5 Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. 6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7 You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
Now that we know where the wind comes from and where it is going, does that nullify the Lord’s metaphor?
Right. And we can agree that the ancients were not idiots. The point is simply that the words “miracle” and “supernatural” are convenient descriptors for us, but they don’t always fit the actual biblical data. Isaiah walking around naked was a “sign,” in biblical terms. Not a violation of natural law.
Ummmm … hello? It’s a sign no different than the voice from heaven in John 12 or the resurrection appearance of Jesus in Galilee in Matthew 28. Just for review:
Earlier, I compared signs and wonders to non-verbal communication, such as a gesture. And, just like any other form of communication, both a gesture and a sign are detectable by our ordinary senses and capable of being misunderstood. (Just as many strangers to town surely misunderstood the naked man walking around Jerusalem …)
You keep coming back to this result because you just want to debate. It’s been nice, but the horse is thoroughly dead now.
Fair enough, last thought. Do you think whatever words they used, that the ancients did not conceive of Isaiah walking around naked, and three men walking unscathed out of an overheated furnace, as two categorically different events?
Would they really not recognize one as (however odd or extraordinary) well within the confines of how the world normally functions, and the other as an event that simply could not have happened without God’s very direct intervention?
Of course. That’s what I said above. They were not idiots.
But many things that we throw under the general term “miracle” do not fit the particular incidents we find in the Bible. Signs and wonders always communicated a message from God to mankind. When we start talking about “miracles” that happened when no one yet existed to observe them (except the angels) and receive God’s message, we’ve wandered far away from the purpose of signs and wonders in the Bible. The only way for us to receive a 500-million-year-old message from God would be if he decided, completely of his own volition, to leave a clue for us to find.
In the case of the creation of the first cell, for example, God could have directly intervened and decided to disguise his involvement, strictly for his own reasons. It is sheer presumption for us to assume that if God intervened, he must have left his fingerprints and DNA all over the crime scene. And, for the third time, even if he did leave his fingerprints behind and we could scientifically prove that they were God’s fingerprints, the majority of people still would deny the evidence before them – just like the Sanhedrin tried to cover up the sign that Peter and John performed, and just like those who saw the resurrected Christ with their own eyes still doubted.
@jstump Hi Jim, I confess that I have not read all previous 83 comments. So what I have to say might be repetitive. Let’s say that Behe got the definition of EC wrong. Let’s say that a correct definition would have creation in an intimate causal connection with God, unlike Deism. It’s not clear that “divine intervention” would be an appropriate term to describe how God acts in his creation, since God continuously acts in his creation.
I like the metaphor of two people dancing together, sort of like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. When you watch their dances on youtube, most of the time Ginger has her feet on the ground, and is just following Fred’s lead. But every so often you’ll see a dance where Fred occasionally picks Ginger up and twirls her around.
I think we could frame Behe’s point this way: ID says that we can study the history of evolution and see times when God picked up Nature and twirled her around (what we used to call “divine intervention”). I think Behe would say that EC denies that we could ever identify such actions, even if they had happened.