A mathematician reckoned you should meet a one-in-a-million event about monthly
J. E. Littlewood argued that with so much happening every moment, each of us should expect a one-in-a-million coincidence roughly once a month. That puts the old question of miracles in a sharper light: are they breaks in nature's laws, or just rare events we notice because they happened to us?
In the strict sense, a miracle is an event that natural or scientific laws cannot account for, so it gets credited to a deity, a saint, a miracle worker or some other supernatural cause. Everyday English is looser. People call survival in a disaster, or the birth of a child, miraculous even though nothing about physics has been broken. Three old schoolmates bumping into each other abroad decades later may feel the same wonder, yet on a planet crowded with events, wildly unlikely coincidences are happening constantly.
Philosophers have attacked the strict version from two directions. Thomas Jefferson treated miracles as physically impossible; David Hume said they could never be confirmed. Hume's case is probabilistic: because a miracle contradicts everything experience teaches about how the world behaves, and because each one is a single, rarely witnessed event, the odds that it happened are always lower than the odds that it did not, so testimony alone should never convince a rational person. Spinoza took a different tack, calling miracles lawful events whose causes we simply do not know.
Believers and theologians answer in several ways. Many say God usually works through nature but, as its creator, can act above or against it. Wayne Grudem describes a miracle as a rarer mode of divine activity meant to provoke awe and point back to God. Friedrich Schleiermacher went further, holding that any ordinary happening becomes miraculous once seen religiously. Richard Swinburne has used Bayesian probability to ask whether historical testimony could make something like the resurrection of Jesus more likely than natural explanations, while James Keller objected that selective miracles would make God unfair.
Belief remains widespread. A 2011 Pew Research Center poll found more than 90 percent of evangelical Christians think miracles still occur, and Muslim thought treats Allah as the direct cause of every event. Buddhist traditions have their own collections, such as the Japanese Honchō Hokke Reigenki from around 1040. Skeptics add that some accounts are simply invented, and that hallucinations or reasoning errors can make ordinary experiences feel supernatural.
Source: Miracle
