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Miracles do not prove divinity.

== Deuteronomy 13
According to at least Deuteronomy 13, miracles, signs and/or wonders alone can never prove that a message or prophet is from God.

== The Arrogance of the Random Coin Flips
If you flip a coin 10 times and it comes up heads 10 times in a row, is that a miracle?

If you flip a coin 100 times and it comes up heads 100 times in a row, is that a miracle?

If you flip a coin 10,000 times and it comes up heads 10,000 times in a row, is that a miracle?

No tricks -- let's assume you have reason to believe it is a fair coin. How do you explain 10,000 heads in a row?

The problem is, it could always just be a coincidence. No matter how unlikely. Further, there are many who would say that such a coin is an obviously unfair coin, using the result to re-define the base principles.

That's a great analogy to the "perfect universe implies a creator" argument. The Atheist will use it to explain any sort of miracle (or lack of miracle). It's all just random chance. If any proof that is offered can be so discredited, at a certain point one would have to ask //what sort of proof// is actually being asked for. After all, if the Atheist's theory can not be falsified then it can also never be proven and is thus found to be an intellectually dishonest argument.

== Coin Flips vs. "Real" miracles
Let's say a whale jumped up and it suddenly got real cloudy except for one beam of light on the whale, and the whale had a scar that looked like a hat and mustache and it started dancing on the beach and singing a German rendition of "Good Morning" from "Singing in the Rain (1952)".

Is that a miracle? Apart from being completely odd, and the rather theoretical concern that it doesn't seem intended to prove anything, you could say so, maybe. But it shares many similarities with a great number of coin tosses. According to quantum theory, you may in fact suddenly dematerialize and rematerialize somewhere else (even, to a place you want to go). It's not magic at all. And the chances of such happening are around the same as the dancing whale. Or, several trillion trillion coin flips coming up heads.

Thus, as soon as one wants to state it is 'only due to chance,' no miracle whatsoever could possibly prove anything, let alone divine intervention, because it could possibly be reproduced entirely by chance and our well-understood and proven science.

Yet it is precisely the nature of the reproducibility and rarity of the evidence which science uses to verify whether or not something is acceptable. A single photo of a black swan is enough to disprove the idea that all swans are white; the fact that this photo is one among millions (or more) photos of white swans is irrelevant. Likewise, finding or producing even a single atom of a new element is enough to prove it can be done; and anyone who thinks that 10,000 coin flips could happen by chance in this universe is playing stupid.

== Actually a Strong Argument for Creationism
Thus the best argument for creationism is merely that the universe is simply that we are here. To state that the universe 'developed by chance' is to stare not 10,000 coin flips in the face, but 10,000 to the power of 10,000 or more. Yes, it "could have" developed by chance, but that is a ridiculous argument. In fact this argument appears in the bible; Psalm 8 notes //very well// the absolute insignificance of humanity's presence in the cosmos; it also infers that such, along with the indescribable beauty of the universe may be taken as proof of God. This is echoed in Psalm 147:4 "He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name."

This is usually phrased as "the complexity of our planet points to a deliberate Designer who not only created our universe, but sustains it today." For example, the size of the earth is perfect for the development of intelligent human life. The Earth's size and corresponding gravity holds a thin layer of mostly nitrogen and oxygen gases, only extending about 50 miles above the Earth's surface. If Earth were smaller, an atmosphere would be impossible, like the planet Mercury. If Earth were larger, its atmosphere would contain free hydrogen, like Jupiter.

== Non-Miraculous Miracles
The big bang had a start and in it was not just the shadow of the layout of the galaxy and all the universe, but also the laws of physics as well. For in the moment of the big bang, time was created. This is a barrier to our scientific understanding of the big bang; we may never understand it beyond those first few instants when time itself came into being.

But we may still ask questions; At some point, it must have existed in the sense of a pre-big-bang "shape". During this space there were no physical laws of the universe, no cause and effect, no entropy, no arrow of time, no physical reaction possible. Thus what set the big bang in motion? How was all of it collected in a state of least entropy? We do not know and can never know scientifically; but if we believe God did it then it certainly fits in with the nature of God as we know him from the bible; a singularity which exists outside of time and space, which is separate from and above all of creation; whose initial act was to simply create light and to separate out light from darkness thus creating the universe.

//to be continued//