We have not in the whole of history one authenticated act of magic, and miracles are a subset of magic. In particular, "I don't know how that could have happened therefore it is necessarily a miracle" is a bald fallacy, the God of the Gaps in action.
There is no evidence anywhere that magic occurs in reality.
Just produce an authenticated instance of magic in reality and I'll adjust my reckoning accordingly.
By the way, I seem to recall from an earlier conversation that you didn't think the video showed Ganesha performing a milk-drinking miracle. That was video evidence, light years better than reports by non-eye-witnesses from twenty centuries back. But you want me to believe the latter and disbelieve the former, which suggests your taste in miracles is extremely subjective, not to say tendentious.
I agree, that there is no evidence anywhere that magic or miracles occurs in reality. But there is evidence of events that have occurred for which the people in those days had no explanation and saw those events as miracles, such as the so-called miracles that occurred at the time of the exodus.
The fourteenth day of the first month of the Jewish year, which was the first Passover ever, was he day in which all the first born sons of Egypt were killed. Around that time the volcanic Island of Santorini or Thira as it is also known, which was situated in the Aegean-sea, on the Anatolian plate, which is subject to the forces of the over-riding African Plate that grinds against the Arabian plate in its Northern migration, exploded with many times the force of Krakatoa, which was a volcanic island that exploded in 1883, and that explosion was heard 5,000 kilometres away, and caused a tsunami that killed at least 36,000 people. It has been estimated that when the island of Santorini exploded, 35,000 kilometres of material was blasted out into the stratosphere, and that the explosive force would have created tidal waves of anything up to 130 ft high which would have traveled at speeds of around 150 miles per hour.
A cloud, that turned day into night around 1,500 BC, has been recorded in Chinese history, and would have covered all of north Africa.
The African and Arabian plates intersect in a line that runs through the Red Sea and up the Jordan valley through the Dead Sea which was created hundreds of years before the explosion of Santorini, when all human civilization in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah abruptly ended on the banks of the Dead Sea some 3,700 years ago by a massive explosion, similar to one recorded over 100 years ago in Russia. and in the days of Lot, that area was described, as like unto the garden of the Lord, with abundant fresh water flowing through it.
Evidence of Sodom? Meteor blast cause of biblical destruction, say scientists
Look at the strange phenomenon that was occurring at the time of the Exodus. The cloud that blanketed north Africa and most of Europe, and turned day into a night so dark that a man was not able to recognise his own brother who was standing at arms-length from him. The rain of sulfuric acid that caused so much crop failure and the death of the livestock which were forced to feed on the polluted pastures, the following series of shock waves along the great rift valley and the fractures in the Sini peninsular which is situated on the Arabian plate, the bulging of the earth’s crust beneath the Red Sea which caused a highway to rise from the waters, with its following tremor when it collapsed and tidal waves that rolled in like two walls of water on either side of where the highway had been.
Wisdom of Solomon 19: 7-8, ‘Then was beheld the cloud that shadowed the camp, and dry land rising up out of what was before water, Out of the Red sea an unhindered highway, and a grassy plain rising out of the violent surge.”
Look even where the Israelites camped on the shore of the Red sea, which was smack bang in the middle of a major coal field in Egypt.
The bulging earth rising from the surging sea before them, pressurised gas screaming from the opening fissures creating towering pillars of fire to burn behind them, a strong east wind blew all that night causing the thick smoke to blind the pursuing Egyptians while lighting up the camp of the Israelites on the eastern side of those wild fires.
All these events were caused from pressures that had been built up over tens of thousands of years and would have occurred in their proper time, irrelevant of the Israeli situation. Where the miracle lay, was in the fact that an unseen deity of the future, was able, through his prophet Moses, to organise the events leading up to and including the exodus itself at the precise time in history that this cataclysmic event occurred.
In the book “The Wisdom of Solomon, 16” Solomon has much to say about the days of Moses; he speaks of the strange hails that fell from heaven. Burning balls of frozen gases, some with the ability to burn even in water, some which burned with a heat so intense that they incinerated anything they came in contact with, while other hail, burned with a cold fire through which animals could walk unharmed.
Solomon also speaks of the cloud that covered the Israelites in the desert and of the Manna that fell from heaven during the night. According to Solomon, the heavenly covering was a cloud by day and a host of stars by night, (a night sky ablaze with falling balls of burning hail stones). Then concerning the heavenly Manna, he says, “And that which was not injured by fire, [Burning hailstones] simply warmed by a faint sun beam melted away.
Each morning the desert floor was covered with mounds of a flaky cellulose substance which looked like coriander seed, and would melt and breed worms and stink if left out in the sun, and yet could be preserved when cooked, and tasted like biscuits mixed with the purest of olive oils.
Carbohydrates are any of a group of chemical compounds, including sugars, starches, and cellulose, containing carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen only, [of which there was an ample supply in the cloud from the volcanic explosion] with the ratio of hydrogen to oxygen atoms usually 2 : 1. Perhaps, if our scientists could simulate the same conditions that occurred in the stratosphere when the island of Thira exploded, they may come up with an inexpensive and environmentally friendly source of food production to feed the starving millions on the earth.
The early Egyptian magicians or scientists, were able to duplicate some of the miracles of God as performed by Moses. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our magician/scientists of today were able to perform the more mysterious of God’s miracles as seen in the days of Moses, and provide an abundant and cheap source of food to feed the ever growing population on this earth.
As I have already said, all those things that happened in Egypt at that time, were caused from pressures that had built up over many, many, thousands of years. Where the miracle is found, is in the fact that some invisible entity from some other time dimension, was able to instigate the Exodus, at the precise time that the destructive forces beneath the island of Santorini, were beginning to awake.
Although radiocarbon dating of an olive tree imbedded in lava would appear to indicate a 1600 BCE eruption of Santorini/Thera, that is, if the lava that it was imbedded in was from the actual eruption that devastated the island and its surrounding districts and not from an earlier minor lava flow, there are many archeologists who still believe that the date is contradicted by findings in Egyptian and Theran excavations.
Buried Egyptian and Cypriot pottery found on Thera were dated to a later period than the radiometric dates for the eruption, and, since the
conventional Egyptian chronology has been established by numerous archaeological studies, the exact date of the eruption remains controversial.
Because of all the contradicting evidence, the exact date of the eruption has been difficult to determine. For most of the twentieth century, archaeologists placed it at approximately 1500 BCE, but this date appeared to be too young as radiocarbon dating analysis of that
olive tree which was buried beneath “A” lava flow from the volcano on Santorini, indicate that the particular lava flow in which the olive tree was imbedded, occurred between 1627 BCE and 1600 BCE.
But at
Tell el Dab'a in Egypt, pumice found at this location has been dated to 1540 BCE, closer to the traditionally accepted date of Thera's eruption. This matches the composition of the Thera eruption.
Were the events that occurred around the time of the exodus, really miracles?
