The Argument from Miracles

The Argument from Miracles claims that documented events which violate the laws of nature - healings of terminal illness, resurrections, water turning to wine, the parting of seas - constitute evidence for a supernatural being who intervenes in the physical world. Every major religion reports miraculous events, and if even one such event is genuine, it demonstrates the existence of a power capable of overriding natural law. Philosopher Richard Swinburne is the most prominent modern defender, arguing that testimony about miracles can be rational to accept under certain conditions. Despite the sheer volume of miracle claims throughout history, no miracle has ever been verified under controlled scientific conditions. We score the argument 5/100 for soundness.

The Formal Argument

The argument can be structured as follows:

1. There are credible reports of events that cannot be explained by natural causes (miracles).
2. The best explanation for these events is supernatural intervention by God.
3. Therefore, God probably exists.

Both premises are contested. Premise 1 requires establishing that the reported events actually occurred and genuinely defy natural explanation - a very high evidential bar. Premise 2 requires ruling out all possible natural explanations and establishing that supernatural intervention is more probable - an even higher bar.

What Counts as a Miracle?

David Hume defined a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature, and this remains the standard definition in philosophical discussions. Aquinas defined it more broadly as an event beyond the power of any natural agent. Richard Swinburne offered a middle path: a miracle is a non-repeatable exception to the operation of natural law, brought about by a god.

The definition matters because it determines what qualifies as evidence. If a “miracle” is merely an unusual event we do not yet understand, it provides no evidence for the supernatural - it is simply a gap in current knowledge. For the argument to work, miracles must be genuinely impossible under natural law, not merely improbable or unexplained.

Major categories of claimed miracles include:

• Healing miracles: Spontaneous remission of terminal diseases, restoration of sight or mobility, recovery from injuries deemed medically impossible.
• Resurrection and raising from the dead: The Christian resurrection narrative, accounts of saints raising the dead, near-death experience reports.
• Nature miracles: Turning water to wine, multiplying food, parting seas, stopping the sun.
• Eucharistic miracles: Bread and wine allegedly transforming into flesh and blood, such as the Miracle of Lanciano.
• Marian apparitions: Reported appearances of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe, and other locations.

Hume’s Devastating Critique

David Hume’s argument against miracles, presented in Section X of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), remains the most influential philosophical response. Hume argued:

The balance of evidence always favors natural law. Our entire accumulated experience of the world confirms that natural laws hold without exception. Against this vast body of evidence, we have testimony from individual witnesses - testimony that is inherently fallible. It is always more rational to believe that the witness was mistaken, deceived, or deceiving than that a law of nature was genuinely violated.

Testimony degrades over transmission. Miracle reports are typically second-hand, third-hand, or further removed from the alleged event. Even honest witnesses misperceive, misremember, and embellish. The further a report travels from the original event, the less reliable it becomes. The most dramatic miracle claims come from ancient texts where verification is impossible.

Human psychology favors miracle belief. People have a documented tendency to embrace the wonderful and extraordinary. Surprise and wonder are pleasurable emotions, and people are psychologically predisposed to believe and spread amazing stories. This produces a systematic bias toward accepting miracle claims regardless of their truth.

Competing miracles cancel each other. Every religion claims miracles, and these claims are mutually exclusive. The miracles of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism cannot all be genuine, since they support contradictory theological conclusions. If Christian miracles prove Christianity true, Islamic miracles prove Islam true - and both cannot be true simultaneously. This mutual contradiction means that miracle claims from different religions serve as counter-evidence against each other.

The Scientific Verification Problem

No miracle has ever been verified under controlled scientific conditions. This is the single most important empirical fact in evaluating the argument:

Faith healing. Despite thousands of claimed miraculous healings at sites like Lourdes, the evidence does not survive scrutiny. The Lourdes Medical Bureau, established in 1905 specifically to evaluate healing claims, has recognized only 70 cases as “unexplained” out of millions of visitors over more than a century - and “unexplained” is not “miraculous.” No faith healing has ever documented the regrowth of an amputated limb or produced a verified result that is clearly impossible under natural law. The healings that are claimed tend to involve conditions (cancer remission, recovery from illness) that have known, if rare, natural explanations.

Spontaneous remission. Spontaneous remission of cancer occurs in approximately 1 in 60,000 to 1 in 100,000 cases. Given the millions of cancer patients worldwide, hundreds of spontaneous remissions are statistically expected each year. Some of these will occur after prayer, religious pilgrimages, or anointing - but this is what probability predicts, not evidence of supernatural intervention.

The placebo effect. Placebos produce genuine physiological changes - reduced pain, lowered blood pressure, immune system modulation, and even tumor shrinkage in some studies. Religious rituals, prayer, and the emotional intensity of pilgrimage can function as powerful placebos. When someone is healed after a religious experience, the placebo effect is a plausible natural explanation that must be excluded before invoking the supernatural.

Controlled studies of prayer. The largest and most rigorous study of intercessory prayer - the STEP study (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer, 2006) - found no significant difference in recovery outcomes between patients who were prayed for and those who were not. Patients who knew they were being prayed for actually had slightly worse outcomes, possibly due to performance anxiety.

The Documentation Paradox

One of the most telling patterns in miracle claims is the inverse relationship between documentation quality and miracle frequency. The most spectacular miracles - seas parting, dead rising, the sun dancing in the sky - are reported in ancient texts or pre-scientific contexts where verification was impossible. As recording technology and scientific literacy have improved, miracle claims have become less dramatic, less frequent, and less verifiable.

In the age of ubiquitous smartphones, security cameras, and scientific instruments, dramatic and unambiguous miracles have not been captured on camera or measured by instruments. Defenders sometimes argue that God avoids performing miracles in settings where they could be verified, because verification would eliminate the need for faith. But this renders the Argument from Miracles self-defeating: if miracles intentionally avoid verification, they cannot serve as evidence.

This trend is consistent with the naturalistic explanation: what ancient peoples perceived as miracles were events they could not explain with their limited understanding of nature. As scientific understanding has expanded, the category of “unexplainable” events has shrunk correspondingly.

The Catholic Verification Process

The Catholic Church operates the most institutionalized miracle verification process in the world, primarily through the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which evaluates miracle claims as part of the canonization process. Two verified miracles are typically required for sainthood.

The process involves medical experts reviewing documentation to determine whether a healing has a natural explanation. However, the methodology has significant limitations:

• It relies on the inability to find a natural explanation rather than positive evidence of supernatural causation. “We cannot explain it” is not the same as “God did it” - this is the argument from ignorance fallacy.
• The investigations are conducted within a framework that presupposes the possibility of miracles, introducing confirmation bias.
• The bar for “inexplicable” varies, and some approved miracles involve conditions (cancer remission, recovery from coma) that have documented natural precedents.
• Independent replication is never attempted, and outside scientists are rarely given full access to the medical records.

Swinburne’s Defense

Richard Swinburne, the most prominent modern defender of the Argument from Miracles, argues that Hume set the bar for miracle evidence unreasonably high. Swinburne contends that:

• Testimony can provide adequate evidence for miracles if the witnesses are numerous, independent, and trustworthy, and if they had no motive to lie.
• Background evidence matters: if you already have reason to believe God exists (from other arguments), the prior probability of miracles is higher, making testimonial evidence more compelling.
• A single well-attested miracle is sufficient to establish supernatural intervention - you do not need repeated miracles under laboratory conditions.

Swinburne’s approach is Bayesian: he argues that the probability of a miracle report being true depends on the prior probability of God’s existence, the reliability of the witnesses, and the probability of the reported event occurring naturally. If the prior probability of God is not negligible, miracle testimony can rationally shift one’s beliefs.

Critics respond that this reasoning is circular when used to argue for God’s existence: Swinburne assumes a non-trivial probability of God to argue that miracle evidence is credible, then uses miracle evidence to support God’s existence. The argument only works for those who already assign significant probability to God.

Connection to Religious Experience

The Argument from Miracles is closely related to the Argument from Religious Experience. Both take subjective reports of supernatural encounters as evidence for God’s existence. The key difference is that miracles are alleged public events - visible to witnesses and in principle detectable by scientific instruments - while religious experiences are private events occurring within individual consciousness.

This distinction is important because it means miracles are, in principle, more testable. A genuine miracle would leave physical evidence: healed tissue, altered chemistry, documented impossibility. The failure to find such evidence under controlled conditions is therefore more damaging to the Argument from Miracles than the difficulty of testing private religious experiences is to the Argument from Religious Experience.

Our Scoring

Soundness: 5/100. This is among the lowest soundness scores of any theory. No miracle has ever been verified under controlled scientific conditions. Hume’s critique - that it is always more rational to doubt testimony than to accept a violation of natural law - remains compelling after nearly three centuries. Spontaneous remission, the placebo effect, misperception, and embellishment provide natural explanations for the most credible healing claims. The documentation paradox (miracles decrease as verification technology increases) strongly suggests that miracle reports reflect human limitations in understanding natural events rather than genuine supernatural intervention. The argument from ignorance fallacy - treating “unexplained” as “supernaturally caused” - undermines even the most carefully investigated cases.

Personal God: 70/100. Despite the extremely low soundness score, the God probability scores are high - and this is the most important distinction in the scoring. If miracles were genuine, they would strongly support a Personal God who actively intervenes in individual human lives, responds to prayers, heals the sick, and suspends natural law to achieve specific purposes. The concept of miracle is inherently tied to a personal, caring God who pays attention to human affairs. No other type of god maps as well onto the phenomenon of miracles.

Creator/Designer: 75/100. The Creator score is slightly higher because any being capable of overriding the laws of nature must have either created those laws or have power over them - which is functionally equivalent to being a creator. A miracle-working being is, at minimum, an architect of reality who can modify it at will. This is a very close fit with the creator/designer concept.

Higher Power: 75/100. The Higher Power score matches the Creator score because any supernatural being capable of violating natural law automatically qualifies as a “higher power” - a force or consciousness beyond the natural world. The God probability scores are uniformly high across all three definitions because miracles, by their very nature, imply something supernatural - the question is entirely about whether miracles actually occur (soundness), not about what they would imply if they did. The gap between the 5/100 soundness score and the 70-75/100 God probability scores reflects this: the evidence for miracles is extremely weak, but the theological implications of genuine miracles would be extremely strong.