"Haw haw, you dumb Christians believe in talking snakes, rib women, and cosmic Jewish zombies, tee hee." We've all heard similar rants from atheists, but while they so often behave as if they're intellectually superior to anyone who believes in the supernatural, most of the sarcastic jabs they throw at us show, beyond dispute, that they have absolutely no clue what they're talking about, and they're almost proud of it.
The Bible does indeed contain a number of strange occurrences. But the point of these strange occurrences is that they are strange. They are not, as atheists mock, regular occurrences. "Snakes don't talk". Correct. The Bible does not teach that snakes talk, nor did Jews or Christians expect them to do so. "Virgins don't give birth". Indeed. It seems strange that this is such a common argument in a culture that thinks men can give birth, but you're right, virgins do not give birth, nor do Christians expect them to.
"Dead men don't rise". Again, agreed, but to quote Donnel and Connel from the Lutheran Satire skit with Richard Dawkins, "that's why it was sort of a big deal when Jesus rose from the dead".
See, in Scripture, miracles go by alternative names, such as "wonders", and even "signs". Imagine if resurrection was actually possible. What basis would we have for being Christians? Our Savior rose from the dead? Ok, cool. Bob down the street did that just last week. Karen hasn't shut up about the fact she rose from the dead a month ago. Tom, Dick, and Harry spent 3 days in the morgue before they all stood up and left. So what's so special about this Jesus character?
As it stands, Jesus is special precisely because He can do what can't be done. Arguing against miracles is like arguing against daylight savings. A clock has a normal function, which it can usually perform uninterrupted. But at a certain time of year, it may need to be adjusted, and then adjusted again later on. "Well don't be stupid, clocks don't just jump forwards or backwards an hour". No, they don't. I did it. It's my clock, and it's that time of year, so I took it off the wall, turned a little dial, and then it went back.
The universe is a lot like God's "clock". First of all, it needs someone to make it in the first place. You can't look at a clock and expect it to tell you how it came into existence. As clocks require a super-clocktual (yes, I'm aware that's not a real word) origin, so also does nature require a supernatural origin. So already it is 100% necessary for at least one miracle to have occurred in history. And no, a magical explosion isn't going to be sufficient.
But second, the universe does have a normal operation with which God does not typically interfere. He designed a specific way for procreation, and normally, that's the only way for it to happen. Normally. But just as a man can interfere with his clock, God can, for reasons entirely left to His discretion, interfere with the natural course of events. This is why it's called a "sign". Because only God can do it. Supernatural events require supernatural causes, so when we see a supernatural event, such as a man rising from the dead, we know God is the one who did it.
Of course, a stubborn atheist might say something silly like "that's just invoking the God of the gaps". After all, many things people used to think were supernatural have now been shown to be natural. The first problem with this is that it requires an overly simplistic view of history. While it's true that pagans had an awful lot of gods with a wide range of functions, it is simply inaccurate to say everyone used to attribute every little thunderstorm to the capricious Zeus. Quite the opposite, in fact; most historians acknowledge that Christianity, specifically Reformed Christianity, played a huge part in the rise of science. Loren Eilsley, for example, once wrote "It is surely one of the curious paradoxes of history that science, which professionally has little to do with faith, owes its origins to an act of faith that the universe can be rationally interpreted, and that science today is sustained by that assumption."
We can even see this in Scripture, such as when the Apostles were out at sea, and a storm fell on them, so they woke Jesus up saying "...carest thou not that we perish" (Luke 4:38). These men worshipped God, and believed His very Son to be in the boat with them. Do you imagine they thought God sent the storm? Of course, in one sense, yes. But was the storm miraculous, or just God upholding the normal flow of events?
But the second problem with the whole "God of the gaps" excuse is that it is all but explicitly designed to exclude the correct answer. There are things it would be illogical to just randomly attribute to the supernatural. We don't need gods of war, sewage, and fertility. These are all naturalistic things. The weather? It's just a thing we live with. Sustained by God, yes, but rarely manually controlled by Him. If you plant it, it will grow, you don't need to pay tribute to anyone. Indeed, as Christ told us, God "...maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." (Matthew 5:45).
But can we all agree that dead men don't naturally rise? Yet, an atheist could have followed Jesus from the night of his arrest, right up until the morning He rose again, watched his heartbeat stop, observed as the spear was thrust through Him, hooked Him up to every piece of medical equipment possible to see the exact moment His spirit returned to His body, and still say "ok, I don't know what it is, but there's a perfectly natural explanation for this...". If your philosophy can admit Jesus rose and still not attribute this to the God who raised Him, you need a new philosophy.
Atheistic criticisms of miracles are thus intellectually bankrupt. They are based on nothing more than ignorance, incredulity, and in some cases dishonesty. One might ask how we know they really happened, at which point we begin to examine the reliability of the written record, but if you're going to claim miracles can't happen because they don't typically happen, you might as well say you can't breathe manually, because normally, you don't have to.