when they say "god works in mysterious ways"?

Question

is this a subtle way of admitting they are wrong?

Answer 1

No. It's a way of saying that He is way, way, way beyond our human understanding. Yours, too.

Answer 2

When they say "God works in mysterious ways" they misquote,"God moves in a mysterious way"--a hymn--
Words: Will­iam Cow­per, in Twen­ty-six Let­ters on Re­li­gious Sub­jects, by John New­ton, 1774. It is re­port­ed­ly the last hymn Cow­per ev­er wrote, with a fas­cin­at­ing (though un­sub­stan­ti­at­ed) story be­hind it.

Cow­per oft­en strug­gled with de­press­ion and doubt. One night he de­cid­ed to com­mit su­i­cide by drown­ing him­self. He called a cab and told the driv­er to take him to the Thames Riv­er. How­ev­er, thick fog came down and pre­vent­ed them from find­ing the riv­er (ano­ther ver­sion of the story has the driv­er get­ting lost de­liber­ate­ly). After driv­ing around lost for a while, the cab­by fin­al­ly stopped and let Cow­per out. To Cowper’s sur­prise, he found him­self on his own door­step: God had sent the fog to keep him from kill­ing him­self. Even in our black­est mo­ments, God watch­es over us.
Thank you for asking.

Answer 3

It's a philosophical out.

The Catholics, who assembled andedited the scriptures knew that they had to have an escape clause when questions came up that the Bible couldn't answer, so this was a perfect way to address it.

Other scriptures come to mind:
Avoid vain babblings
Avoid the wisdom of this world
Jesus is everything

Answer 4

No, it's a subtle way of saying "no matter what, I will always believe what I believe because there is always an excuse to make in order to make everything fit into my view".

Answer 5

They say that when they are ignorant of things, would not be bothered looking for reasons or explanations, and resort to their magical 'god' as always.

Answer 6

It's a bit like saying, we have no idea why THAT just happened, but we're sure as hell not going to explore why

Answer 7

No at all!