“I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.” - G. K. Chesterton
The possibility or impossibility of a thing is determined by the parameters set for what is possible. Many divine activities described in scripture simply can’t be fit into the laboratory of uniformitarian science, let alone analyzed there. And so when a uniformitarian scientist says something described in scripture couldn’t have happened, he should be told he needs a bigger laboratory.
A minister of the gospel in himself has no authority to forgive sins; but he is authorized authoritatively to proclaim and pronounce to God’s people the forgiveness their God has already proclaimed and pronounced in the gospel.
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
(John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” October 1816)