Spong's Fifth Thesis

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

Spong doesn’t really tell us what he is referring to when he uses the words “post-Newtonian world”. Could he simply be meaning “post-Modern” instead. I’m not entirely sure, but I assume Spong means something like the words of James Burke, author of The Day the Universe Changed, when he writes: Newton's theories

destroyed the medieval picture of a world as a structure moved by the unseen but ever-present hand of God. Man was no longer at the centre of a system created for his edification by the Almighty; the earth was merely a small planet in an incomprehensibly vast and inanimate universe which behaved according to laws that could be calculated. There seemed, for the first time, no place in the cosmos for the providential involvement of God in the affairs of mankind.

Spong believes that, because we can explain the workings of inertia, attraction, orbits and gravity, God is no longer needed to move the heavens and the earth. More importantly, miracles, as they are commonly understood (i.e. God's interference in His own laws), are nonsensical at best.

Seeing as how Newton (as well as Kepler and Copernicus, just to mention two) had no trouble simultaneously believing in the God of the Bible AND making startling advances in mathematics and physics, I, once again, am finding that Spong is simply overstating his own beliefs in derision of others. Granted, Newton was not what I would call a convinced Christian; in fact, he found trinitarianism to be a “corruption” of the “original” intent of the Bible. Newton, though, formed his ideas based on the assumption that the laws of the universe were knowable because there was a knowable God. As some have pointed out, science can't really tell if there is a "Watchmaker", more so how blind said Creator is. Obviously, I take differential and integral calculus, gravity, attraction and inertia for granted, but the way things work does not tell us, with a low degree of necessity, much about the Maker. More importantly to this discussion, it also does not tell us if the Maker can or cannot break His own rules.

My take on this issue has always been that, while there are scientific laws, we would not be able to make sense of them unless they were indeed lawful. That is to say, because there is a God who created the universe in a particular way, we can understand those laws. While this tells us very little about the Creator--other than, perhaps, His predilections towards order--it tells me, that there is indeed a Creator. This, of course, is an interpretation of the available data. It does not preclude the possibility of other interpretations. By overstating his position, Spong claims a monopoly on the truth--something he repeatedly claims to abhor.