Every religion has miracle claims. The purpose of these claims can vary from religion to religion and from within religions. Sometimes the purpose is to demonstrate god's awesome power. Other times it's to establish the authority and validity of a prophet. Regardless of the reasons, the miracle itself is a demonstration of the natural laws of physics being violated. This view of miracles is so common that the
definition of a miracle in its popular usage is "an event not explicable by natural or scientific laws."
Or is it? Miracles of this kind — the law violating type, are sometimes called Humean miracles, after the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume. In Section X in his 1748 book
An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, titled
Of Miracles, he defined a miracle as "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent". Though a source of great debate, this general notion of miracles
violating natural law such that they could not happen without the interference of a deity or something outside nature is what we commonly think of when we claim a miracle occurred (despite the fact that
colloquially we loosely throw the term around to describe
anything unlikely, such as surviving a terrible car crash).
But the Humean definition is only one of many. One of its great rivals is the lesser known Leibnizian miracle, and fits into the view philosopher Kenny Pearce calls
Christian naturalism.
Leibniz was the 17th/18th century philosopher and mathematician known mostly to apologists as the creator of the
argument from contingency. Pearce describes what a miracle is
on his blog following Leibniz's insights:
A miracle is an event in which the "higher functions" of the divine consciousness, i.e. the part equivalent to the conscious functioning of the human mind, that makes plans and designs regarding human lives and the like, are more apparent than the "lower functions" which are the laws of nature. To put it more simply (but less precisely) a miracle occurs when the laws of nature conspire together to acheive [sic] some intelligent end. These sorts of miracles are a definite argument not just for the existence of a spiritual being in general, but for the existence of the God of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.
Um, what? I have to honestly say that I have no idea what he really means in his first sentence. How do the higher functions of the divine consciousness become more apparent than the laws of nature without violating them? It's not clear, especially since earlier in the post Pearce had written:
What I do mean, is the belief that every occurence [sic] in the physical world is governed by a set of fundamental laws to which there are no exceptions.
Except of course that
one time, an under-aged virgin girl in Palestine gave birth to a son, who walked on water and turned it into wine without technology, and he died for a few days and came back to life. Yeah, no exceptions. But anyway...