DL has a question concerning the apparent absence of Old Testament miracles:
I would like to say that I have been reading your blog for over half a year, maybe a little bit longer now. You write about a lot stuff that I have thought for years, it has just given me the evidence and confidence to speak my opinions besides just sitting quietly by while people say stuff I don’t really agree with.
The point of this email is to ask your opinion on a problem I came across during a debate I was having with a friend over the existence of God. This debate has been going on for a while and slowly the tides is turning from him controlling the debate to about a mutual battlefield. The idea of God being omniderigent really put a cap over some of his arguments.
Things were going ok until I was asked the question of “Why doesn’t God do any of the big miracles that he did in the bible today?” What he meant by this is the parting of the Red Sea, destroying a city with fire, and raising people from the dead. I was unable to come up with a completely logical solution for this question. I done some research on apologetic websites on why God would do this and the answers are a little unsatisfactory and doesn’t really answer the question in a logical way.
I would think the answer is fairly obvious. First, God clearly does miracles for specific reasons. Consider the repeated response of the Israeli people to His miracles; they kept returning to their false idols and their evil ways, and rejected Him for an earthly king. Why would it surprise anyone if He stopped bothering to intervene on their behalf when they repeatedly turned their backs on Him after witnessing them? Jesus himself had the people turn on him despite his miracles and even pointed out that people would not believe regardless of what they had seen with their own eyes.
Second, what would the point of any such divine miracles be? The Bible makes it clear that there will those who believe without seeing, and Richard Dawkins makes it clear that even if God Himself appears and tells him that he is wrong about His existence, he will not believe.
When X doesn’t happen, the correct question is not “why did X not happen?” but “why does X happen and is there reason to have expected it to happen in the first place?”