The tension between science and religion is often framed around the question of miracles.
Science does not explicitly declare that miracles cannot happen; rather, it operates as if nature behaves in a consistent and regular way. This raises an important question. If science does not say that miracles are impossible, why do religious believers fail to shout: “Miracles do not happen today—but tomorrow might be different”? That would mean for example suggesting that from midnight chemotherapy might be useless. If they say it is science to affirm that miracles might happen, they have to encourage science shouting that its conclusions might be overturned at any moment by an unexplained miracle. If science did that, then all its knowledge—including the reliability of antibiotics, gravity, or electricity—would become provisional to the point of uselessness. Science cannot function.
Religion, for its part, avoids openly demanding this kind of concession because doing so would make its challenge to science too obvious.
Science is minimalist in what it claims. If Jesus truly rose from the dead, modern scientific standards would demand video documentation, medical confirmation of death, and ongoing observation of his continued life. If he appeared only briefly and intermittently, how do we know he remained alive when unseen? Was he fully alive, or only partially restored? He wore robes; observers saw hands and a face. Religious traditions are full of partial resurrections—talking heads, animated corpses, or temporary returns. Science could never rule out such possibilities. From a scientific standpoint, the most that evidence might support is a partial resurrection, not a complete victory over death. Anything more would go beyond what the evidence can justify and would become an act of wishful thinking rather than science.
Science follows a broad principle - that nature behaves in regular ways. The sun does not speak, goats do not give birth to kittens, and dead men do not rise. From this perspective, any report of such a miracle is outweighed by the overwhelming evidence that such things do not happen. The conclusion is that the report must be an illusion, an error, or a lie. Or simply unexplained. Unexplained does not mean in supernatural.
Religious believers respond by arguing that general laws can still hold even if rare exceptions occur, provided the evidence for the exception is strong enough. In theory, this sounds reasonable. In practice, however, the required evidence would have to be of great quality - and it never is.
Another problem arises with any alleged supernatural intervention. Suppose a person’s dog appears to come back to life. Nobody and nothing, never mind science, can determine how or where a miracle supposedly occurred. Was the dog resurrected, duplicated, or placed in suspended animation? Did the observer hallucinate the death? Did a miracle interfere with the ability to detect a pulse? The possibilities are endless, and none can be conclusively ruled out. Even if science could confirm that something unusual happened, it could only say that the event occurred—not that it came from a trustworthy or benevolent supernatural being with a hidden moral purpose. To claim more would be to preach religion rather than practice science.
Science must allow evidence to speak for itself, without importing assumptions about divine intentions, mysterious messages, or higher purposes. Once science starts explaining events in those terms, it abandons its own standards.
Belief in the supernatural only makes sense if nature is sometimes unable to account for what happens.
What if you say, “I believe in the supernatural, but it never acts in any noticeable way"?
Or, "I believe in the supernatural, but only when it behaves in way I can notice"? You still have to concede that there is no serious reason to hold that it really does make sure it will always be noticed. Your position is very weak.
Or, "I believe in the supernatural and that sometimes it can be noticed and other times it isn't"?
Intervention that may happen or claimed to happen without being detectable threatens science. The danger is not that science might someday discover such intervention, but that it might never be able to detect it at all. If that were the case, science would be reduced to mere opinion—stripped of authority, reliability, and value. A world where anything might be tampered with by unseen miracles is not a world in which science can meaningfully or firmly exist.