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3) Out of the Ground
The description of the creation of the man Adam also appears as a miracle.
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. (Genesis 2:7)
The claim that God made man out of the dust of the ground appears amazing, but it is a well known fact that when people die they return to dust. If it is thought unbelievable that God made man of the dust of the ground, consider the following comparison, which today is accepted as a natural occurrence and is yet just as miraculous.
Recently a native tribe which has never had contact with other humans or modern civilization was discovered in the Amazon region of South America. If these people, seeing our twenty-first century cars, planes and trains, asked where these things came from, would they not be amazed and unbelieving if they were told that they were made from out of the ground? If we consider carefully almost all things come out of the ground: metals, gems, oil, gold, silver, and in fact everything that is made. The making of an aeroplane requires the extraction of the materials obtained from the earth and the building of the aeroplane is achieved through the skilful hands of men. To the native tribesmen it may appear as something amazing and miraculous, but to the people of the twenty-first century civilization it is a natural industrial process.
Today we turn on our computers and instantaneously can communicate with people around the world. Do we stop to consider and wonder how a tiny silicon chip from the ground is the means by which this can be achieved?
Who can explain what electricity is? Man has harnessed it and can describe how it works but not what it is. It is a power far beyond man's comprehension.
The conveying of images and sound by television and sound in telecommunication use natural processes but are beyond our true understanding. So why would it be extraordinary for a power beyond our understanding to convey sound or visions to an ancient world to manifest the existence of an all powerful creator? Surely all those daily conveniences that we take so much for granted are truly miraculous if we pause and consider. Our lives daily revolve around inexplicable miracles that come from the ground or are harnessed from the air waves.
Life is a miracle
If we observe the fish in rivers and the sea, and if they could think, they might affirm that they could live on land or that no other creatures existed on land. They would obviously be in error in both cases. It is fact however, that life exists almost everywhere in some form or other with the organs and capacities suited to its environment. In the air, the water, on the earth or in the earth, in sand and in mud at the bottom of a river, life of some sort is to be found.
There is life from the lowest form to the highest, that we are capable of understanding. But can we as humans have the audacity to imagine that we are the highest form of life? There is so much that we cannot explain in the natural world around us. We use the products of the earth to create extraordinary things and accept this without a thought. We accept the complexity of the world, which we take so much for granted. If we can see the levels of life reaching up to the human scale, is it so extraordinary that there is a power and force far beyond our level? Just as the fish have no knowledge beyond their environment, it must follow we have no understanding beyond ours.
The Bible informs us that there is a power far above our earthly experience. All the arguments of analogy and logic would suggest that the probability, on scientific grounds, is that there are beings of a higher order than ours, capable of living where we cannot and doing things that we regard as miraculous. In such a way this would account for any miracle that is recorded in the Bible.
Science now knows that it is impossible to have new life without life. A child lives because it grew in a living mother. Humans now know it is impossible to make life from the raw ingredients on the earth, without life. For example we can clone a sheep, but it must grow in the womb of a sheep. There is fundamentally something about life, for when a person is drowned they exist complete physically, but some bodies are revived and live again with resuscitation and others do not.
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