this is a bad objection.

This is ******ed.

That's not a very loving thing to say, LOVELOVELOVE.

I wouldn't describe is as a 'bad' objection so much as one that we could find semantic fault with if we chose to be that picky. I think that otherwise, we all know what we mean when we use the word 'religious', that theism and god beliefs are being referred to.

When a deity IS unquestionably involved, do you agree that science and religion are mutually exclusive paradigms?

What does this mean? What does it mean for something to be mutually exclusive paradigms? ( and what do you mean by paradigm? I see you use the word a lot but Im not sure you are meaning it in the usual sense of the word?)

does it mean that someone who is religous( or who has religious beliefs) cannot ever "use science" or have scientific beliefs or whatever?

I would describe a paradigm as an underlying idea, theory, or model, that determines what questions are relevant and what answers are meaningful. If your paradigm is that there is a universe creating god that is non-physical, then that's going to conflict with a paradigm that rules out such a possibility, such as science based on the assumption of philosophical naturalism.


They can, they just hold beliefs that are mutually exclusive and therefore incoherent.

Well, this is blatantly false. There are scientists who do good scientific work, who are also religious/believe in god

Believing in god, and believing, for example, that electricity is due to the transfer or flow of electrons, are not mutually exclusive.

Edit to answer your 3rd edit. No, these 2 beliefs arent incoherent either