Do you believe in miracles?

SHOOT: I found this article very troubling, but not for the reasons you might imagine. I see our main problem being a problem of standards. What do we define as a miracle? Getting a parking space on a Saturday morning in middle Manhattan? Or is it cancer that inexplicably [but there is an explanation if you bothered to investigate it] goes into remission?

Of course, there really are occasion events that defy explanation, and there are commonplace things which, if we are sincere, are miraculous - life is. The stars wheeling above us. The beauty of water in the sunlight. An insect transforming into something new. I just find it an utterly subjective term, much like the word 'God'. It means simply what we mean it to mean, and possibly quite different from the lexical meanings/inferences.

Lexicon is what we use to describe things. And let's face it, we are prone to exaggerate. A 'miracle' is a good example of word that is hijacked to say 'something unusual happened'. If there is one survivor of an airplane crash as happened recently in the Comorros, that may be a miracle for an audience of onlookers, but from the point of view of the survivor, they may have lost their entirte family and ended up stranded on an island - injured, bruised, mourning, I'm sure she didn't feel so lucky. In fact survivors are often haunted by survivor guilt.

I have two points to make here. 1. It is important to believe in the possibility of the 'impossible'. [Anything is possible]. 2. It is important to be accurate about what something is once it has happened. Most 'miracles' are either just exceptional circumstances, or bogus. Few 'real' miracles, attributable to a 'God' are miracles at all. In many cases it is a case of charlatanism.
Disagree - SHOOT THE DONKEY and send me your miracle and I'll provide you with a sensible explanation.

Stay tuned for my up-coming piece/s: THE CHRISTIANITY CHRONICLES.

clipped from www.newscientist.com THESE days most people think it unscientific to believe in "miracles", and irreligious not to believe in them. But would the occurrence of miracles really violate the principles of science? And would their non-occurrence really undermine religion? David Hume and Richard Dawkins have attempted to answer these questions in their different ways, but I am not convinced by their arguments, and for me they remain open questions. Dawkins, however, does. In The God Delusion, he asks: "Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question with a definite answer in principle: yes or no." clipped from www.newscientist.com For instance, human clones could be born of virgins - without violating a universal law. In the Humean sense of a violation of a law of nature, virgin births and the examples of "miracles" that Dawkins gives are not, if they occurred, necessarily violations of natural laws.