2. Are there evidences of biblical miracles?

Answers:

As a physics professor, my answer is that the dougnut-shaped universe is either EXTREMELY speculative or, more likely just plain wrong.  This is one of those theories people throw around because they are trying to refute the idea of a created universe.  It is ad hoc and can be dismissed as not worth considering.

There is plenty of evidence of miracles, but the evidence is not scientific, obviously.  Miracles are one-off events and are not repeatable, so science is no help there (except to help decide what event would, indeed, be a miracle).  Evidence of miracles is found in the gospels.  Jesus, the greatest person who ever lived, did unquestionable miracles, such as raising Lazarus from the dead, in front of hundreds of people.  That Jesus was a worker of signs and miracles was common knowledge in his day, as evidenced by the Babylonian Talmud, a Jewish writing, trying to explain away the miracles of Jesus.  These miracles were done in front of literally thousands of people, including skeptics, critics and enemies, but no one in Jesus’ time questioned that he was in fact doing miracles.  The miracle of the empty tomb speaks for itself.  Jesus was definitely killed, and he was definitely alive again afterward.

There are a couple of Old Testament miracles with supportive evidence.  There is the death of an entire army of Sennacherib, as recorded in Isaiah 37 and 2 Kings 20.  This is supported by the Sennacherib cylinder which reports the Assyrian king’s massive army conquering all of Judah except for Jerusalem, surrounding the city, putting Hezekiah in the city “like a bird in a cage.”  The story ends there, which is best explained by the miraculous ending to the seige.   And there are the five cities in the plain around the Dead Sea, which archaeologists have discovered were all destroyed around 2100 BC, and never reoccupied.  Here we have indirect evidence of miracles happening.

Remember, evidence for miracles in the past can only be indirect.  We cannot expect scientific evidence.  The best we can hope for is reports of miracles, and other corroborative evidence, making it more believable that the miracle actually happened than that it did not.  We cannot “prove” that miracles happened in the past.  But… Such corroborative material exists in a couple of Old Testament miracles, but especially with the miracles of Jesus.

John Oakes