God does not arbitrarily manipulate the laws of physics and perform miracles.

1) The Straw Man complaint: I think Pro missed my entire point. My point in submitting the ball example was that if we, as finite human beings could serve as a force, surely God's infinite power would be enough to do miracles. Pro did not respond to my argument that miracles could be interpreted as supernatural force overcoming natural force. 2) " . . . should these laws ever be violated, then predictions for future observation would become much more difficult. To explain why, somewhere down the line we would find a non sequitur in our search for an explanation on how the universe actually works . . ." Not so. We see examples in the field of medicine every now and then where doctors say they have no idea how a patient could have recovered from a disease or infection. For example, I personally have heard of a Christian's broken leg healing far faster than the doctors thought possible. Now, must the doctors throw up their hands at this and declare that they cannot make any more predictions regarding broken bones? No. They simply call it a "miracle" and move on, confident that in the vast majority of cases their predictions will come to pass. Accepting the possibility of supernatural intervention merely requires that scientists recognize that every once in a great while they may encounter something clearly impossible that nevertheless happens and further recognize that these exceptions are the work of God. I never mentioned the Bible, Pro. Check again. The Bible is historically accurate, but Jesus' resurrection can be believed even without it. Secular sources all affirm that 1) Jesus lived 2) Jesus was crucified 3) Jesus died 4) Jesus' disciples claimed he rose again 5) Even when Jesus' disciples were killed for their belief, they refused to deny they were speaking the truth about what they had seen. 6) No one ever saw Jesus' dead body again. 7) Despite persecution, christianity grew rapidly and even the emperor became a Christian in the end. Logically, why would the disciples die for something they knew to be false? They had nothing to gain from proclaiming Jesus alive if He was actually dead. And if Jesus was actually in his tomb why didn't the Romans and the Jews just open it up and show the Christians His dead body? (The tomb had been thoroughly sealed and guarded; it would have been impossible for the disciples to steal it. And why would they want to?) And finally, why did Christianity spread so fast? Islam spread through persecution. Christianity spread despite persecution. One of the main reasons Christianity spread as it did was that people saw the miracles the disciples did in the name of Jesus. How would Pro explain the universal presence of cultural tales of angels and demons? Also, the New Testament is actually historically accurate: The New Testament is an accurate copy of what was originally written. The time gap between the oldest original manuscript and the oldest surviving manuscript is only about 25 years, possibly less. This is considerably less than the gap that exists for many ancient authors such as Homer, Caesar, or Plato. Also, there are nearly 5,700 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The number of copies means that it is easy to reconstruct what would have been the original. Scholars point to "errors," but the majority or variants involve spelling or grammar, leaving a text that is 98.33 percent pure. The New Testament is also historically reliable. Most, if not all, of the books of the NT were definitely written before AD 70, about 40 years after the death of Jesus. This is a reasonable gap. Historical research indicates that a myth cannot crowd out the truth while eyewitnesses are still alive. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, which are for our purposes the most important part of the Bible, were written by eyewitnesses that were present at the events they later recorded. Acts was written by Luke and contains no fewer than 84 historically confirmed details, such as place names, local regents, and local weather. Why would he be more careful with these than with the miracles and signs he also writes about? In the gospel of Luke, eleven historical figures are mentioned in the first three chapters, and all have been confirmed by non-Christian writers and/or archaeology. The other gospels are similar. The New Testament Story is not a Legend. The gospels are historically corroborated and were written close to the events they describe. New New Testament Story is not a Lie. The writers included embarrassing details about themselves that they would certainly not have lied about. They included facts their readers could check on and even provoked their readers to do so. And they endured torture and death for their story. The New Testament Story is not an embellishment. The New Testament writers were meticulously accurate, as evidenced by over 140 historically confirmed details. They recorded miracles in those same historically confirmed narratives, and they did so with apparent objectivism, without apparent embellishment or theological comment. The New Testament writers definitely believed what they wrote. And they wrote what they saw. They did not suffer a group hallucination, because group hallucinations do not happen. We are forced to conclude the resurrection and Jesus' miracles did happen. Faith healer objection: I did actually once attend a church where they claimed that they had done thousands of miracles among the sick. However, the simple answer to your question is that healers cannot heal whenever they want. They can ask God to heal, but God may or may not answer their prayers. The Bible IS historically accurate. Your complaint about the "star" falling to earth does not prove anything. We still speak of shooting "stars" that are actually meteors falling and burning in earth's atmosphere. This is probably what the Bible means. Your point about another dimension is good. Did you not read my argument about another dimension making miracles possibly for the beings living there? I do not see a scientific problem with another dimension, as the dimension would obviously by its nature be impossible to detect--except through the miracles done by it. In the Bible the Devil is referred to by several names. The "snake" is one of them. The Devil need not be a literal snake. Floods do not destroy all plant life! A flood distributes seeds around the earth, and those seeds can grow when the waters recede. We do not find trees older than the flood, in Sweden or elsewhere. God is just. And He is benevolent in that He has provided a way to avoid hell. Back to Pro.