How rare does something have to be, to be a miracle?
This might seem like a strange question to ask. Why would miracles be defined in terms of the frequency at which they occur? Isn't a miracle defined more along the lines of, something that doesn't have a natural explanation, because God intervened supernaturally to do it?
Yeah, but if God "intervenes supernaturally" frequently enough, then these "miracles" start to become something we can measure and quantify scientifically. Scientists will say "this is a known phenomenon that happens, we know it happens, we've observed it many times" even though they don't have a full explanation of the reasons why. At that point, can you even say it's a miracle?
Miracles are, supposedly, events that break the laws of nature. But how do we even know what the laws of nature are? The universe didn't come with an instruction manual which listed out the laws of nature. Over thousands of years, generations of scientists have worked hard to come up with theories and test them, and all this hard work has led to our current understanding of what "the laws of nature" are.
In other words, our "laws of nature" are based on repeated observations of how the world works. If miracles are so rare that they've never shown up as any kind of observable pattern in our scientific data, then sure, okay, maybe it makes sense to define miracles as breaking the laws of nature.
But there are Christians who believe miracles are happening all the time. I've heard plenty of anecdotes about "so-and-so had some serious illness but then suddenly got better and the doctors have no idea how" - yes, you go to church and everyone knows someone personally that had a "miraculous" recovery like this, and I just... if it's really happening so frequently, then is it really true that "the doctors have no idea"? This idea that miracles are things that science can't explain, and they're constantly happening, seems to rely on a misunderstanding of what science even is- as if science is about strong confidence in the explanations we already have, and denial that there can exist things that we don't currently understand. Wow, that's so backwards- in reality, pursuing science means being excited about things we don't understand- let's research them! Let's understand them!
Probably what's more likely is many illnesses have a known rate at which people just kinda mysteriously recovery, and it's not yet understood how it's happening (or maybe it *is* understood, but your doctor wasn't expecting it because it's rare), but it's a known observable thing, and the scientific types aren't calling it a miracle. (And maybe it's better if it's not a miracle, but something we could study and use for more patients' medical treatment.)
You end up with this weird paradox where it only makes sense to believe in miracles if you also believe they're so rare that you're never going to see one.
Or, alternatively, you can believe that God is constantly intervening to make the laws of nature what they are. When we observe a chemical reaction happening, it's because God is actively causing it to happen- and They do it the same way every time, and scientists observe it and call it a law of nature. As Colossians 1:17 says, "in him all things hold together." (I actually like this idea and might believe it? ... Okay the more I think about it, the more I feel like, I like some aspects of it but not others.) Not sure if it really matters though- if physics always works the same way because that's how physics works, or if physics always works the same way because God is always there doing it, does that difference actually matter? (Hmm, but maybe if physics causes you to fall off a cliff and die, it's not great to believe God personally caused that to happen.)
A long time ago, when I was a teenager, I heard a Christian speaker giving a talk about how apparently scientists don't know how bees fly. Because based on the bees' weight and the size of their wings, it shouldn't be physically possible. And this speaker said it's a great illustration of how God does miracles, and science doesn't know everything. I was so incredibly annoyed by this, this God-of-the-gaps thinking, this claim that "it shouldn't be possible for bees to fly" (??????). Are we really claiming that every time a bee buzzes around, God is personally doing a miracle, and scientists shouldn't even bother trying to understand it? A while later, I was very happy to come across an article about how bees fly (apparently there's something different about it compared to other flying things, so I guess that's where this Christian speaker got this idea from). It's not a "miracle"! It's not a mysterious thing that science can never understand! (Here, if you ever meet someone making this claim, send them this article to slap it down.)
Anyway. Some Christians would argue that God makes sure that miracles never coincide with situations where scientists are gathering data- the belief is that it's not possible to collect evidence or proof of miracles, because "Do not put the Lord your God to the test." This makes no sense because it imagines the world is clearly divided into situations which can/are being measured and having data collected, and situations which aren't. What? How on earth could there be a situation where, on some fundamental level, it's impossible to gather data for analysis??? And also, with modern technology we're collecting so much data, there are security cameras everywhere, people's phones are tracking their location all the time, people are wearing smart watches which monitor heart rate and other health indicators- if God does a miracle right now, surely some of it will be captured in data somewhere.
And if there was a miracle, and it was captured in data, would it no longer look like a miracle? What if you were collecting data when Moses led the people out of Egypt and God parted the Red Sea (which I don't think actually happened BUT THAT'S NEITHER HERE NOR THERE)- you would see high wind speeds in your data, and you could say "oh, the sea parted because of the wind"- would you then feel like it wasn't a miracle? But what caused the wind? Well, a difference in air pressure caused the wind. But what caused that? And you can go on forever, asking "why"- at what point does the science end and the miracle begin?
If a miracle really did occur in our real physical world, there will be real physical effects that can be measured. But if we really did measure them, would we still *feel* like it was a miracle?
And you might say "well you can collect data when the miracle happens, but that won't tell you the real reason why, so you're not really 'capturing' the miracle in your data"- but all scientific study is like that. You collect data, and the data never tells you the reason why something happens- you have to come up with a hypothesis and test it.
Another anecdote: I once watched a tv show about supposed miracles, and one of the stories on the show was about a guy who got run over by a train, and his body was cut in two, but he survived. Wow, he survived! And the show interviewed different people who offered their opinions on whether it was a miracle. This annoyed me SO MUCH because they never actually gave a good definition of what a "miracle" was, and so people took the exact same pieces of information and said "therefore it's a miracle" or "therefore it's not a miracle." Like "oh, the path of the train didn't hit any of his vital organs, that's how he survived, it's possible to survive this kind of injury if it doesn't damage any vital organs, therefore it's not a miracle" and "oh, the path of the train didn't hit any of his vital organs, wow how amazing that it didn't hit any of his vital organs, what are the odds of that happening- must have been a miracle!" Aggggh that tv show annoyed me so much.
(And people who think it's a miracle should then have to consider the question "why didn't God just stop this from happening in the first place, rather than doing a miracle to save his life after the fact?")
Probably a lot of Christians would tell me I'm overanalyzing this, and that the way we know miracles are real is more vibes-based. That has never made sense to me. If a thing is true, then you can analyze it as much as you want and it will still be true.
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If you're in a situation where something good happened and you think it might be from God, how do you know if it's a miracle or not? If it's the sort of thing that could have happened through normal, natural means, then maybe it just happened naturally for no reason, or maybe God caused it to happen and it's a miracle. Or maybe God caused it to happen but it doesn't quite count as a miracle.
Certainly there were many times, back when I was evangelical, that we believed "God made it not rain today so we would have good weather for [some important event]" (or some small everyday thing along those lines)- yes, I believed God had intentionally caused the good weather to happen, specifically for us. I wouldn't have called it a "miracle" though- that feels like such a big claim. I believed God caused the good weather to happen just in the normal way that good weather happens, and no matter how much data you collected on it, you would never find any anomalies to indicate God's meddling. Or, maybe God caused the good weather to happen through miraculous means. Who knows? Does it matter?
(But I don't believe in this any more- I don't believe God intervenes like that.)
I guess my point is, I've never really seen any use in distinguishing between "miracles" and situations where God intervenes through natural, undetectable means. I don't think it's possible to clearly distinguish between them. Perhaps when we read stories from the bible, the difference between "miracles" and "God intervened but it's not really a miracle" is more important? But in my actual life, it seems like you can never totally know which kind it was, and I don't know if it really matters.
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There's another aspect of belief in God's intervention I want to talk about here. Also related to frequency. A lot of times, the dramatic stories that Christians tell go like this: "Normally, you wouldn't expect XYZ to happen. But, God is so powerful, God is always doing the unexpected, and XYZ happened, hooray!" I have concerns about how these kinds of stories are told so frequently, it kind of reverses Christians' expectations about what "normally" happens.
An example: I led bible study groups, back when I was in college. As the leader, you have to spend time beforehand preparing. You have to read the passage, do research about how it's interpreted, etc. You really should do this work to prepare, otherwise your bible study won't go well.
But occasionally, I didn't have time to prepare, and I just showed up at bible study and we read the bible passage and I had no idea what I was going to say about it. And sometimes, when that happened... well I described it as the Holy Spirit taking over, and the bible study went great, way better than expected, and clearly it was God, it wasn't me, obviously it wasn't because of me, because I hadn't even prepared anything.
Many of my friends who led bible studies have had similar experiences. I've also heard this from pastors- sometimes they don't have time to prepare a sermon, and they just go up there and the Holy Spirit gives them the words to say in the moment, and it goes great.
In the evangelical subculture I was in, we believed this happened sometimes, but we didn't think you should count on it. Normally, if you don't prepare anything, and you just wing it, it doesn't go very well. Yes, okay, sometimes God comes to your rescue, but you should do the work yourself, instead of assuming God will pick up the slack. It would be really lazy and arrogant, to intentionally not spend any time preparing, and expecting that God would make it all okay. Like you're gonna expect the Creator of the universe to personally come and save you from a problem that you caused. Yeah, we believed it was great when it happened, but don't count on it. Do the work yourself.
But the more "charismatic" Christians, who believe the Holy Spirit is constantly "moving" and doing amazing things in our lives all the time- I've noticed that they are a lot more casual about just winging it and expecting God to give them the words to say. You have pastors preaching their sermons, and they often say "I wasn't going to talk about this, but the Spirit had other plans" or "I was only going to preach for 20 minutes but the Spirit has given me more to say" and it goes on for an hour. This didn't happen in the church where I grew up, so when I first encountered it, I really thought it was an unusual situation, like normally the church service goes according to a nice reasonable schedule, but this one time the pastor has been struck with holy inspiration and wants to talk for longer- and is a bit nervous because it's so unusual and the congregation might not be happy about it, but the pastor just has to trust God and take that step of faith, to make them all continue to sit through whatever half-baked ideas might come to his mind. But no, it's not like that, in those churches, it's not unusual at all. At some churches, it's very common that the sermon goes on and on and the pastor says all sorts of things they weren't planning to say but just came to them "from the Spirit." It happens so frequently that you can make plans around it. Is that really from the Spirit, then? Do we expect God to reliably give us words to say when we put ourselves in that situation, or is it a rare, exciting thing?
Believing miracles happen so frequently that you can then predict them and rely on them. Is that what miracles are supposed to be, though?
(See 1 Kings 18 for a particularly gutsy version of this "expecting a miracle to happen." Elijah sets up a test to see whose god will make fire fall down and burn up the sacrifice. Elijah even dumps a bunch of water on the altar. Then when he prays, fire does indeed come down and burn up everything, including the water. Wow. I always interpreted this not as Elijah asking God to do the miracle, but as God telling Elijah to go set this up because God already was planning to do the miracle. Because yikes, you can't just be ordering God to do miracles.)
Here's another example: I read Phil Vischer's book "Me, Myself, and Bob," which is about the rise and fall of VeggieTales, including how they eventually went bankrupt. They spent so much money on marketing their movie "Jonah," and then it didn't do as well in the theaters as they had hoped. But Vischer wrote in his book that he thought to himself, maybe the DVD sales will be so incredibly successful, it will save the company. He thought, wouldn't that be just like God, to come through right at the last minute when it seems there is no hope? But then, no, the DVD sales were not that great, and there was no way to recover from that, and the company went bankrupt.
This belief that when it looks like everything is going bad, that means you're in a story where God comes in and demonstrates his power by dramatically saving you. Christians tell these stories so much, it becomes something we expect to happen, rather than an amazing exception that's worth talking about because it is so rare. Wouldn't that be just like God, to do something so dramatic and unexpected? I've been in situations like that too, feeling like "the reason our plans for this Christian event seem to not be working is that later God will show up and suddenly make everything into a huge success" (and then no, God did not make everything into a huge success).
All sorts of stories that Christians tell, about having faith and obeying God, and it seems like things aren't going well, it seems like a bad idea, but you just keep obeying what you believe God wants you to do, and then miraculously God comes through and makes everything great. I really did have a mindset where I expected that to happen, rather than believing that usually when it looks like you're failing, that's because you really are failing.
It's so weird, this tension where the story is dramatic and exciting because we know that's not what normally happens, but you tell those kinds of stories so often that then we expect that's what normally happens. Kind of like when you watch a movie, and the main characters are in danger, but you're not concerned at all because they're the main characters so obviously they'll be fine. Plot armor. We *expect* movie heroes to be successful despite the odds. We *expect* God has put us into an amazing, dramatic story where we obey Them even when it's hard and it looks like it's not working, and then in the end God will guarantee us great success.
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The thing is, though, I can't totally reject this kind of "things that by definition need to be rare, but we believe they're happening all the time" thinking, because I believe in resurrection. I believe in the Resurrection, but also in resurrection as a general concept. The way the world normally works, it's about power, the strong taking advantage of the weak. The way the world normally works, death is the end, a terrifying enemy that we have to fear. But resurrection says this isn't the whole story about how the world works. That on some level, the truth is that love is stronger than power, that love is stronger than death.
So which is it, then? Does power always win, except that one time when Jesus resurrected? Or does love win frequently enough that we can study it and rely on it, as if resurrection is a law of nature rather than an exception? (For example, we can study the tactics used by successful civil rights movements/ resistance movements throughout history. Did they work because some law of the universe and human nature says they will work, or because God made an exception and intervened to help them out? Hmm, that question has big implications in terms of whether the same tactics will work in new situations.) I really believe resurrection does describe a truth about how the world works. But in order to be such powerful good news, doesn't it need to be contrasted with how the world "normally" works, and therefore it can't be an aspect of that "normally"? There's something inconsistent in my beliefs here.
I'm very excited about the idea of resurrection, but what does that actually mean?
Or maybe resurrection does not describe the world as it is now, but only how it will be in heaven? But no, I can't get on board with that interpretation, because I believe we have to do the work here to bring heaven to the earth. To bring justice and freedom and love. Resurrection is not supposed to be some faraway otherworldly thing that we can't relate to. "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."
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Nobody seems to have a good definition of what a "miracle" is. Is it something that breaks the laws of nature as we know them? But then if miracles happen frequently enough, wouldn't they just become part of those "laws of nature"?
How often can you expect God to come through when you need help? Does this happen frequently enough that you can predict and rely on it? Evangelicals believe in having a "personal relationship with God", and in most personal relationships, you can rely on each other like that- but I never felt that you should do that with God. Sure, it can be tempting to want to get yourself into a badly-planned bible study just so you can feel God's power bailing you out, but I always felt that would be wrong, and God won't play along with it. "Do not put the Lord your God to the test."
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Follow-up post: Trusting God, Predicting God, Controlling God
Related:
What Does God Do When You Pray For An Anonymized Patient By Bed Number?
Runaway Radical: The Stories You Can't Tell In Church
Kangaroos and Creationist Fan Theories
Does God Use Miracles To Take Sides?
Renee Bach, who had no medical training, opened a clinic in Africa. Just like missionaries are supposed to.
