Yeah, they weren’t. Insult ↔ snide, comme ci comme ça. Your behavior ain’t sterling, bro. – you could afford to deal with it.
Says you who doesn’t believe in God nor anything but natural laws. You don’t see a little non sequitur there, I suppose.
Nope. It’s been covered. ← I lied. Yep, that was my response.
I don’t. You should explain.
That’s unfortunate. This wasn’t even about theodicy but about the conceit of thinking that you’re special compared to other people, i.e. those whose lives were manipulated to provide you with a sign.
Nah. I am inadequate to do so. You’ve told me so yourself.
You are accusing Maggie as well, you know, and every other Christian who can point to providential co-instants in their lives. No, I don’t suppose you do.
Can you not at least aspire to better?
Agreed, at least if any of those co-instants include actions of or effects on other people. Haven’t you ever thought about that?
I do fine. You’re just a little slow in some things. 
Duh. Of course I have. I marvel at how God can wonderfully orchestrate (or ‘manipulate’, to use the word from your limited vocabulary ) events without violating anyone’s free will.
Now you’re just being rude and annoying on purpose.
Just tellin’ it like it is, bro.
I would think with the several compelling examples of his orchestration, or that should be compelling to anyone whose spiritual eyes are not absolutely blind, anyone would want to be in the maestro’s orchestra (the maestro who is also the composer par excellence, beyond imagination) or at least in the appreciative audience, not outside in the cold picketing against his very existence.
Do you even know when you’re being offensive? I would like to think not, but perhaps I’m being too charitable.
The cross is an offense and a stumbling block to those who don’t embrace it.
That is something you can be at ease about.
I believe that smugness is a sin. Or at least it should be close enough to pride.
We agree completely, but if you are inferring that I am smug, you are completely wrong. Smugness is self-centered – what I have is God-centered confidence and absolute trust in my Father. Maybe your inference says more about you than me, because that is something you cannot imagine or identify with.
No, I’m implying that you’re smug. And you should look at yourself a little more closely.
You have to infer it before you can imply it or even declare it outright.
I did not say anything yesterday about the heavy irony in that.
And then there’s the irony in that, too.
You seem to think you you are in a position to judge the obviously demonstrated beautiful orchestration of the Maestro, the orchestration that changed Maggie’s life, and judge him as well, calling him an egotistical manipulator.
Shall we talk about pride.
I’m curious. Has anyone else been reading any of this? Do you share Dale’s dismissive view of non-Christians? My worry is that everyone thinks as he does but he’s the only one willing to say it in public.
Dismissive, like you are to God?
(Calling it like it is is not being dismissive.)
If I were dismissive of you, John, I wouldn’t even bother engaging you.
Unless you specify precisely what it is violating, or exactly what is being taken exception to, it would seem to me your references to natural laws are as semantically meaningful as the smell of blue.
With respect to what miracles are, it’s not at all clear that miracles require some sort of exception to the normal operation of things, or must incur a violation of some operating principle. I would like to see you defend this conception of ‘miracle’, because I’m just inclined to think that it is not actually describing miracles.
I don’t understand this objection. How about the basic notion of causality? (Or, in the case of quantum events, randomness.)
I don’t understand this either. That, to me, is the definition of “miracle”. What would be your definition? Is turning water into wine a miracle? If so, why? I would say it’s because doing so requires causes that do not in the ordinary course of the universe exist. The details of just how it happens are not necessary in order to tell that. Then again, if something happens like a particular A->T transversion in some gene, and you want to say that God did it, that too is a miracle, because something makes the transversion happen when it would not otherwise have happened. We don’t need to know how it was accomplished to know that it’s a miracle, even if to our eyes it’s indistinguishable from an ordinary mutation.
Let’s take causality.
In what sense is God directly causing a physical event ex nihilo, such as the generation of force on the side of an asteroid, a contradiction or violation of cause and effect?
What does it mean for a cause to be or not be in the ordinary course of the universe?
Let us say that, ever since the first life form, God has consistently raised a life form from death every 500 years. Would this count as being part of the ordinary course of the universe?
It’s also not clear why miracles could not be, at least sometimes, a naturally occurring event.
Take the crossing of the Red Sea in the Old Testament. Could this not be some extremely improbable occurrence of natural winds blowing apart the water to make a crossing and at the same time a miracle ordained by God to rescue the Israelite people?
What precludes God from being able to use ordinary cause and effect relationships to perform miraculous functions?
A miracle might involve something that might not ordinarily occur, but this doesn’t strike me as a necessary feature of miracles. Rather, it seems to me that what’s central is not whether how an event happened is ordinary or not, but that the caused event is itself not an ordinary event.
I think there also needs to be an apparent intentionality behind the event. Simply experiencing an unordinary event wouldn’t necessarily be thought of as a miracle. There needs to be something about the event that implies an act of intention from some kind of agency.
Something else I want to raise, is that Classical Theists hold that God is essentially part of the ordinary operation of all existing phenomena (1 Col 17). So any definition of miracles needs to take this kind of activity into consideration. A miracle would in a sense be one kind of divine activity among a number of others.