Excellent Quality Rigorous Evidence is needed whether a Miracle is "Major" or "Minor" for in Reality a Miracle is just a Miracle

A miracle is an event that is not naturally possible eg visions and voices from God or instant healings. That does not mean it is necessarily impossible. There could be a power greater than nature such as a god that can do it. A miracle is supernatural.

We will find that it is really magic and superstition under a different name. If a power can instantly remove an incurable terminal disease, then it can guarantee bad luck for those who walk under ladders.

Religion concentrates on impactful miracles such as Jesus coming back from the dead or the sun spinning at Fatima. Mormons like the tale of the angel giving Smith golden plates. Muslims relish how an allegedly uneducated man could dictate the Qur'an a "masterpiece".

But what something is should matter more than how it presents itself.

True respect for miracles and for a supposed God who does them would suggest that.

A rose appearing out of nowhere in your hand impresses nobody. That is not fair. Seeing that happening matters more than any books from people you don't know saying Jesus rose centuries ago.

Let us look at the topic of the small "insignificant" miracle.

Some examples of what is meant, for the purposes of this essay, are needed.

The car keys are in the cupboard though your memory correctly tells you they can't be. You will forget this and put it down to a mistake.

The antibiotic should not work for Jane is immune and yet it does. That would be a miracle if there is no natural way that could happen. Doctors will assume they missed something.

1 If it can happen, we cannot definitely rule out anything being a miracle.

2 It follows that if miracles happen then there could be ones happening that we simply don't see. Or do see but explain away.

3 It follows that if miracles happen then there could be ones that God does not want us to see.

Trust in the natural order of things is reduced too much by each one of these. The three of them together logically lead to us being dissociated from real life.

Science cannot function if there is that suspicion. Science is turned into opinion and opinion is as far from science as religion is. There is no such thing as testing one thing. One thing is is sum of many forces and effects. Any tampering makes the findings guesswork or suspect.

Small miracles if they happen make it very likely that small unseen miracles are happening too. A small miracle is one that could be easily missed so it is not too worried about being seen or not. And it is as good as unseen for few care. In a sense a small miracle then is a bigger threat to science and needs more investigation than a big one. You may say that a big one also needs huge investigation only because it uses fanfare to demand it. It looks like it wants to observed and vindicated. But that is a choice. Just because the person is loudest at the party does not mean they are entitled to any attention. That religion ignores this point and hammers big miracle doctrines home all the time is not something that should give us confidence in it.

Imagine the person who says they got a revelation from God that the world is to end next week. And the person seeing the Blessed Virgin and getting a harmless message to repent from her. Apply the same the same level of evidence. Why?

Doesn’t the first person have a more important message than the second? Yes the content is more serious but that is not the point. The method by which both messages came is equal in that it is supernatural. The two revelations, irrespective of content, equally need to be proved reliable and supernatural because they claim to be supernatural. The point is not the importance of the messages but the medium of the message – that is, how the message was given. The content messages can have no importance at all unless the supernatural nature of the message can be proven and the supernatural can be proven reliable. Think of it this way, we can’t listen to the world end message or the other one just because of what it says. The supernatural has to be proven to exist and be reliable before we can heed such a message. Therefore small miracles need to be treated as scientifically or sceptically as big ones.

In fact for handiness, small miracles should get the attention. There is too much emotional pressure to affirm that Jesus rose. There is not if you want to show that your soup cooked itself.

If 1 plus 1 is 3 in a village in Spain that calls for as much attention and examination as 1 plus 1 being 3 in the whole of Europe would be. A miracle challenges the way things happen in the same way that that would challenge mathematics. For example, if 1 + 1 = 3 is true anywhere it is true everywhere. It’s a universal law. If somebody can instantly cure the incurable that means the diseases cured are no longer incurable and this becomes a universal law too.

Imagine that when two natural laws are brought together they result in a specific result that we will call result X. You could say that law 1 plus law 2 is equal to result X. If a miracle interferes with this then the two laws bring about a different result. It’s the same scenario as 1 and 1 = 2 being changed to 1 and 1 = 3. Believers say that this is wrong. It is law 1 plus law 2 plus miracle law 3 = a different result from X. 1 and 1 being 2 is still valid but a tampering is done to give a different result. 1 and 1 being 2 then means nothing in the practical mundane world.

It’s a matter of worldwide concern when a miracle takes place – though the world wouldn’t be concerned it ought to be.

Ask if an event claimed to be a miracle really is. This will need very strong verification regardless of whether the miracle is small.

The view that the bigger the miracle the greater the evidence is a mistake. In a sense, a God who could raise a dead person but who instead toasts your bread there and then, is doing a greater miracle. It would be a miracle in the sense that a top pop star would release a single that has barely any words or tune or direction and that nothing natural is behind it. It seems very trivial and too out of character for a God to do that and that would be a more wondrous thing than Jesus coming back alive.

The claims made by a miracle are to be distinguished from the miracle. A miracle can make outrageous claims and have an outrageous context. These claims need verification on their own merits. The miracle needs verification and the claims it makes, and arises in, need verification too. That is two separate jobs.

You need gold-standard clear hard evidence for claims made by a miracle. But for the miracle itself, a small miracle needs as much backup as a mammoth one. Why? The form of the miracle may differ but the nature of the miracle is the same, it defies what we know of nature.

Religion does not want you to think that big and small miracles alike need huge evidence for that distracts from the miracles it wants you to believe in - the ones it uses for propaganda reasons. This evidence is so difficult and time-consuming to verify that clearly all believers in miracles are inferring that evidence isn’t so important and if so, then we should believe individuals who claim revelations about the end of the world!

STATISTICS

Religion and the "professionals" who say its miracles happened conveniently ignore statistics when they investigate. We do countless things every day. We live on a planet with billions of people, animals and plants. Even what looks peaceful and quiet in nature, is a hive of activity. We don't need Darwinism to tell us that we are all living alongside threats and that only works for a while. Eventually nature takes from us and kills us. My body is a warzone, red in tooth and claw, though I will not notice this. It is ridden with competition that breaks it down.

It is no surprise with all that competition and complexity that we do not accurately assess what an extremely rare event means. The extremely rare paradoxically happens a lot. A brain tumour dissolving on its own is remarkable when you forget that there are eight billion people out there. The more people, the more it will happen. And we are biased. We want to think something sends us luck so that our lotto win is some kind of special treatment. It makes us feel safe.

Statistician David Hand tells us that the extraordinarily rare hit of good or bad luck is commonplace and if I would let myself be more observant I would see something in that category at least once a month. He is thinking of wonders such as something like lightening striking the same thing twice.

I would add that if you put the crave for excitement and magic aside, and if you look for more boring and mundane strokes of luck or ill luck, you will notice how frequent they are.

While people lie and make mistakes when they report a miracle, we must not overlook that nature can do things that look like miracles and at times you may never be able to show what it was. Unexplained does not mean inexplicable.

The point is that the "small" wonders are the ones that count. They have a bigger impact overall.

We have learned that we should not favour the fashionable "major" miracles of religious systems, over any minor miracle claim AT ALL. Now we have learned that though in principle, if miracles should be tested and we are going to test the "minor" ones, that statistics is against us. You would never know what to start with for extraordinary events of a small nature are probably nearly daily occurrences in a person's life.

The drive to show pet miracles to be probably true is riddled with half-truths and often lies. You will wonder if a wonder such as Jesus rising needs lies to defend it, if it is a lie itself.

CONCLUSION

Miracle believers would be less keen on them if they stopped assuming miracles only happen to be seen and give a message from God and show his love. They hope that makes miracle belief safer. If tampering happens, they can trust nothing and no one.

It is not how big or small a miracle is, it is that it is a miracle. That needs verification.

I would add that when you want prayers, you want hidden miracles to help you. Maybe you mean the "small" ones. But prayer is definitely a problem for it reflects the bad mindset that goes along with such desires.