Humor has to do with the incongruous, but the incongruities are only in your perception, because nothing has been contorted (as I have aready started to explain).
Not really. God is big enough that he can do that, and he is personal.
The problem of pain (whole books have been written about it, and there is one by C.S. Lewis with that exact phrase as the title) is a straw man and a red herring, and a whole other topic.
Iâm confused, because this started by denying that there was any claim of an opaque atmosphere. You said âThis says nothing about an opaque atmosphereâ. Itâs consistent with Genesis 1:2 in the sense that anything the verse doesnât talk about at all is consistent with it.
You and Ross really need to get your stories straight.
What does that mean? Were all the stars and planets created at the same time? How, then, could light not exist until Day 1? The verse doesnât say âlight reaches surfaceâ; it says ââLet there be lightâ; and there was lightâ. Thatâs the creation of light. Hence the contortions, and the need to invent both a change of perspective and the opaque, translucent, and transparent atmospheres. Letâs not even get into the substitution of âexpanseâ for âfirmamentâ, which somehow turns into âwater cycleâ. And of course Genesis clearly states that the sun, moon, and stars were formed on the 4th day, after the formation of dry land, ocean, and plants. None of your concordance makes any sense, either as biblical exegesis or as science.
Oh, well. That settles it, then.
So you think that God arranges ducks for you, but heâs not arranging the starving children in Yemen? Iâve noticed that sort of thing before. If thereâs a plane crash and a hundred people die, the one survivor thanks God for his deliverance. An unbiased observer would call that cherry-picking.
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And I didnât claim that he arranges the whole world for me. That is your incorrect extrapolation, probably just for rhetorical effect?
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I was referring solely to the things you mentioned as being arranged for you, though there do seem to be a lot of them.
Iâm not clear on what would make that arrogant or egotistical. People often make things or plan events for the entertainment and joy of others. When people recognize such loving gestures, is that âarrogant egotismâ? By what logic would God making things or planning events for the entertainment and joy of others be any differentâand thereby be âarrogant egotismâ when people make note of that?
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You pick the wrong analogy, because when people plan events for you, thereâs evidence that they did indeed plan them. You are assuming that events that other people would suppose just happened were indeed planned for you. You arenât âmaking note ofâ anything; youâre interpreting stuff that happens as planned for you. To suppose that God made mandarin ducks to entertain Dale, purely because Dale happened to find a duck interesting, is indeed arrogant egotism.
Of course you can. Iâm not sure where the term originated, but âhypernaturalâ miracles is a useful term: no natural laws are broken, but there is amazing timing and maybe extremes of degree and extent. Many of the miracles in the Bible were of that sort, including the Israelites crossing the Red Sea.
I had a Christian friend whose office overlooked the shallow and muddy Schuylkill River in Philadelphia years ago, and one very windy day and with the particular topography (above and below water), wind speed and direction, he was excited to see the muddy bottom of the river in a trough made of water all the way across, with water on the left and on the right, upstream and downstream.
That, of course, reminded him of the Exodus and the Israelitesâ crossing of the Red Sea. Having had more than a little experience with Godâs providential timing myself, I suspect that the sea might have parted without Moses and the Israelites being there. But they were.
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It may have been Einstein who said, âCoincidence is Godâs way of staying anonymous.â Rightly put it is, âCoincidence is one of Godâs ways of saying, âHere I AM!ââ âCo-instantsâ and âco-instance(s)â are my substitute terms denoting ânot a chance!â
I have been keeping a Co-instants Log for over three decades, with retrospective entries for two decades before that (Iâm in my early geezerhood), and it has a small multitude of entries. Some are fun, funny, startling, poignant or life-path changing, and there are a lot of them! Not all are easy but all are good.
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Not life changing, startling â at least not instantly, but upon reflection, or as fun as are some are, this one (it is really a few more than several) is by far the most improbable, as humans count probability, and one of the most amazing to wonder at, how he orchestrated it all without violating anyoneâs free will. It is excellent evidence of Godâs sovereignty, timelessness and immanence, not to mention his interventionism for his children, even sometimes just for fun (yeah, Iâve got those, too 
)âŚ
Here is the log entry written up into a more readable formâŚ
docs.google.com/file/d/0B5k4bRhd7XlpWURaSzV6UHg3YTA/edit?usp=docslist_api&filetype=msword
I just did. 
How about it never happened?
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Why do you need a term like hypernatural when no natural laws are broken? If you really look at the events closely you will see it is NOT amazing timing nor any way extremes in degree nor extent.
The beginning of nature itself might be one. 
Being dismissive of God at the beginning in big bang cosmology is a fallacy of incredulity â âI cannot imagine and/or refuse to believe that God was the Beginner, so something else has to be true.â
Iâd said chuck the journal and go for a walk in the sunshine. Meet someone different than yourself and listen to their story and appreciate your life. Youâre the lucky one youâre alive.
well it wasnât a big deal to me.
I read your log. Humans have the ability to see patterns everywhere. I see nothing in your log that is astonishing. All kind of normal (and rather boring) But thanks for sharing.
So what you think is reason or logic is just evolved chemical and electical processes in human brains adapting them better for survival and that have nothing to do with truth. So they have no real reason, they are just compelled by chemistry âŚand what they say is completely meaningless.
Naturalism is self-refuting
https://carm.org/naturalism-is-self-refuting
The whole point of science is to figure out what is true and what isnât. You can believe in anything that youâd like but that doesnât make it true.
God created mandarin ducks for his own enjoyment as an artist, and for us to enjoy as well. You donât enjoy looking at mandarin ducks? They are really quite spectacular.