What does a genuine miracle look like?
How to distinguish between a genuine miracle and just coincidence / a natural event?
There are many books collating reports of miracles in modern times (see a few examples below). Can we trust those reports? Are they all lies?
- The Case for Miracles: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Supernatural (link)
- Miracles : 2 Volumes: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (link)
- Miracles Today: The Supernatural Work of God in the Modern World. (link)
- The Miracles: A Medical Doctor Says Yes to Miracles! (link)
How can we know for sure that a genuine miracle has truly happened?
ISTM that:
1. Miracles have no other source than God Alone.
2. Acts of men, and fallen angels, and the created order in general, are not miracles, but are one of the following:
a. misidentified human actions that are called miracles, but are in reality produced by causes within nature.
b. demonic delusions masquerading as genuine Acts of God, & permitted by Divine Providence
c. human impostures that are meant to be taken as miracles
d. Processes within created nature that have not been understood properly or completely.
e. Ordinary natural processes, such as the seasonal cycle.
f. Human abilities that are either innate, or acquired. The art of surgery is a gift of God, but it is acquired by human ingenuity & effort. So the removal of a cancer, though beneficial to the patient, is not a miracle.
2. Miracles may be performed immediately, by God alone; or, mediately, by the instrumentality of some creature.
a. No creature is the author of a miracle, because miracles proceed from God's Omnipotence. And God alone is omnipotent - to be a creature, is to be limited; therefore, no creature can be the source of infinite power. So it is impossible for a creature, a limited being, to exercise, by the resources natural to it, the infinite power of God.
b. Creatures can, however, be enabled to exercise the omnipotence of God, in a limited, incomplete, manner. Not in the Authorial manner that God does, but as created instruments through which God condescends to operate.
c. Miracles are therefore purely gratuitous - they are graces. God is the Lord of all His gifts to His creatures, and therefore He is under obligation to none of His creatures. He bestows the working of miracles on whom He will, when He will, for the benefit of whomsoever He will, where He will, in whatever measure He will.
d. Therefore, in principle, anyone on Earth can be God's instrument in working miracles, should God so choose. For this reason, I don't see why (what seem to be) reports of miracles outside Christianity must necessarily be ruled out. If Josephus claims that the Emperor Vespasian, a heathen, miraculously healed a man, my instinct is, not to reject that story out of hand, but to entertain the possibility that Vespasian did that. If God's goodness comes through heathens in other ways, why not by the working of miracles through their instrumental agency, as well as through that of Apostles & other Saints ?
If there were reports, from reliable, sober, trustworthy witnesses, of miracles at the tomb of some great criminal, I would take them with the same seriousness. If God deigns to work miracles through heathens, sceptics, enemies of Christianity, persecutors, unbelievers, heretics, schismatics, evildoers of all kinds, etc., then He does; and it is nobody's business to tell God He can't.
e. I think that, if a society in the world is the Body of Christ that He has founded, and if its foundations are His Apostles & Prophets, and if His Spirit animates it, that it would be altogether fitting that it should manifest the Life in it by the working of miracles. Since the Holy Spirit of Christ promised by Christ has been poured out on the Body of Christ on Earth, the miracles worked by Christ, and then by His Apostles, may reasonably & unpresumingly be expected still to be worked.
3. I think that a miracle has the following attributes:
a. It is a purely super-natural act of God, Who is alone, and in the strictest sense, super-natural; because God Alone is "Wholly Other" than all created nature, visible or invisible, spiritual or material. (IOW, angels & demons are in no sense whatever super-natural. In Catholic theology, they are called "preternatural" - that is, "beyond [material] nature". That is, they resemble God in being immaterial & spiritual; but, they are created beings nonetheless. So they can no more be the authors of miracles than a butterfly can.)
b. It has an ethical purpose.
c. its miraculous effect is accessible to the senses. Cases in point: the raising of Lazarus, the multiplication of the Loaves & Fishes, the Stilling of the Storm, the Walking on the Water, the Resurrection of Christ, the raising of Dorcas.
d. It is no way the result of processes within the natural universe.
e. It is instantaneous.
So, if, for the sake of argument, it is granted that genuine, God-Authored, supernatural miracles do occur; what is their relation to the workings of the material universe that works in ways accessible to unaided human investigation ?
ISTM that:
Miracles are not from any factors in the universe - material, or spiritual, or preternatural.
Miracles are not breaches of the laws of nature.
Miracles are wholly impossible - to creatures. So when people deny that miracles are possible, they are in fact correct.
Miracles are not the ordinary instruments by which God rules His Church, world, & universe.
Miracles are not "interventions" by God. To call God's action in His creation an intervention, risks implying that in the normal run of things God leaves the world to itself; or that God is a stranger to His own creation.
I think it is more accurate, and sounder as Christian theology, to regard miracles as totally
unrelated to the natural universe. They occur in it, but are not, as miracles, from it. Just like the Incarnate Word Himself. They witness to Him - so His Character is reflected in them.
Example: the water at Cana that became wine was "from" creation, and could be entirely accounted for by the processes within creation. The miracle, consisted in the creative act of Jesus, that resulted in the existence of wine where previously water had been: and that act, though occurring within the universe created by God, had its source not in the created universe, but solely in the Word Incarnate, Jesus Christ.
I think miracles are manifestations of the Holy "Otherness", Apartness, Hiddenness, Uniqueness, & Incomparability of God. They are not like any acts arising from created factors, because they are in their origin holy; and are therefore essentially inaccessible, dread-ful, awe-ful, terrible; as is the God Whose works they are. This may help to explain why, in Christianity, miracles and Saints often go together.