The word, "miracle" means a lot of different things to different people. Everyone has heard of stories of amazing things happening to people, or they have experienced amazing things themselves. People attribute miracles to events such as escaping a car accident, healing from cancer, winning a game, or even being rescued from a mine.
If I'm going to argue about the existence of miracles, I need to first define what I am considering to be a "miracle". The definition is broad, and vague. It's almost as hard to define the term "miracle" as it is to define what "god" is.
Meriam-Webster defines a miracle as:
1: an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs
2: an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment
3Christian Science : a divinely natural phenomenon experienced humanly as the fulfillment of spiritual law
I don't find any of these definitions particularly useful for means of argument, especially number 2. If these are your definitions, I would concede that extremely unusual events and accomplishments occur all the time (particularly during NFL games). Yet, I would not accept a Hail Mary play as proof of god's existence.
For my purposes I would have to define a miracle as: An event or occurrence that either the act of and/or end result defies the laws of nature and is presumably a deliberate act of god's will. Admittedly this definition has some flaws, but it allows for your partings of Red Seas and Waters into Wines, and discounts lottery winners and Lake Placid hockey games.
Why am I excluding statistical anomalies such as extremely unlikely scenarios that happen? The universe is constantly playing "games" of chance. Let's take the example of someone winning the lottery: Statistically speaking, your chances are very very VERY low that you'll win the lottery. Yet out of thousands of people playing every day, someone will win. Given that it will happen to someone, it's not a miracle that someone does. Looking at a lottery winner as being a miracle is discounting all the people who played and didn't win. Surviving a car crash, or a terrible disease is very similar in that it happens to thousands of people every day, even though chances may be slim that someone would survive, people will. Looking at one person surviving as being a miracle is discounting all of the times people in that situation don't survive.
Just like I can only accept prophecies that fall within certain parameters as proof, I must put certain parameters on a miracle if I consider it to be proof. This doesn't mean that things that don't fall into these parameters aren't necessarily miracles, but it does mean they can't be taken as proof of the supernatural.
A: As my definition states: It must be an event where the act of occurring, or the occurrence itself must defy the laws of nature. Water doesn't randomly turn into wine, people don't come back from the dead, seas don't part on command.
This section specifically is problematic, because it butts heads with the, "God of the Gaps" fallacy. Just because we don't understand how something happens, it is not proof of god's existence. To me, this really dooms just about every miracle from the get-go. If someone showed me an example of something defying the laws of nature, I would take it that we don't understand the laws of nature as well as we should. I would not see the event itself as being a miracle. As science is, the more we learn, the more we realize we don't know. This doesn't mean that there are more and more miracles happening. It means we don't have answers to all of the questions. I talked about this in Section 8 of my very first post on this blog.
B: Given that the miracle defies the laws of nature, it must be verifiable to be truly defying the laws of nature. Arthur C. Clarke put it well: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A thousand years ago, a person would have considered a metal box with wheels moving on it's own as a miracle. Yet today, we see cars everywhere, and there is a rational explanation for them.
It should go without saying that the miracle should occur legitimately and not through the use of deception. Stage magicians and con-artists do the seemingly impossible every day, but "trickery" is not a miracle. Again, this area becomes problematic, because even scientists are susceptible to deception. Just because something appears to be defying the laws of nature, it doesn't mean it is, even if it can't be proven.
C. The miracle must have actually happened, and be verifiable that it happened. Two thousand year old texts are not proof of any miracles. The hearsay of people written thousands of years ago is only proof that people had these stories back then. People have a quirky ability to distort what they see as reality. We turn common house squeaks into ghosts and lucky guesses into psychic premonitions. We tell "fish tales" and create urban legends. Our memory gets distorted and we are susceptible to suggestion. There are things such as mass hysteria and mass hypnosis. People's testimony, however earnest, is simply unreliable as proof. For a miracle to be considered, there must be actual tangible proof that it happened, and that it happened the way that it is said to have happened.
D. To give credit to my friend Aaron, he made a good point in that the miracle should have some meaning behind it. I don't necessarily think this is an important precursor to establishing the existence of the supernatural, but I do think it's an important precursor to establishing the link between the miracle and god. Supernatural miracles could possibly exist and there still be no god behind it. I think once an unnatural event occurs, that defies the laws of nature, and is verified to happen, the message behind such an event is the compelling evidence that would tie it to being god's will.
As it stands right now, I have yet to come up with any examples of miracles that I think fulfill this category as proof of god's existence. Given my arguments, I see it being highly unlikely that I would consider any given event as being miraculous, but I'm open to discussions about it. I'm sure that this will stir up some debate, and I'm looking forward to hearing what you all have to say!
-Mike
One area of evidence for miracles might be found in statistical anomalies. If faithful Christians with cancer were found to have much higher survival rate than atheists, that would be an important finding, and one that might be considered evidence of legitimate miracles. Perhaps the Christians would be surviving cancer via understood mechanisms, but the statistics would indicate that something was going on.
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