Miracles are the cornerstone of virtually every religion. If Jesus did not miraculously rise from the dead, Christianity is little more than interesting myth. If Muhammad did not truly receive miraculous visions from Allah, then Islam is just the invention of a 7th century Arab man. Many believers look to miracles for affirmation of their faith, and if something cannot be explained to them in any natural way, they take it as evidence of the supernatural. The argument from miracles is an argument for the existence of God which claims that testimony of miracles is sufficient evidence for the intervention of a superior being. This raises several important objections though.

I. What Makes a Miracle?

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "a miracle is a manifestation of God's power" [1], and as any believer will tell you, God may manifest his power in a wide variety of different ways. There are the iconic, 'higher grade' miracles like the parting of the Red Sea and the resurrection of Christ, but then there are also 'lower grade' miracles, which can include such mundane things as the birth of a child or receiving an anonymous check in the mail [2]. A miracle may suspend or defy the laws of nature or it may just be a bizarre event that seems too unlikely to be coincidence.

The definition of a miracle is extremely vague, and oftentimes members of one faith may not consider the miracles described by another faith to be legitimate. Muslims claim many miracles that show the truth of their faith, but there are many Christians who reject Islam and its miraculous claims. How do they determine what is an authentic miracle and what is not? It's quite simple, actually. If it doesn't keep with their god's character, they dismiss it. Many Christian apologetics websites exist that compare the miracles of Islam to those of Christianity and conclude that, "The Holy Bible is the inspired inerrant word of the true God, and the Quran is not. The Quran is only a very poor imitation of God�s true and pure word" [3]. In other words, they reject the miraculous claims of Islam because their own religion tells them to.

Already we can see a couple problems with the argument from miracles. Practically anything can be labeled a miracle by the faithful, and there's no reliable criteria for determining what is a true miracle and what is a 'false miracle'. With no clear definition of a miracle, and with the possibility of various religions all having miracles that conflict with other religions, the argument from miracles is far from persuasive evidence. But there are still several more issues to be raised against it.

II. Reducing God's Power

Higher grade miracles seem to have become quite the rare thing these days, leading some believers to assert that God no longer produces such grand spectacles as he used to in the biblical era. The reason for this can only be speculated upon, with some Christians suggesting that people still doubted even after witnessing amazing relevations. Either God gave up out of frustration or he still works major miracles today that just go unnoticed or denied by most people. Yet if getting us to believe is God's primary motivation in performing miracles, it seems odd that he would persist in his same old unsuccessful ways. Other believers claim that God also works miracles for his own glory, to show off his power. If this is true, why has he stopped the grand spectacles?

I would think that any serious religious follower would be quite irate at the idea of their god's profound power being reduced to mundane everyday oddities. Instead of stopping the sun in the sky, raising the dead, and sending angels to annihilate cities full of wicked people, we now have bleeding statues, impressions of the Virgin Mary on grilled cheese sandwiches, surprising tales of survival against the odds, and other interesting but perfectly natural and easily explicable coincidences. Even in those rare cases where 1 out of 50 similar patients amazingly survives, it begs the question: what about the other 49? Had they not prayed hard enough for a miracle?

In many cases a small survival rate is to be expected, and it's not an unnatural work of God if one person successfully recovers or survives a disaster every once in a while. Sometimes doctors purposefully underestimate the survival rate in order to be safe and avoid being sued as well. Islam faces the same problem as Christianity in this area too, as no one has since been taken up to Heaven by Gabriel as Muhammad supposedly was. Miracles are unique occurrences, according to many, but one has to wonder just why they are unique if God intends them as persuasive devices like the argument from miracles contends that they are.

III. Putting Things into Perspective

The philosopher David Hume said that, "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish" [4]. If there's even a slight chance or likelihood of a rational explanation behind a miracle claim, there is no reason to suppose it is anything of supernatural origin. It is an argument from ignorance to assert that because you cannot imagine any natural explanation, there must not be one, and thus your explanation that you use to 'fill in the gaps' is justified. The cosmologist Carl Sagan famously said that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" [5]. Any allegation of a miraculous occurrence needs to be approached with a good amount of skepticism and met with a reasonably high standard of proof.

"Wait!" the believer might say. "Are you trying to say that anyone who has experienced a miracle is delusional?" Not at all, but it is a false dichotomy to pretend as though everyone is either deluded or there must be some authentic miracles. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who have experienced things they cannot explain, yet that does not mean their experience was exactly what they may perceive of it. We humans do have a tendency to want to fill in the gaps in our understanding and knowledge, even with information that is just as uncertain as the initial experience. It's not so surprising then, knowing this, to observe how people of various religious beliefs often see their own religious iconography in their 'miraculous' experiences.

Miracles may make peoples' everyday lives seem a little more interesting and not so dull, but we should try not to get too caught up in the hype, out of our own willingness to experience something extraordinary. There are plenty of fascinating, extraordinary things right here on earth, and in my opinion, no miracle would ever be a worthy substitute for some of the bizarre beauty we can see in reality.

1. Anonymous. Miracle. Catholic.org. Retrieved June 10, 2009.
2. Anonymous. What is a miracle?. AllAboutPhilosophy.org. Retrieved June 10, 2009.
3. Shamoun, S. The Challenge of the Quran. Answering-Islam.org. Retrieved June 10, 2009.
4. Hume, D. (1748) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
5. Sagan, C. (1980) Cosmos.