Author: administrator

The hypothetical example of a child who survived the 2004 tsunami (while many others perished around him) features in a debate between Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins. The former endorses the appropriateness of the claim that God saved the boy; while the latter thinks that God would be extremely capricious if he behaved like that, and himself attributes the child’s survival to chance in the context of natural laws. Christian theists believe that God sustains the world rather than only having created it and set its path in motion. But could we also say ex ante that the child’s survival was determined (purely) by the laws of nature; but ex poste that God saved him?