Some of Trump’s followers claim divine intervention saved him during the shooting in which Corey Comperatore died protecting his family. Trump initially credited himself, explaining he had turned his head to look at a chart and thus narrowly avoided death. He soon embraced the narrative that God had saved him. While there are psychological and theological issues here, my focus will be on the philosophical aspects of the issue of whether God saved Trump.

Looked at philosophically, three of the domains of concern are epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. A key epistemic issue is how one would know whether God saved Trump. The metaphysical challenge is sorting out the mechanics of reality and divine intervention. The ethical aspect is the classic problem of evil or, in this case, the problem of good. I will start with epistemology.

The details of the shooting have been reconstructed in detail,  but the key facts are that Trump suffered a minor wound to his ear, Corey Comperatore was fatally wounded, and David Dutch and James Copenhaver were both critically wounded. Assuming the shooter was trying to hit Trump, Trump was lucky to escape with only a minor injury. That is, he survived as a matter of chance. Some of his followers are denying that it was chance and are claiming that God saved Trump. Some are even taking this as a sign that Trump is the chosen of God. From an epistemic standpoint, the key question here is: how do we know that God saved Trump? That is, what evidence is available that would prove divine intervention as opposed to alternative explanations, such as chance? I am asking these as serious epistemic questions.

One approach is to attribute the knowledge to some special epistemic ability possessed by some of Trump’s followers that enabled them to somehow know that God saved Trump.  They cannot point to any empirical evidence in the shooting that would prove this, but they know. They could appeal to divine revelation or other avenues of knowledge. The problem is, of course, that there is no way for anyone other than his epistemically special followers to have such knowledge. Which is certainly adequate for Trump’s purposes. On this view, the way divine intervention is determined is via a special epistemic capacity possessed only by dedicated followers of Trump. But what about everyone else? They would need to rely on more mundane means of discerning divine intervention.

I will assume that evidence of divine intervention would require something unusual that could not be better explained by alternatives. To illustrate this, I will present a few examples of how this process might work. They will also involve shootings.

Imagine that Margorie is at the range and sees that a shooter has set up some cans. The shooter aims at a Diet Coke can. One shot grazes the can and other shots hit nearby cans. Margorie tells you that God intervened to save the Diet Coke can. At first you think she is joking, but she is serious and starts talking about the can being the chosen of God. On the face of it, her claim would be absurd. We know that people often miss what they aim for, and these results are not unusual. They can be explained in purely mundane terms and there is no need to posit divine intervention.

Now imagine that Margorie is at the coast when someone is duck hunting. The hunter shoots at some ducks, grazing one with a pellet, killing another duck and wounding two others. Margorie tells you that, once again, God has intervened. This time, He has chosen to save one duck while letting another die and two more be wounded. She insists that God has chosen the duck. This would be absurd, since the fate of the ducks is explainable in mundane ways that do not require divine intervention.

It could be objected that my examples involve objects and animals, and God does not intervene for them. Given that Aquinas argued that it is no sin to kill animals, this does have appeal.  But we can turn to countless examples of people being slightly wounded rather than killed in situations that might have resulted in their death. This happens all the time in wars but is also something that happens in everyday life with hazards such as falling, vehicle accidents, workplace accidents, falling and so on. On any given day there are probably thousands of people who could have been killed but were only slightly injured. But these are usually not presented as cases of divine intervention. And, presumably, Trump’s followers cannot attribute these cases to divine intervention. After all, if God intervenes so much, then there would be nothing special about Trump’s survival and this would not be proof that he is chosen. It is also worth thinking about people who did not suffer even a slight injury in the shooting. There were many people around Trump who were not hurt at all, yet Trump’s followers do not say that God singled them out to spare them or that they are thus marked as chosen. This is only being applied to Trump, despite their being no evidence that his survival was beyond mundane explanation. On the face of it, the best explanation is that shooters can miss their targets and it just so happened that Trump was grazed while another person died, and two others were badly injured. There seems to be no miracle here. But what would divine intervention look like?

In the bible, divine intervention is usually presented as being clearly outside of the usual workings of the world. Things like the parting of the Red Sea, walking on water, curing of blindness, raising of the dead, destroying cities, and turning people into salt are good examples of divine intervention. As such, it would seem reasonable to expect that if God intervened to save Trump, this would be done in a suitably divine manner. This might have involved turning the shooter into salt or sending an angel to smite him. But nothing like that happened. It can, of course, be countered that God now does low-key interventions that are indistinguishable from cases in which He does not intervene. But the flaw with this response is that we would have no way to distinguish cases of divine intervention and we would be engaged in wishful thinking when attributing it to any outcome. As such, there is no evidence that God intervened to save Trump.