All miracles are violations of what ordinarily happens. Here are four conceptions of the idea of what gets violated. Each of them have successively created a more symbolic or metaphorical idea of miracle and so can be thought as markers in the evolution from supernatural religion to a religion which is only moral rather than factual. Looking at the meanings of miracles reveals the ways in which religion can sidestep or excuse its claims without abandoning a sense that miracles are somehow real.
The most usual sense of miracle is that the laws of nature are violated. The Gospels are full of miracles, though they mainly concern healing the sick, which is often associated with charlatans who can fake a cure, as when someone can raise the dead who may not really have been dead or cure a leper who just got a little better or thought so. Other miracles include providing enough food for a group, which simply means that food arrived or walking on water, which as the joke goes, can happen if you walk on the rocks. It would be something if Jesus provided food for all those who were hungry or were seen as emerging from the tomb. But that would be to miss the idea that miracles are limited, illustrations of power rather than transformative ones that changed mankind. In that case Jesus telling the people to throw the first stone at the adulteress is no longer a miracle, a spectacular but singular intervention, but a change in moral life which replaces justice with compassion, and works by changing people’s lives, which is momentous but doesn’t violate nature. Similarly, it would not be a miracle if Jesus provided food to all who were hungry because that would not be a special occasion but a resolution that it is abhorrent for people to be in need and so a token of the transformation that will take place in society when Jesus takes over but which is only one very neon miraculous reading of the Jesus message. Many Christians cling to the miraculous over the transformative as when one Catholic read the story of Chanukah as mainly about how long the oil lasted rather than a celebration of a political upheaval, which may or may not be praiseworthy but is not centrally a miracle. Catholics are long on miracles because they want to see the intervention of the supernatural in the actual, and so see the appearance of Mary at Lourdes as predicting what will happen rather than mourning the devastation of the First World War. Every Catholic Mass, anywhere in the world, does something miraculous, transforming wine into blood and wafers into flesh. The preservation of that ritual was regarded as the purpose of the Church, at least until Vatican II, when it posited its new purpose as unifying humanity in mutual respect and caring, which is indeed transformative even if not yet achieved.
Miracles in the Old Testament are harder to come by in that the great events have to do with changing people’s minds and so that only something of a miracle, the stellar example being Noah who somehow gets in his head to build an ark and only his children will follow his instructions. Putting aside Daniel in the lion’s den, a late and Hellenistic addition, the miracles in Exodus are suspicious because the plagues are natural events that are suspiciously useful to the Israelite cause and that the death of the first born, by both sides, may have been a tactic of warfare and so the true miracle is the parting of the Red Sea which is remarkable because it is both spectacular and singular. The Burning Bush isn’t much, given that there must have been many burning bushes and is just an incarnation of the divine, as can be imagined in trees and stones and mountains. The other major miracle in the Old Testament is Joshua keeping the Sun from setting so that his army could complete his victory. Skeptics will say that the claim is foolish because we know that stopping the sun would disjoint the entire gravitational system and so destroy the solar system, but that is to miss the point in that a real God could stop it without suspending the rules of physics because a miracle only suspends a particular effect not natural law, any more than curing a leper would require doing violence to the nature of how germs work. A miracle is its consequence not its explanation.
There is a very different kind of miracle that does not suspend nature but just glorifies it, as happens when one is amazed at the beauty of a sunset or the petals of a flower. These are tributes to God and allow wonderful things to exist in creation, even to the clever articulation of the pancreas and the intestine. Who else but god could have created that exquisite and complicated interconnection? Now, this affirmation strikes a skeptical mind as superficial. First of all, what is wonderful is what we find familiar. A sunset strikes people as beautiful because that is what happens whereby in another solar system or on another planet there would be a different collection of figures and colors to see and that might seem very aesthetic to the minds of their eyes. Second, causes and consequences have to be disregarded so that the sunset is, as I take it, the result of air pollution, and so predicts bad things. Third, what seems beautiful are only the things one regards as beautiful, disregarding the creatures of the deep that are very different from mammals or even dinosaurs, creatures hardly beautiful even if they are ones who peacefully graze on the flora. And what of the lack of the articulation of human bodies. There are children who die of cancer and adults who die of war and starvation. Is it always someone other than God's fault? There is just a logical flaw in giving hosanna to the beauties of nature. When people of belief say that it is a miracle that the earth survives because if it were a little bit farther from the sun it would freeze and be dead and if a bit closer in it would be fried to a crisp and so something had to put it thee just right, the answer is that indeed it might be too cold or too hot and so the world wouldn’t support life. Just the breaks. Life is sustained because it meets the right parameters not made to meet the parameters. The universe is cold-hearted.
But people persist in getting the logic wrong because it is so satisfying to treat some of what happens as so wonderful. This tendency may very well be one of the guiding experiences of religious experience, whereby a person is intoxicated with what are selected as its splendors, the entire universe suffused with the grandness of the design, whether that because it creates physical intricacy so gyroscopes can turn, or serenity and peace of mind, or social law and order, whatever it pleases to make life seen as perfected. There might be a law of aesthetics whereby it might be possible to see why some sunsets in some world are beautiful perhaps because of a balance of components, while other sunsets are ugly, as are some animals, dogs, for example, always attractive and not just because they aren’t mean (those qualities, after all, having been bred into them by unnatural selection) but I am not aware of those aesthetic principles independent of people and so part of metaphysical nature. So huzzannas all around and people treat that as the essence of religion, God everywhere and nowhere, filling time and space with his creations, a religious person oblivious to the exceptions or finding them just mysterious or curious, modest in declaring not to know why children suffer.
Miracles which involve the suspension of natural law might seem to be in decline even though one would think there would be a sprinkling of miracles at all times so as to awaken people to the sense that the supernatural intervenes with the natural with an ordinary regularity and so miracles are, as it were, natural. But even the Catholic Church finds that miracles are harder to come by. It requires only one miracle than two to authenticate that a person has been brought into heaven and so is a saint and even then the rigor of proof is weaker, at one time requiring that the cure that results from an invocation of someone regarded as only blessed must be immediate while now it can have a delayed effect, so spontaneous cires of cancer, which ordinarily happen, can now be regarded as miracles.
But do not lose heart at miracles because they can be reinterpreted in a different way, not as a suspension of natural law but a set of coincidences within natural law but where the believer finds the meaning of these concurrent events as morally significant, no magic required. When the cross appeared in the heavens so that Constintine would be victorious, that might have been an old fashioned miracle in that the sight of that event had inspired soldiers to their duty as well as forecast the victory or else the display of the banner of Christianity had inspired the soldiers to be brave. Consider that the prior version can be thought of as Catholic and the second as Protetant, trying as it does to eliminate superstition. A good example of Protestant miracles arises in the television series “The West Wing'' where President Jed Bartlet has to decide whether to provide clemency and is reminded that a Quaker, a Catholic and a Jew had advised him to do that and that he had not heeded that advice. He is told that had he not been amply advised, that God was behind that advice, and so a kind of miracle. The point is that people disregard miracles and that claiming so is to deliberately avoid additional circumstances. The screenplay does not include an Evangelical Christian as one of the advisors perhaps because those denominations support the death penalty.
A real life instance of what we might call a circumstantial miracle occurred to a very educated and sophisticated friend who was Jewish. He thought that Jews were more Liberal in their politics than might be expected because of their relative affluence and this remarkable finding was regarded as a kind of miracle showing that God favored the Jews. But that is to only consult one characteristic of the Jews. They are also more urban, and so that might make people to be more Liberal. If you added up more conditions, the variance between the expected percentages of Jewish Liberalism might not be as remarkable, and most important, it might indeed be the case that Jews quoting from the Passover Seder to remember that once they were slaves in Egypt might lead people to support the beleaguered. Such a tradition is cultural rather than miraculous.
A miracle of this third type is ubiquitous even if it is not generally regarded as a miracle though it does comport with the idea that the universe has been arranged to our advantage. It is to be drawn in what we might call folk religion and is expressed in the adage that “everything happens for the best” which means to trust that fate can be trusted. It applies to major decisions, such as who to marry, or what job to take or in which place to live. What happens is that people find the advantages of a situation after the crucial events have occurred. A spouse is found to be nice or responsible or a good breadwinner even if he is not particularly romantic or charming. It turns out that you can master the job you managed to find and that the boss is compatible even if the wages are not as high as you would like. You live in an area without tornados and hurricanes even if it has a higher crime rate than you would like. In each case, you become familiar with the advantages, including just becoming familiar with the situation, while downplaying or neglecting the disadvantages. So fate is regarded to have been fortunate and people advise themselves and others to be satisfied with what has happened to you rather than complain that life wasn’t better. This third view of miracle is the solace of the all but inevitable shortcomings of the lives of those who are relatively passive in forming their destinies and so may indeed be very general. No use just moping.
There is a fourth kind of miracle that can either be supernatural or circumstantial or both. A miracle is announced because an event is so consequential that it is declared as such. So we say, perhaps literally or metaphorically, that the surgical operation I or someone else had was “a miracle”. It meant that I survived even if the procedure had been around for fifty years. This kind of miracle happens when the cavalry comes to the rescue. You really needed it and it might not have happened. The best example of this as a religious miracle is the parting of the Red Sea. If it hadn’t happened, the Egyptians would have slaughtered the Israeliotes and all those naysayers, including those who had wanted to stay in Egypt, satisfied with their slavery, would have been right. Why had Moses gotten the idea of freedom into his head? That he had convinced people that freedom was a necessity was also a miracle. Slavery wasn’t all that bad. You made a living and survived.
Another example of a consequentialist miracle is the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. It didn’t have to be but was regarded as extremely fortunate in that it provided a refuge from holocaust survivers and, eventually, Russian Jews who came there even if the Jews in America decided to support it rather than move there, and that is a theological problem; why not? To be permanently in the diaspora? As it was, the creation of Israel required theological readjustments. They could no longer say “Next year in Jerusalem '' because they could go there even if Michel Chabon imagined that the birth of a red calf would miraculously bring in the establishment of Israel.
Some of these examples are Jewish because the Jewish mind refers to large historical events as transforming the world for large numbers of people, as when people thought that atomic energy would change from being a scourge to mankind to being an almost free cost of energy that would liberate the world. That would have been a kind of miracle, akin to building dams throughout America to have a previous generation’s abundance of energy.The trouble with that idea of making every momentous event as a miracle is that it becomes necessary to posit good and bad miracles. Yes, the Founding Fathers, a group of particular;y gifted political thinkers, created a miracle called the Constitution, but then there is the Russian and the Nazi Revolutions. They were momentous in their consequences but hardly providential and so not to be considered miracles. Leave politics to politics.
Christianity is different. It has only one really significant miracle, which is the incarnation of God as Jesus, the entirety of the universe bottled up into a human being with usual emotions, or so it might seem, though not really in that Jesus always remind enigmatic, those who write the Gospels never offering his thoughts and feelings, only his activities and sayings, leaving even more enigmatic Jesus’s remark that his Father had forsaken him. Did that mean Jesus did not know He was God? A weighty possibility. At any rate, this singular miracle of great consequentiality for all of mankind remains alive to flowers but becomes restricted and dated in that the impulse to see the Christian story as the only story becomes antiquated in that evolution or nuclear physics can present imaginations that can also encompass a person while other Christian miracles are, so to speak, ordinary, in that they are restricted to saving the life from disease by particular human beings, Gerald of Wales treating miracles, perhaps facetiously, as always happening just over the next hill, by report rather than visual experience. Paltry next to historical miracles, but the best you can get until mankind is transformed by the suasion and example of Jesus.
All four of these kinds of miracles are logically flawed, but the first kind of these four kinds are the most philosophically complex. What does it mean to say that the supernatural intervenes in the natural to the extent of suspending a bit of it? If the supernatural can intervene reliably on the natural then it is just another part of the natural. God and his minions might cure lepers just as they regularly turn wine into blood in accord with rules and practices of invocations. So there could be a book of spell;s whereby to raise the dead or cure an illness, everyone or a set of people trained at some school like Hogwarts to master the skills involved with this separate realm of what can also be considered the natural. But that is a very modern reading of miracles. A more accurate one is invoked by Ovid who spells out how special transformations take place because of the failings of character or passing fancies of humans they receive just if however surprising results from on high. In that case, mythology is about the arbitrary nature of people rather than a formula whereby someone can say “Shazam” and so a form of willfulness, which is necessarily arbitrary and created by people rather than a part of natural law. Supernaturalism reaches even further back to when people feared and provoked spirits in trees, mountains and rivers, and were tamed through dreams and nightmares, weather awake or asleep, a yearning for the future to be different rather than a technology by which to manage nature, my best example remaining where “Gilgamesh” builds an ark to deal with political intrigue rather than Noah building an ark for the purpose of averting the death of all humanity. Supernaturalism is therefore by its nature vague rather than cataloged and so is always a throwback to a non-scientific spirit.
The second kind of miracle, which concerns wonder and awe, just neglects the fact of ugly or unpropitious events so as to acclaim the sunset or disease or ugly toads, and so seems superficial, which is an unadmirable characteristic, while insisting that the purity of a soul might rerender such items as significant. That happens in John Updike’s short story “Pigeon Feathers” where the observance of such a delicate and mysterious appearance is an answer to a H. G. Wells' view of how the world unfolded. It is a mystery to me how Updike could buy that, but it was written when he was young or could not think of a more profound way to imagine the experience of the supernatural. Similarly, the third kind of miracle, which piles up coincidences while leaving untouched the additional factors that would resolve the miracle into nothing special, also seems naive and full of special pleading rather than an honest account, to be accepted only because it gives a warm spot in one’s heart. And the fourth kind of miracle, which is consequential, can be applied to anyone a person favors having happened and rejected for what is disfavored, and so not a test for when the cavalry should or should not come to the rescue. In conclusion, miracles don’t amount to much unless when saying so is regarded as a spoilsport, like disabusing a child of Santa Claus. And non-believers are irritants because they ask people to grow up. It all comes down to motivation, whether to be soft headed or to be skeptical, rather than to treat language as a way to offer description.