God and Parsimony

Toward the end of last August, I encountered a point of view that at the time struck me as bizarre and possibly revolutionary in terms of looking at God and faith.  I simply haven't written about it till now because my time has been taken up by my formal education.  The idea is that God probably isn't parsimonious.  That is, God doesn't need to do things by the simplest, most strait forward way possible.  It's God!  He does whatever he wants.

When I usually get into a discussion with a devotee, the argument eventually breaks down to one of God of the Gaps.  They contend that there are simple things that god set down as universal laws, like gravity, that time moves only forward everywhere, that force = mass x acceleration, energy travels from a point of high potential to low, and that the rest of the actually complex stuff like life, is specially created.  My argument in tern is that the complex stuff is really just an extension of simple laws building on each other with lots of very little parts, and that the laws themselves are the extension of some more encompassing law.  I make the argument that it is simpler that God (if there even needs to be one at all, and I don't think there does) just put down a very small set of laws, and that the rest just flows from there.

The man that I met in late August believed that simplicity just didn't enter into it.  

-Why are we having a nice breeze right now?  

-God wills it and is favoring us, his children.  

-Isn't it true that our having a nice breeze is the result of large scale weather patterns that also breed destructive typhoons that kill thousands and ruin lives?  

-No, they are completely independent, as is absolutely everything in the universe.  Any cohesiveness is the result of God's decision to have cohesiveness.  That could change.

-But having a miracle in one spot would create a chain reaction of consequences that would ripple out in increasing complexity through the universe.  Answering someone's specific prayer in one spot could cause harm to someone else.  For example, if someone prays to recover from an accident, someone else won't get a kidney as a result.  Also, someone would eventually notice that there are things happening that can only be explained scientifically by the sudden creation or destruction of energy or matter somewhere.

-Not really.  God could just do a second miracle to cancel out any affects of the first one.  He really doesn't have to conserve miracles.  It's not like he's going to run out.

-Well, I guess when you take out parsimony, you can believe in anything!  Including a very, very personal God.