The evangelist cries, "But God promised only one miracle! If He keeps repeating a miracle it stops being miraculous!"

The scientists say, "There's nothing we can do about that. The scientific method requires significant reproducibility."

The evangelist never dreams of God again; and opinions of believers and non-believers alike remain unchanged. Wars and sin continue.

The moral of this story: Believe in a miracle if you want; but don't expect scientists to verify it, they can't deal with non-measurable one-time events no matter how wonderful.

A corollary is: Don't expect scientists to prove that some event in the past long regarded as a miracle really wasn't miraculous. They might be skeptical, but the rule about one-time events still applies. Scientists may come up with possible explanations for the parting of the Red Sea or for manna in the desert, but they weren't there to make observations.

In particular Science is not going to help us to verify or understand, what to Christians is the ultimate miracle, the appearance of Christ on the earth and his resurrection after the cross. We will never have anything more than the word of the ordinary people who were there to witness. What they saw made them extraordinary and they carried the good news over the earth. The important part of the miracle of Christ, to me, is that His presence for a brief time on earth changed forever the course of mankind, and continues to bring believers closer to God.

In summary, science cannot validate or, for that matter, invalidate events regarded as miraculous. An individual scientist might, by his methods, expose a fraud, but that is a wholly different. Moving on, let us consider some other matters so far closed to science.

Scientists have, for instance, been unable to say how life started on earth. Theory says that sometime 3 billion or more years ago, when the earth was young, conditions were right for the formation of self-replicating molecules, which evolved some organization that we could call life. A number of brilliant men have tried to reproduce these conditions and have so far failed to create anything that can make more of itself, so the hypothesis hangs there, unproven. I have seen articles where the writer expresses confidence that the discovery will eventually be made, so this could be a temporary wall. At least, the hypothesis is under test.

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