that's what it says in the Bible

You can't use the Bible as a reference to prove the validity of the Bible.

I'm quite aware of that, thank you. I wasn't trying to prove the validity of the Bible, and I apologize if my command of language is so poor that you were led to infer that from my words -- perhaps you could show me what the problem was so that I don't make the same mistake again? Peter was making a suggestion for how things are based on a possibility. I offered a different suggestion for how things are.

Please demonstrate, using the technology of 2000 years ago, how a virgin woman can naturally become pregnant without having sex.

I was going to add, but left out for the sake of not being overly offensive, ``or falsehoods''.

Oh, don't worry about that being offensive to me. I'm quite aware that the Bible has been meddled with by less than divinely inspired humans. I'm curious though, how do you purport to demonstrate that the story and circumstances surrounding Jesus' conception is irrefutably a falsehood?

we have two choices:

There are more choices than those two. In fact, the only mutually exclusive pieces of those two choices you provide are the ``there is no/a god'' parts.

Yes. I'm sure that if you were to go count the number of words is my previous post that you'd find the number grievously too few to enumerate all the intricate possibilites. I just tried to boil it down into the two basic options that dealt with Peter's possibilty and my alternate possibility.

You mean to tell me that this is all just a huge coincidence, despite the statistical probability of that ever occuring? Yeah, right -- just the odds of winning the lottery are astronomical."

Yet people win the lottery all the time. Just because it's unlikely doesn't mean that it can't be.[emphasis mine]

So remind me again why you argue so vociferously against the possibility of a god, that he has a direct hand in things, etc, etc?

For a lot of people, it's far simpler to pick option 2

It's also a lot simpler to assume that one plus one equals three than to go through the immensely complicated mathematics to prove that it, in fact, equals two. But just because it's simpler doesn't make it so.

<pedantic>
Actually, it's simpler to stick with the convention of 1 + 1 = 2 -- it's commonly accepted knowledge.
</pedantic>
Aside from that, the difficulty I see in your parallel is that, whereas 1+1=2 can be proven through complicated maths, no matter how complicated things get, you cannot prove either of option 1 or option 2.

Particularly if they also have some sort of personal experience which they *can't* explain via option 1

Example? I'd bet that it's because they'd rather attribute it to option 2.

Okay, an example. My mom, brother and I were driving down from Alberta to my grandparents' house in Missouri. My mother, who gets lost very, very easily, had some written directions, but no map. It had been so long since my mom had been there that for all intents and purposes, you could say she'd never been there before. My brother and I had never been there before, and I think we were both under the age of 10 when this happened. Well, my mother got lost, and we were out in the middle of nowhere (my grandparents lived on a farm). This was also long before the common existance of cell phones. My mom is rather religious, so she had us all pray for help in finding where we were going. About 5 minutes later, my brother, who had not read any of the directions, and who had no better an idea where we were than the rest of us, piped up and said "You need to turn right, here." Of course, that was the road my grandparents lived on. When my mom asked my brother how he knew where to turn, he said "God told me."

I have not been able to think of any other more plausible explanation for that. Could it have been a guess? Sure. But then my brother would have been lying when he answered my mom, and that's completely out of character for him, even at that age. Furthermore, it wasn't an "I think you should turn here," it was "you need to turn here." I don't think it's a case of preferring to attribute this to option 2, so much as it's a case of I can't figure out how I can fit this into option 1, because to do so would require ignoring part of the evidence.

Does that help?