In a comment on an earlier thread, C Grace posed me the question:
Do you think QI [quantum indeterminacy] is needed for God to manipulate the material universe without breaking His natural laws? It seems to me that without QI, God’s freedom to affect the physical universe would be limited to what he could do through us.
No, I don’t think QI is needed for God to interact with creation (say, by performing miracles) w/o breaking natural laws (e.g., conservation laws). Unlike Hume, I don’t think miracles are properly thought of as “violations” of natural laws but rather as “exceptions” to those laws. Any natural law that we are able to formulate has a structure like “If conditions C obtain then, all other things being equal, with probability P result R will obtain”. The “all other things being equal” condition is also called a ‘ceteris paribus‘ clause and functions as a built-in exception clause. Thus, natural laws reflect the ordinary operations of created things. In the case of a miracle, all other things are not equal, so we have an exception to the law, not a violation of it.
Philosopher Richard Purtill makes the same point by using the example of a presidential pardon. If the President of the U.S., say, should decide to pardon a criminal, this in no way abrogates the law or changes the criminal code. It’s an exception that preserves the rule. Just as the President of the U.S. has the executive authority to override the normal law of the land in special circumstances, so also God has the sovereign authority to override the normal operations of things in the natural order if He sees fit to do so. And if He does so, this in no way nullifies the normal operations of the natural order. It’s still normal for things to fall in a gravitational field even if God decides for some reason to supernaturally levitate my couch.