There is demonstration, and then there’s rejection. What appears in this question is simply a rejection of anything which appears to violate Einstein and Newton.

In which case it amounts to trying to prove a negative, i.e. proving that nothing of the sort could possibly happen, i.e. there is no supra-normal entity capable of manipulating His own creation.

Three accounts available around the turn of the 20th to 21st Centuries attest (mentioning but not including the necessary many thousands of pages of real research) that an exhaustive search of all documents from the the First Century CE makes a strong Occam’s Razor case that either Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected, not to matter the trifling bits about feeding thousands and healing anyone who touched his garments, OR an enormous number of deeply improbably things would have had to align. Three articulate, bright atheists and one Muslim with multiple advanced degrees researched the First Century, including any material that bore on Jewish prophets and historical figures, including  utterly disinterested pagan writers. They dealt with that era’s treatment of women and women’s accounts. All four of these men came to realize that the only respectable conclusion was that Jesus came for the purpose he said he came for.

One who axiomatically denies the possibility of a supra-normal (divine) Being acting on this world is also one who, on faith alone, accepts a cascade of illogical coincidences and improbable events and non-events. An agnostic can “logically” say “I don’t know” but for an atheist to maintain his/her position requires an actual religious belief, “against all textual evidence.”

Seeking Allah Finding Jesus; Nabil Q’reshi

Cold Case Christianity; J. Warner Wallace

The Case for Christ; Lee Strobel

How well do children understand combustion engines? The Christian Bible, 66 books if you’re Protestant and more if you’re Catholic, contains such riches that constant reading doesn’t exhaust it. So to ‘fully understand’ requires some qualification.

In fact the final book, the Revelation, is not comprehensible in any good sense. Some read it in a linear fashion, such that what the middle chapter says is in fact the middle of its message. Others experience it as going over the same material multiple times, each from a different perspective, i.e. it’s written as a group of concentric circles. Note that in Scripture just about every number that appears carries a symbolic meaning with it. There are sects (Jehovah’s Witnesses, notably) which read some of this symbolic language as a literal counting-up of souls to enter ethereal heaven, with all other saved souls relegated to live on “the new earth.” They may even be right, but I’m not ready to adopt their position.

One point to ponder is that in the Gospels Jesus tells his disciples to let the children interrupt their elders, i.e. to cluster around Him. He told them to let the little children come to Him, because any soul not approaching Him in that same manner (you can infer wholesale trust and peace, no worrying about nits and conditions) can’t really approach Him at all.

Hope this reflects well on the question.

Current studies of rate of genetic drift (how quickly non-essential DNA changes occur) suggest that, studying mitochondrial DNA, the funnel’s narrow end, i.e. one copy, was 225 to 250 thousand years ago. Eve, in other words. That’s around the same time that all major mammalian species went through a ‘survival funnel’ or in other words came close to dying out. Must have been a VERY hard time all around.

For a man’s Y chromosome, a small collection exists in a remote part of Africa which looks 400 thousand years old, but everywhere else the funnel’s narrow end happened 75 thousand years ago, give or take a few. In short, Adam.

Genesis 1 reads much more like liturgy than history or science. In fact Genesis 2 contains, if you look closely, an alternate liturgy with fewer days and a different sequence. As a Christian, I read Genesis 1:3 “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’” as the one accurate piece of history / science, i.e. that He said so 13.8 billion years ago. The first few verses of the Gospel of John lead to the idea that Jesus was that Word, who made all things that were made, i.e. Jesus held the active role in the Godhead.

Since then the knowable universe has unfolded into two hundred sextillion stars (a 2 followed by twenty-three 0’s) so any effort to cram His self-revelation, enshrine His own private OED, into a handful of verses given to his Chosen People several thousand years ago, and ditto any effort to cram the creation of the vast universe into Day One six thousand years ago, is pitiable and insulting.

God is patient and merciful, so trying to boil Him down to the constraints of His original Deed of Title in Genesis is what it is. We are humans and our actions are always imperfect. For all your committed Young Earth and Creation Science acquaintances, just let them be; they’re not capable of harming God. Think of it this way, in fact – Jesus wants every believer to come to Him with a child’s trust, and they at least have that. Now – do you or I? Huh?

God doesn’t prevent a malicious or unfortunate etc. act or event. But His promise is that He will bring something good out of it for those who love him. Might a Christian die in a horrible way? The ‘good’ is that the transition to immortality, however rough it may be, is a transition to eternal joy where all tears are wiped away. Might a Christian suffer great damage yet live through it? Eventually a hindsight will reveal that the individual is, well, blessed in an unexpected way.

Just in the general case, very often a major loss (limb, spine, sight, etc.) drives one to a very sad place, but within about three years that person’s “happy-stat” has returned to where it was before. General view of life, optimism toward the future, enjoying the ‘now’ may have been bad before – they return to no worse than that. Or they were all rocket high – and get there again. God built us to absorb those transitions, if you will. And in fact you will find people who, once the adjustment completes, swear they wouldn’t go back to ‘before’ even if they had the choice.

Blessings are from God – it’s the only way He intervenes, as far as I can tell. On one specific occasion he hardened a heart (Pharaoh in Egypt, ten plagues and TEN hardenings of the heart afterward.) But he also lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust.

There’s no yardstick by which one measures karma in the Christian universe, except one. That is Christ on the cross, where He took all our sins onto himself, suffered the deepest possible kind of ostracism, i.e. being cast out from all that is Holy, and died there. He washed away our sins, so that our ‘consequence’ or ‘karma’ would not fall on us. Instead we are cleansed by laying our pride and nature at Jesus’ feet, exchanging a broken and contrite heart for Ultimate forgiveness. The ‘broken and contrite heart’ is the flip side of ‘peace that passes all understanding.’ One coin, two sides.

May that blessing find its way to you!

God created man, but He placed into man the ability to realize that there has to be a God. Initial attempts to explain a mysterious, arbitrary, and often dangerous world generated notions of divine causors.

God revealed Himself to a “chosen nation/tribe/race” in the context of an extensive Semitic culture that contained a thousand-year-old version of Creation; we know of this as the Gilgamesh Epic. Some of the Jewish Pentateuch consists of a re-write of that. The critical differences are that God reveals himself as tolerant (to a point) of human frailty, a tender and patient (to a point) nurturer of His chosen people, and promises of a Savior.

Bits of those promises pop up all over the Jewish Scriptures (what Christians call the ‘Old Testament.’) In God’s own time the part of the trinity we refer to as “The Word” took human flesh, taught us that love is the correct way to find and appreciate both God and His creations, then died in our place on the cross.

This idea is illustrated well in a DVD called “Star of Bethlehem.” Of course there are folks who want to deny what it contains – judge for yourself. For me, there is such a sweeping connection of Scripture and astronomy, and hold your hats astrology (see Job, where God names the constellations) that the story sweeps all doubt away. Better to believe without seeing, but here you can actually see it.

In short, some say “reason defeats belief” – when in fact that’s the other way around. Belief that there can be no divinity defeats reason.

It’s trivial, hence likely very wrong, to blanket every word of Scripture as though God meant it to be exactly so and forever pertinent. Broad example – Genesis 1 is liturgy not history (note the repetitive format and the elevated language) especially since Genesis 2 contains an alternative liturgy consisting of four days not six, and in a slightly different order.

Yet God did say “Let there be light” – 13.8 billion years ago. Following which the Word (see the first few verses of John 1) made all things that were made. So far as we can tell, that includes two hundred sextillion stars (a two followed by 23 zeroes) – one of which owns the planet that evolved homo sapiens. And after spending four point six billion years to get this far, on exactly the Jewish New Year of 3 BCE the skies come alive with signs and conjunctions (cf The Star of Bethlehem, a DVD available on the web.) This is a good candidate for the date that an angel tells Mary that she will bear the Messiah. Talk about precision, eh? Not to mention that the likeliest candidate for that Star which stood over Bethlehem; that likely date is 25 December of 2 BCE. God’s sense of humor sweeps me away. At least, I hope that’s His idea of a good chuckle.

Forgive the digression – bottom line God reveals Himself to us in myriad ways, and allows humans to be who they are all the way through. Paul on at least one occasion confesses that a particular command is from him not from God (if I recall correctly, the urge not to marry if you can manage your own domain, i.e. contain your lust) – so I infer that more culturally derived points which Paul included in his letters amounted to a human being intermingling his own notions with the vast, subtle understanding of all the Jewish Scriptures. And all the while, without intending to do so, he was laying down large parts of the Christian Canon.

Discern! All who read the Word must do so with care and close attention. So when something human leaps out, have the courage to accept that this may be the occasional peanut in the ice cream. Rather than equate this to the “Ten commandments – choose your fave eight!” school of theology, realize that God used men to convey his revelations. Not just the Revelation of John – all of the Torah, the Poetry, the History, and the Prophets that comprise the Jewish scripture bore the textual and conversational fingerprints of humans. Trying to hog-tie Genesis into being a scientific truth insults a God Who remains wholly beyond our understanding and Whose timing, methods, and manner of revealing Himself are outside our ability to critique.

In short, don’t count the bathwater as equal to the baby. Jesus came, revealed His purpose, endured bodily death on the cross, resurrected, and spoke again to His disciples before ascending into heaven. That’s the baby.

Or as Paul says in one of his letters, agreement in Christ is essential, other details less so, and charity is required in all things among Christians.

On a more gradual scale the real drama began about two million years ago. The ingredients for this “perfect storm” scenario begin with a forest/open landscape that made it optimal to spend part of the time on the ground foraging. Once the early homo species in that area had specialized for a life less and less dependent on the safety of trees, i.e. their feet, legs, and pelvis began to do a better job of supporting weight while in an upright stance, they found the trees too limiting.

THEN the weather changed, a lot. Every couple of hundred thousand years “the rules changed” and the ability to work things out in the evolutionary equivalent of real time rather than rely on instinct encouraged growth in brain size.

After long series of those two hundred thousand year shakeups,  HSS had the ability to travel on two legs while using hands/arms to hold onto things like weapons, food stores, children.

And while the wildebeest migrates thousands of miles back and forth annually, just about every other species turned out to be vulnerable to being run down. HSS wasn’t terribly fast, but could go at a decent clip for a LONG distance. And with a larger brain, homo became a top-tier predator as well as scrounger and omnivore.

By the time modern HSS survived one last horrible weather period  – about two hundred thousand years ago most large species came very close to dying out – things like ice and altitude had become quaint, interesting problems to solve. Where the air is thin, the local HSS population, having lived there for a hundred centuries or so, adapted to that. Likewise where the summer itself is a brief ice-free interlude, that HSS population evolved a couple of metabolic tricks for that. The folks who live on the mile-high plateaus in the middle of the African continent have small hands and feet – which are optimal for both conserving body heat and for long distance running. Kenyans do really well at marathons, don’t they?

Optimizing in small ways over some handfuls of tens of centuries isn’t that big a deal. And to the folks who say we’re about to undo a lot survival genes by making the world so user-friendly via cars and air conditioning, baby don’t look back, because evolution is gaining on you! Lots of things are making us die sooner, so there is both a fabulous chance for good genes to crop up that offset modern chemical etc. stressors,  and a fabulous chance for them to spread.

Faith is of the heart. Religion, if you will, in that it is organized, is more like a club with rules – these are my own working definitions, at any rate.

Supposing these definitions have merit, recall that forced conversion to a religion has been documented throughout history. Between the fourteenth and twentieth Centuries CE the Catholic Church did its best to drive out ‘false’ beliefs e.g. Judaism. Currently China is doing what it can to drive out Christianity.

The Muslim faith actually makes all other faiths illegal, and between its inception and its maximum extent it spread itself by military conquest.

Were the many spreadings of a religion economic and political more than religious? To answer that, do we need to distinguish between faith and a club with rules?

One misfortune of the Spanish just after driving the last Muslims off their peninsula near the end of the fifteenth Century was to turn on the Jews and drive them away also. But, alas, Jews were the engine of commerce in that they facilitated the flow of money. They would lend it out. Without Jewish participation in national commerce, Spain withered. Plundering the New World kept Spain afloat, but they blew it all on the great Armada of 1588. After that escapade, Spain faded from the front ranks of commerce, influence, etc.

It took until 1820 for the Mexican government to become independent of Spain. During the second decade of the 19th Century Simon Bolivar helped the Spanish colony/nations of South America divorce the Spanish Government. So it took a while for Spain to fall flat; but fall it did, arguably due to expelling the Jews.

In other words actions taken at the level of nations which have primarily doctrinal underpinnings bring an unreliable “bottom line.” Beware of the Law of Unintended Consequences. The 21st Century world has replaced faith with science, and as a consequence forced conversion into or out of any given faith system has lost its economic importance hence just doesn’t happen, and we’ll see whether the religious hold-outs who conflate science with perversion of their faith systems manage to drive their nations onto similar shoals.

Unless you’re akin to Boko Haram, and feel that your religion is the primary rule of public action as a system of laws.

One thing that is supposed to be a Christian attribute is humility. So when someone makes it clear that he or she isn’t Christian, yes at first glance it’s irritating to have that person pose as an expert on how Christians should act.

On the other side of the coin, Christians are folks who tell themselves the story of the Good Samaritan. In common parlance that would be the Good Illegal Alien in the role of the guy who helped a person who had been robbed by thieves, wounded and left beside the road. A traveling salesman and a rabbi – read minister or priest – both detoured around him before a foreigner (Samaria was way the wrong side of the tracks in those days, so the Samaritan would be about the same as an ‘illegal alien’ today) tended to his injuries, schlepped him to the nearest Holiday Inn and paid his room and board a week ahead.

So when a professed Christian gets upset about the influx of illegal aliens, don’t call that person names, just ask for a rendition of the Good Samaritan parable, but using “illegal alien” in place of “Samaritan.” Let the person digest it later, in peace and quiet. Honey wins friends quicker than vinegar, so keep your words sweet and let the misguided Christian do his or her own math.

Both of you will wind up happier when name-calling and shaming aren’t obvious, and you’ll likely have a far greater impact on the world than you would by throwing righteous disgust as the first punch.

This one supports at least a sloppy rationalization, to wit:

Shakespeare in English and Luther in German left extensive writings which had so many first-hand readers, decade by decade then century by century, that they acted as a kind of “sea anchor” – a drag that impedes drift. We need help really ‘getting’ Shakespeare, and doubtless Luther’s 16th-Century German is a chore to modern Germans, but both authors are still read by laymen and without translation.

So, that being the case, a) we know that 16th Century English sounded very different from what Australians, British, Americans, etc. etc. speak today. The accents differ, but we understand each other fairly well.

Second, successive generations of newscasters speaking to the nation every evening at 5:00 or 5:30 p.m. etc. also retard otherwise rapid shifting in the national diction and accent.

That being the case, the answer depends on just how much of the time the average citizen-on-the-street accesses recordings that are older than, say, a 1930’s movie reel.

I don’t think the Nightly News “sea anchor” effect will be all that much greater than the Bard and the Protestant have already been.