About other gods-question for theists

[Jenny A]

With regard to miracles, like the virgin birth, I am extremely skeptical, because extra ordinary events require extra ordinary proof. The Bible with it's 30 year later anonymous authors does not nearly reach that level of proof.

Are you saying all the authors of the bible are anonymous? Why? What would you call extraordinary proof?

I'll start with extra ordinary proof.

If I were to tell you I spent part of last night in the driveway with my family setting off fountains and playing with sparklers, you'd probably believe me. It's an ordinary thing commonly done by many people on the 4th of July and there's no reason to doubt me.

If I told you I was 120 years old, you might question that though it's in the realm of possibility, just rather unlikely. So you might want to know if I can send you a picture, link some press coverage about my last birthday, etc. before you'd believe me.

If I were to tell you my mother was dead for several days and then rose out of her coffin and went on with her ordinary life, I suspect you want more than a newspaper story. You'd want medical confirmation and a whole host of other things. But it's still sort of within the realm of possibility because there have been people who were thought dead who have woken up in the morgue. They were not of course dead, just in very deep comas.

But if I insisted that she really was absolutely clinically dead, no brain activity, not heartbeat however faint, and that she'd begun to rot first I doubt a newspaper story and a single doctor's testimony would do it for you.

If I told you that well, really only a few people saw her after she rose from the dead and that she's since moved away and I don't know where she is, I think you'd smell a rat or think I was crazy or deluded.

But history is full of such claims and not just in the Bible. Miracles in ancient times are a dime a dozen. It's only when the concept of scientific proof and greater knowledge of how the world works that miracles begin to disappear.

For extraordinary claims like: ESP, UFO visitations with or without medical exams; talking to the dead; dragons in the backyard; we need more than eye witnesses testimony. I would need scientific proof, in the form of experiments independently reproduced.

In ancient times miracles were a dime a dozen and not just in the Bible. Notice in Exodus that Moses' miracles are just bigger and better than the Pharaoh's magicians' miracles. But the more people learn about how the world works the fewer miracles there are. That's because we've learned to ask questions when someone suggests the impossible has happened, or even when we think we've seen something impossible.

Should one of my teen age daughters claim she's both a virgin and pregnant I'm going to have a lot of questions. And though I love and trust her, I wouldn't take her word on that one.

Or as Martin Luther put it "There are five miracles we see in Matthew’s account of our Lord’s birth. He
was born of a virgin, God became man, his birth was
foretold by Isaiah seven hundred years before it
happened, Joseph believed it, and we believe it."