I’m not ready to reject dualism wholesale yet, and I’m not sure I even know what that would look like. However, I don’t think it makes sense to say that God’s interaction with the world is “supernatural”, in the sense that people today use the word.

People today use the word “supernatural” to mean “impossible through natural means”. This makes no sense to me, since the moment you observe something, it has obviously been proven to be possible. If we say that something is “supernatural” simply because we don’t have an explanation for how it could’ve arisen through natural means, we’re engaging in “God of the gaps”, and I don’t think that God would want that.

Worse, when we insist that God’s hand is, by definition, only that which can’t be explained by physical means, we’re essentially banishing God from the physical universe. I can understand why atheist materialists would want to promote this view, but it’s astonishing to me that any Christian would support this view. Christian orthodoxy for 2,000 years has insisted on God incarnate, bodily resurrection, opposition to Gnostic dualism, and belief in any number of other materialist-compatible positions.

The word “miracle” is perhaps slightly better. We could use the word “miracle” to describe something completely unexpected, rare, or inexplicably coincidental — yet physically possible. Used this way, the moment a “miracle” happens, it is incontrovertible proof of physical possibility. If a miracle were miraculous primarily due to physical impossibility, the idea of miracle, and thus the “hand of God” would be self-refuting. But has this ever been the standard view of miracles? It seems to me that the linkage between “miracle” and “physical impossibility” is a very modern view (and incoherent, as we see). In scriptural usage, miracles seem to be things which are physically possible (and in the case of Moses’s staff and the court magicians, even repeatable by others), but very unpredictable and coincidental. When coincidental, the coincidence generally centers around a moral context where someone has been granted some insight about what is going to happen.

For the committed materialist, ability to predict the future requires no supernatural pixie dust, since everything is predetermined anyway. And even for someone who believes in libertarian free will (by definition, not a materialist), the ability to look ahead over a certain window of time is not problematic. Therefore, we do not need dualism or the colloquial “supernatural” to explain miracles in any Biblical sense of the word. Of course, we don’t have a materialist explanation for future prediction any more than we have a materialist explanation of intentionality, but neither fact ought to give the committed materialist much grief. Materialists will agree, no doubt, that we don’t yet have a solution, but “we can taste it”.

Postulating some exorbitant privilege for God, where His hand escapes or negates the laws of physics, seems to me to be an act of little faith. Is God that impotent, that He cannot reconcile physics to Himself? Therefore, I don’t see why we would insist that God’s hand is immaterial or anti-material. It may be true that His fingers are not clad in animal skin like ours, but He has a “hand” that is physical, and which manipulates the physical. I still think that the attempts to measure God’s finger length or calculate the size of God’s arm are stupidly literalist, and even idolatrous. But the staunch insistence on the physicality of God’s hand can be seen as a rejection of an unnecessary and counterproductive dualism. And to the Muslim theologians, I am thankful for that.

Look at what happens when you let these crazy religious fanatics take over government!  Next thing you know, you’ll be in a concentration camp facing genocide!

However, the truth is precisely the opposite.  The arrests in Egypt were conducted by the secular government, and those arrested were members of the fundamentalist Islamic party who seek to influence the upcoming elections.  The secular Egyptian government has stated that they conducted these arrests to “simulate” what it would be like if the fundamentalists took over, to educate the people in advance of the elections.

In other words, the pro-Western secular powers are religiously persecuting fundamentalist Muslims, and the Christians are opportunistically seizing upon this to claim that fundamentalist Muslims are bad.  This would be exactly the same as if the Obama administration were to arrest and imprison members of Westboro Baptist Church (the “God Hates Fags” guy), as a way of “simulating” what it would be like if the Baptists took over government.

As much as we disagree with fundamentalist Muslims, or with the Westboro Baptist Folks, this is not the way to combat them.  By seizing on lies and deceit, Christians cheapen and diminish themselves.  The idea that Christians would use these arrests to smear Islam is disgusting and reprehensible, and does not help Christianity.

~

The arrests were conducted by the secular Mubarak government, against members of the world’s largest and oldest Islamist group, al-ikhwān al-muslimūn, or “The Muslim Brotherhood”.  To understand the significance of this, you need to understand a little bit of history.  Mubarak became president when Sadat was assassinated by Islamist extremists associated with the Muslim Brotherhood (in fact, the fatwah against Sadat was issued by none other than Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is currently in prison for the first World Trade Center bombing).  To say the least, Mubarak’s pro-Western, secular government is not a friend of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The antagonism between Egypt’s secular government and Muslim Brotherhood is not new.  The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, in Egypt, by an Islamic fundamentalist preacher named Hasan-al-Banna.  Al-Banna’s goal was to evict the colonial and secular powers who controlled Egypt at the time.  The Muslim Brotherhood has never held political power, and has been outlawed periodically and persecuted by secular authorities throughout its existence.  In 1948 (after the partition of Palestine), Egypt’s secular prime minister, Mahmoud Fahmi an-Nukrashi Pasha was assassinated by Muslim Brotherhood.  In retaliation, Hassan-al-Banna was assassinated by the secular forces shortly after.

Given this acrimonious history, it should be no surprise to find the secular Egyptian government taking action against the Muslim Brotherhood; especially before an election.  What should be a surprise, though, is that people parrot the accusations that “those mean Islamists are persecuting secularists in Egypt!”