My favourite is when people try to claim Biblical literalism AND go the whole "every sunrise is a miracle" route. Kinda feel like you have to pick one or the other.
I'm not sure if miracles would be enough though. If someone turned water to wine that would certainly change my worldview, but isn't necessarily proof a god exists. Just that you can turn water to wine.
If a being descended from the sky, could do impossible miraculous things, seemed to know everything, and said he was god, I think you’d have pretty decent reason to believe in god
This is a sort of comical paradox theology created for itself.
By "well my god is philosophically better than those other gods" escalating things all the way to perfection and omnipotence/omniscience, we're left the following situation:
Because the "real" god is so beyond anything intelligible, then any lesser, but still far beyond human being or phenomenon (Satan, aliens, what have you), could easily trick us into thinking some miracle or another is "the" god's work. We have literally no way to distinguish, trust, or verify!
I mean, a teenager with a few solar-powered gadgets from 2025 could easily convince any stone age community that they are a god. Similarly: what hope would we possibly ever have against some rogue genie just fucking with us?
The historical concept of a miracle is grounded in a very different world view. In Medieval thought miracles are grounded in an understanding of a corrupt, unjust, and arbitrary natural realm. They really can't be transferred to or understood in a modern rationalist context.
Although these are features that are still applied to nature in the modern day, I'm not sure even most Christians really make a similar intelligible divine/unintelligible nature distinction today. It's not compatible with a view of a fully rationally intelligible nature anyway.
Comments
By "well my god is philosophically better than those other gods" escalating things all the way to perfection and omnipotence/omniscience, we're left the following situation: