miracle an extraordinary event brought about by God. In the medieval understanding of nature, objects have certain natural powers and tendencies to exercise those powers under certain circumstances. Stones have the power to fall to the ground, and the tendency to exercise that power when liberated from a height. A miracle is then an extraordinary event in that it is not brought about by any object exercising its natural powers – e.g., a liberated stone rising in the air – but brought about directly by God.
In the modern understanding of nature, there are just events (states of objects) and laws of nature that determine which events follow which other events. There is a law of nature that heavy bodies when liberated fall to the ground. A miracle is then a ‘violation’ of a law of nature by God. We must understand by a law a principle that determines what happens unless there is intervention from outside the natural order, and by a ‘violation’ such an intervention. There are then three problems in identifying a miracle. The first is to determine whether an event of some kind, if it occurred, would be a violation of a law of nature (beyond the natural power of objects to bring about). To know this we must know what are the laws of nature. The second problem is to find out whether such an event did occur on a particular occasion. Our own memories, the testimony of witnesses, and physical traces will be the historical evidence of this, but they can mislead. And the evidence from what happened on other occasions that some law L is a law of nature is evidence supporting the view that on the occasion in question L was operative, and so there was no violation. Hume claimed that in practice there has never been enough historical evidence for a miracle to outweigh the latter kind of counterevidence. Finally, it must be shown that God was the cause of the violation. For that we need grounds from natural theology for believing that there is a God and that this is the sort of occasion on which he is likely to intervene in nature. See also EVENT, LAWLIKE GENERALIZATION, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGIO. R.Sw.
