A Miracle isn't just unexplained, it is unexplainable

kw: opinion, miracles, supernatural phenomena

The word miracle is almost never used properly. So also with supernatural. By the simple meaning of the word, something supernatural is not natural, not explainable by any appeal to the natural. And a miracle requires divine, or at least supernatural, intervention.

• A million-to-one chance is not a miracle.
• Just because you can't explain it, doesn't make it a miracle.
• If it has a natural cause, it isn't a miracle.

There are six-plus billion people on this planet. Almost everything that happens to each them is a billion-to-one event. The popular show America's Funniest Home Videos shows all sorts of unusual events: throwing a basketball over a house, and swishing it; a wildly hit golf ball making a hole-in-one on the wrong green, or hitting someone 200 yards away in the crotch; a kid falling into a creek and coming up with a trout in her mouth. These are rare, but not miracles.

A miracle is something that just won't happen unless God does it. Spontaneous remission of a dangerous cancer isn't a miracle. A guy like Lazarus, four days dead and stinking, being raised to life...that's a miracle.

Venus and Mars, careening around the solar system like pinballs, bringing about the plagues Moses, with God's help, visited on Egypt, would not count as miracles (sorry, Mr. Velikovsky). Changing real water to real blood (not just water with red mud in it), or changing dust to fleas? Real miracles; and no planets had to zoom around while it happened.

Can miracles happen today? Many Bible believers think they are common. If I understand the Bible right, they were never common (Jesus said the only leper healed in Elisha's days was Naaman, for example), and this period of history is set aside as a time when they are to be very rare; the age is predicted to end with miracles aplenty, but most folks won't enjoy the experience.

Jesus avoided talking to folks who were too enamored of miracles. At the end of John 2 and the beginning of John 3, we see him hiding from a crowd drawn by his "signs" (John's word for them), but spending the night talking with Nicodemus, who came to be taught.

My definition of a miracle, as observed: A unique event that directly interferes with a natural process, demonstrates the power or compassion of God, and that will never be explained by natural causes or scientific discoveries.