The difference is that sensible Christians do not take the miraculous as a rule to interpret nature. Merely maintaining that Christ rose from the dead on the third day does not by itself prove that anyone else will.
Seizing upon one of a number of possible interpretations of Scripture as the necessarily correct one and bending science and the observations of the senses in an attempt to support the infallibility of that intepretation is what brings the ridicule on Christians in general about which St. Augustine was writing.
What’s in the background here, not often directly recognised, is the importance of the notion of the perspicuity of Scripture to “Bible Alone” Protestants. If the Bible requires interpretation, that implies the necessity of teaching authority to preserve the correct interpretation.
Many Protestants flee from this like hellfire, so they instead prefer to paint themselves into a literalist exegesis that winds up painting God’s universe as a clever deception, ingeniously designed to fool observers who haven’t been graced with the literalist interpretation of Genesis, that Creation is billions of years old.
“The difference is that sensible Christians do not take the miraculous as a rule to interpret nature.”
What then of the initial creation? The ex nihilo or singularity?
If Christians MUST believe that God created the universe in a miraculous nature (putting them at risk of ridicule) then why the onus on miraculous biological genesis?
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“Merely maintaining that Christ rose from the dead on the third day does not by itself prove that anyone else will.”
“Merely maintaining that Christ rose from the dead” puts Christian belief squarely outside of the realms of modern science.