SR: So we do not exist as a result of the ordinary, natural behavior of dirt, mixing with lightening and water and whatever else the "primordial soup" is supposed to have contained, all running along their natural, predictable path of being.
TB: Again, "natural" and "predictable" to whom? You? Predictable to you. Yes, really. Try this. If you point a loaded .45 at center mass of some innocent person and pull the trigger three or four times, what will happen? Is that really so hard for you to predict? No, it's very deterministic. And it's that very determinism which allows you to form a moral judgment about whether you should do it in the first place. Many other things are presumed reliable in your life (and mine and everybody else's). You get in your car and drive to work. A million things had to work predictably for that to happen. Someone you love gets a terminal illness. They will die. And we all get old and die anyway. Very predictable. So I don't know what you mean by "predictable to whom." Natural things are natural because they are predictable as secondary causes to most any rational mind. Once you know the rules, you can tell what will happen.
WHom do you think made those things "natural" and "predictable?"
Of course God made them that way, but that's the way they are now, and if God intervenes on those things after they've already run for a while on their own, then what's wrong with that? The whole point of modern creationist study is to show that natural processes work within predictable limits, and that no matter how far back you run the clock, those processes, by themselves, do not explain our current state, that necessarily God must have intervened in His own created order as a way of giving us a clue it was really Him doing it, and not just some giant, soulless machine running it's course.
So He made these things predictable for us, for our benefit, so we would understand it was Him speaking when a true miracle happens. Look at the time Jesus was with His disciples on the boat and it was being battered by the weather. He simply says, "Peace, be still," and what happens? Even the winds and the waves obey Him. But what happened to the disciples? They start to get it. Jesus is no ordinary prophet. He's way past that. He's able to act in nature with the full, supernatural authority of the Creator Himself.
Bottom line, it is God who has established this contrast between nature and supernature, not me. We just have to decide whether we want to believe it when He tells us He made us from dirt. I don't know. Is that just too big a miracle for some to believe? If, as you rightly say, He can make the whole universe out of nothing, why then is He suddenly NOT able to make us straight from dirt if He wants to, and then tell us about it in a book?
Peace,
SR
Obviously, the significant difference between man and other animals is his soul. Otherwise, we share enough of the same biological characteristics to be included as mammals. It is the appearance of that soul that would appear to be the defining miracle of humanity, while the biological development of our corporeal selves seems plainly to have occurred in the same manner as that of the other animals.