Miracles (updated)

One day some teachers of religious law and Pharisees came to Jesus and said, “Teacher, we want you to show us a miraculous sign to prove your authority.”

But Jesus replied, “Only an evil, adulterous generation would demand a miraculous sign; but the only sign I will give them is the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights."
--Matthew 12:38-40 (NLT)

The subject today is miracles. I'm not talking about things like the "miracle of childbirth" or other things that can be explained reasonably well by science, amazing though they may be. I'm talking about events that blatantly violate the laws of this universe.

I haven't personally seen or experienced a miracle like this, but I've met a few people who claim they have. In a couple of cases, they talked about almost dying of some vague childhood disease, people prayed for them, and they recovered. Whether this qualifies under the definition of "miracle" that I'm using, I'm not sure. In one case, a guy I met claimed a badly broken bone had been instantly healed leaving no sign that it was ever injured. I've also met some people who claim they know people who've experienced miracles, such as cancerous tumours disappearing without a trace.

Could there be a "natural" (as opposed to supernatural) explanation for these things? I find it hard to come up with one for the broken bone or the cancer. Were these people exaggerating, or even telling blatant lies? Christians generally seem pretty honest to me (although some like to point out evidence for God's existence that they haven't even tried to verify), so I don't think these stories would be blatant lies. Am I a fool for thinking these people might be telling the truth? (They do seem a lot more credible than Peter Popoff anyway.)

If we don't have evidence of some kind of miracle that couldn't have happened without God (whether the creation of the universe, the resurrection of Jesus, or something in our own time), what right do we have to claim that God is real, has expectations of us, and that Jesus has made the only way for us to come to God? But as you read at the start of this post, Jesus didn't want people demanding miracles to prove he was sent by God. But then he did promise a miracle--his resurrection. Even so, even Jesus' words get me to question the authenticity of modern-day miracles.

If these miracles are real, they could really convince the people involved that God is real, but the miracles would elude scientists because there wouldn't be a repeatable cause-and-effect relationship to experiment with. Usually this notion that "God has given us just enough evidence of his existence that we'll find it if we're really looking for it" seems like a cop-out to me because so much of the evidence seems so subjective, but with miracles, maybe that notion would work.

I think every good thing, whether it fits this definition of miracle or not, is ultimately a gift from God, so I don't mean to sound ungrateful to God here. But blatant miracles would make it easier to be confident that God is real.

[Update #2: I got invited to contribute to another blog a while ago called Godtalk Uncensored. I posted this thing there too, so go have a look and see what others have written.)