A miracle is an event that appears to violate ordinary natural expectations and is attributed to divine agency. A stress response will arise. Say you hear Jesus rose from the dead. You wonder if this is true or simply cannot be true for it is absurd. Religion usually says it cannot be absurd or impossible for the evidence says it happened. But no evidence can support an absurdity. So religion should be honest and say, "We assume he rose." The evidence then is doing no work - it is mere window-dressing.
Even if we agree that it might not be an absurdity, we simply cannot guess that. It could only be distinguished from an absurd or meaningless anomaly if its purpose and meaning were clearly communicated by the alleged divine source. We do not have that. We have documents written decades after the alleged events.
Christian claims that Jesus rose from the dead are usually supported by two main points: that his body was missing from the tomb and that he appeared to his disciples afterward. However, these claims effectively dictate in advance what kind of evidence would count as proof. They assume that Jesus must leave an empty tomb and must appear in visible form. But alternative possibilities are logically possible. The tomb could have been robbed, and Jesus could still have risen later. He could have chosen to appear only through dreams. He could have conveyed his continued existence through non-visual experiences, such as an unseen physical presence felt by the apostles. The reported appearances are mostly open to the notion of remote viewing.
[It might be significant that if Jesus were appearing, if others were around who saw nothing. If they should have seen him, the miracle then might have been how their eyes were shielded from seeing him.]
The problem is that, without the empty tomb and the specific appearance stories, these alternative forms of evidence would not have been accepted, even if they were extensive and consistent enough to form a complete narrative on their own. This suggests that the issue is not simply faith, but a prior ideological commitment to a particular type of evidence. It is not purely a search for truth, but a reliance on traditional expectations that resemble superstition rather than open inquiry.
Most miracle reports also depend on the claim that a violation of the normal order of nature has occurred. Describing a miracle as an “absurdity” would be even stronger than calling it a violation, but the two are often blurred together. It is possible, however, for something to violate ordinary expectations without being absurd. For a miracle claim to avoid being dismissed as absurd, God would need to clearly explain why the event occurred and what it was meant to signify. Without such clarification, the event reasonably appears arbitrary, and the default conclusion is that it is absurd rather than meaningful.
Christianity’s approach to the resurrection shows neither epistemic humility nor respect for God’s freedom, because it assumes the resurrection, dictates the form divine evidence must take, and treats evidence as confirmation of an ideology rather than as a genuine test of truth.
This is not an abuse of God only but anyone who cares about evidence and searches for it.