Sure, I can agree with that. I have no problem agreeing with the term "miracle" when used in that sense. Now, if you were trying to get me to agree to some sort of theological type miracle I'd be much less likely to agree...
Other than being non-existent?
Just how unlikely is it? Some---most notably Frank Drake---have calculated that, given the billions upon billions of stars in the universe, there should be thousands of planets with civilizations as advanced as ours, and with many, many thousands of planets with species comparable to us who have not achieved our degree of technological sophistication.
The greatest act God through the natural:
We understand this process quite well. No deity is needed. The matter that we know and love condensed out of the high temperature bath that existed in our early universe, a bath that came about from the decay of the field that drove inflation. Where inflation came from we don't yet know (we don't even know much about what inflation was), but that doesn't mean that it came from nothing.
Though we don't yet know that much about the formation of life, it certainly didn't come out of nothing. It came out of the soup of organic molecules that existed on the early Earth (and we can be certain that they did exist on the early Earth, because we see the same molecules that would have been necessary for the formation of life on comets).
To say god works "through" the natural isn't really saying anything at all. If what happened is natural, it follows laws and happens the way it happens. For god to do something himself, means he'd have to break the laws, otherwise he isn't really doing anything, it's just nature acting as it would. God working through nature is more a deistic, maybe even pantheistic view.
Matter always existed, the first law of thermodynamics confirms this.
I'm interested in reading stuff written for the layman on this. Have any good links?
