Little Evidence =Evidence?

[BluffTHIS!]

[ QUOTE ]
But the biggest point is this: Until about 100 years ago or so, it did not take any leap of faith to be a believer. The mere goings on of the universe, the earth, and living things, seemed like a constant miracle. No one realized, to take a simple example, that the majestic beauty of mountains could be easily predicted by a tivial Mandelbrot equation. Or that the laws of physics, the motions of the planets, the workings of the heart, could similarly logically be derived from a few simple assumptions.

[/ QUOTE ]

And you are making an erroneous assumption here. Namely that the only reason people 100+ years ago believed in God was that they ascribed all such then scientifically unexplained phenomena to a direct divine cause, and that such was the basis of their faith. You are discounting their belief in scripture (which admittedly cannot be conclusively proved to be true), and most of all to the experience of that faith in their lives. You have in a previous thread admitted that the question of religion is not a scientific one, but a probability one, and that the faith of religious believers constitutes additional evidence to them, though evidence that would not be credible to non-believers. Therefore, your use of anyone's beliefs on matters of science is not relevant unless such beliefs can be scientifically disproved.



[ QUOTE ]
The almost certain truth is that God's vague miracles of today are not miracles. And that the reason Jews misbehaved after the ten plagues is that the plagues did not happen the way the bible they said they did. And that anyone who believes otherwise is either uninformed about science and probability, is flat out stupid, or has a disease where the brain fights desperately to believe something because the alternative is too painful.

[/ QUOTE ]

You are making two assumptions which cannot be proved to be anywhere near "certain". The first is regarding how God chooses to act in most cases, and that he does not choose "vague" miracles as a usual way of acting (you know that I believe this is precisely how He chooses to act). Any conclusions on how God chooses to act can only be made from a relgion's relevant scriptures and beliefs and experiences, and not from your own a priori assumptions which include the falsity of those things.

Secondly, your beliefs about whether certain biblical miracles happened is due to your assumption that any God who might exist, as you posited in Sklanskyanity, does not interfere in supernatural ways contraty to the physical laws of our universe. But that is precisely what a miracle is. If you don't believe there is evidence for such miracles thousands of years after the fact, certainly believers cannot prove otherwise, only that the evidence that religion is true overall makes such beliefs in those miracles more credible than mere scientific evaluation could.