THE POINT? Take a miracle. Person on deathbed. Suddenly gets up in prime of health. You only see a change. You don't know precisely how it's a miracle, when or why. The person can recover and not realise it at first so you cannot pinpoint the when. And as for the how, did something act to change things instantly? Or was it in fact over a few minutes which would be strange if a real miracle were at work? Or did something put energy into the person's water and cure him? Why you as witness? Why this person? Why now? Why this situation? This is about the unknown effectively, or actually, trying to pressure you, not teach you. Miracle believers ignore all the questions which is unfair. They want you to inflict a discontinuity on yourself. It is, "I should have those questions. No - I will pass over them and just agree that it was a miracle".
Other miracle examples might be a statue or corpse coming to life. Or a profligate suddenly changing into a wonderful person. It does not matter. Discontinuity is discontinuity.
ANALYSIS: This shows a miracle is an event of discontinuity—not an explanation, not a lesson, not even a revelation in the usual sense. Just a brute fact: someone was dying, now they are not. No visible mechanism. No narrative bridge. No “therefore.”
And the key line is this: “This is about the unknown effectively or actually, trying to pressure you, not teach you.” Teaching gives structure. It works from cause to effect - granting meaning and understanding. Pressure gives none of that. It confronts you with something that doesn’t fit, and forces you to react.
A supposed miracle like the above doesn’t say, “Here is how something works.” It tries to tell you that how something works does not matter.
The unknown is or leads to a withholding mechanism. It applies pressure in three ways:
1 Epistemic pressure - you are forced to live with a gap in understanding. Not everything yields to inquiry.
2 Existential pressure - if death can simply fail to happen, then the finality you rely on is unstable.
3 Moral or interpretive pressure - you are tempted to assign meaning, but any such meaning risks being projection. The projection may be any or all of the following. Why chosen? Why spared? Why blessed? There are many other possible projections.
You only see a switch from dying to health - you have experienced a boundary event. You don’t see the process, so you can’t inhabit it. That makes the miracle a boundary marker between what can be explained and what can only be endured. Pressure comes from the fact that the something did something it didn’t owe you an explanation for. It doesn’t invite belief so much as it demands reckoning.
In that sense, the miracle is not benevolent or cruel—it’s indifferent.
Be warned that something that hates you can simulate indifference - in order to damage you. An enemy who ignores you is using that ignoring as a weapon.
Finally, why are those who say Jesus rose etc using the word miracle and not the word discontinuity? The word miracle is very loaded - it helps created supernatural leanings in people.