Pluralism Concerning the Weather

This paper argues that the belief in God's action in response to petitionary prayers and the scientific description of the weather should both be upheld. I discuss critically several attempts to resolve the tension between the two perspectives, such as postulating God's supernatural intervention or his tweaking of the statistics of quantum events or of chaotic fluctuations. Instead, I argue that all scientific theories are idealizations with a limited validity and that the physical world is dependent on the wider context, which includes the biological and mental realms. Thus, the scientific and theological perspective complement and enrich each other.