Are miracles real prove it

Answer 1

No: miracles are evidence of very unlikely things occuring, and this is perfectly normal. Though it depends, of course, on how one defines "miracle".

If you go to a city far away, find a bar, sit and have a drink, and your long-lost father walks in and finds you, this would probably be classed as miraculous. What are the odds? One in a million? Ten million? A hundred million? The population of the world is about 6.7 billion. So you could reasonably expect about 600 of those hundred-million-to-one-against things to happen every day.

Raise those odds to 201 billion to one against, and (according to the Laws of Probability) you can reasonably expect one such event to happen to somebody somewhere in the world (on average) once every month or so.

In a world with global communication and mass media, one can further expect that many of these events will get broadcast: miracles seem to be getting more commonplace: but in reality, everyone loves a good story about chance and we are better able to find them and to pass them on to many people.

Take cancer, for example: the odds of cancer going into spontaneous remission are very low. But with so many people getting cancer every year, there will be many cases which simply disappear with no apparent explanation. When people have been praying, they sometimes regard the prayer as the cause for the remission, but there is no evidence to suggest that this is actually the case.

Despite many people searching for many years, no person who claims to have been healed through a miracle has ever been located who really was healed, and who could not have been healed by another factor (eg placebo, spontaneous remission etc). Furthermore: no gods, no matter how powerful or how merciful, have ever healed an amputee.

So you have to ask: if there are god(s), and they do perform miracles: why do they consistently refuse to help amputees? After looking at the evidence, an objective observer tends to conclude that these are not acts of a deity, but of nature.

Also, if you regard miracles as evidence for a god, then you have to ask yourself: which god? Pretty much every god ever worshipped by humans has had miracles attributed to them. Even today, miracles are proclaimed for Ganesh (and the rest of the Hindu pantheon), Yahweh (Jewish version), Yahweh (Christian version), Yahweh (Muslim version), John Frum (a god worshipped by the inhabitants of a Pacific Island, based on a 1940s American GI ), and even Zeus still has a look-in, with people ardently believing that not only does he exist, but that he grants them various wishes.

The morality of miracles is also difficult to explain if you believe that they have a divine origin. The same gods who are apparently keen to heal people with cancer seem to ignore prayers about the babies in the world with AIDS. Why the favouritism? It's very easily explained if you remove the deity from the hypothesis, and impossible to explain if you do not.

The upshot is that the world, including very unlikely events, behaves in exactly the fashion which one would expect if there were no gods.

Miracles are merely very unlikely events which are bound to happen once in a while: and the more people you observe, the more frequent miracles will seem to occur.

Answer 2

Miracles would be a proof of god(s) or some other force beyond the natural world.

However there are no miracles - only misrepresented or misunderstood natural events.

While there are no miracles, this does not disprove "god" it is strongly supportive of several options:

- there is no god, or

- god(s) don't do miracles, or

- people are too lazy to search for the real cause of "miracles", or

- claiming to have experienced a miracle or know of one boosts your status

Answer 3

Miracles are not real. All religions, past and present, have claimed to produce miracles and prophecies, yet it defies logic that miracles can be performed by different gods who refuse to accept the existence of each other. So-called miracles are proof that people are prepared to believe in a higher power, whether that power is the Abrahamic God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, or some other god presumed to have performed the miracle.