A miracle would be His suspending the normal operation of those laws to demonstrate that He is God who can do so.
then why should we expect naturalistic evidence to back up such a miracle?
When it comes to the Flood, there is no hint in the Bible that anything miraculous took place.
i'm forced to disagree.
When the rains began, this was a new thing on earth, but there is no hint it was anything other than the working out of conditions and laws already in place.
except that there are certain things that are quite problematic from a scientific viewpoint. many of them were covered in the thread this spun off from. i don't want to get into them a whole lot, because that's not really the topic, but rather old questions of "where did the water come form?" and "where did the water go?"
the bible reports that the water comes from beneath the earth, and above the sky. whether or not you think it's being used colloquially, it still reflects a very, very old cosmology, one where the earth was something like an inside-out snowdome, with water all around the outside. the water that god lets in through the windows of heaven and the fountains of the deep are the waters of creation, the primordial chaos from which everything else was formed. god is, in effect, un-creating.
in a modern context, looking for the source and eventual destination of the water is about like looking for where the fish and loaves came from. yes, they were real, tangible results. but so was creation. and a world-wide flood is downright impossible with the way this planet works.
the question isn't "how to make it possible" but "why are creationists trying?" if it's just working out of laws already set in motion, why are there no more world-wide floods? why is it set on by god's anger and regret over humanity? the point i'm trying to make here is this:
if the flood was a natural occurance, like you say, where does god fit into the picture? and why do we need god?
Science itself depends upon a lawful orderly universe, the kind of universe God made. There is absolutely nothing that exists that does not depend upon God and that certainly includes science.
on the contrary, the laws negate a dependence on god. if the universe is lawful and ordered, it doesn't need a good to direct its every action. the only "need" for god would be to interrupt those laws, in the cases of miracles.
But surely it is obvious that we say evolution denies God because it denies what He tells us in His written revelation about the creation of humanity and about the flood. Nothing mysterious about this.
i don't want to get off topic on this, but as demonstrated in other threads, "evolution" here seems to mean quite a bit more than biological variation. what i'm suggesting is, in ineffect, by attempting to reconcile god with naturalism at all, you are destroying the meaning of the word "god."
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