We don't know any of that.


Well, that's what it says in the Bible. Given that the argument is over Christian theology, I'm just starting from the Christian concept of God. If you aren't going to do that, then there's no point in arguing, because you haven't agreed on what you're arguing about yet.

None of those examples can be demonstrated to be anything more than natural occurrence.


Please demonstrate, using the technology of 2000 years ago, how a virgin woman can naturally become pregnant without having sex.

It's circular logic.


Of course it is. No one ever said religion was logical.

The way I look at it is that we have two choices:

1) There is no god, and everything (quigs/laws/mathematics/evolution/etc.) essentially boils down to a long past random happenstance and that the entropy of the system has settled to a point where those random happenstances no longer occur (or, in the case of things like evolution, occur much less frequently), leaving us with an essentially fixed system. Science is the discovery of the state of the current entropy.

or

2) There is a god, and long time ago he cooked up a game for himself that had some really complex rules that he's been following (more or less -- does God cheat at Solitaire?) since then. Science is the discovery of those rules.

I don't find either option to be any more or less plausible than the other. At some point, they both devolve to what I consider "the fantastical". It's either
    "you mean to tell me that there's some magical being that created this? Yeah, right."
or
    "You mean to tell me that this is all just a huge coincidence, despite the statistical probability of that ever occuring? Yeah, right -- just the odds of winning the lottery are astronomical."
Now, since we'll never really know (i.e. be able to demonstrably prove) the answer to whether we exist under option 1 or option 2, all we can do is pick one and go with it until proven wrong. In the face of multiple theories, both of which explain the observed facts, pick the simpler one until you get more evidence (remember our good friend Occam?). For a lot of people, it's far simpler to pick option 2. (Edit: Particularly if they also have some sort of personal experience which they *can't* explain via option 1.)

Pick one, live and let live.