I was in an informal poker game once many years ago, when for a deal every hand was a royal flush. The dealer was known for being a tricky guy—the other players threw down their hands and ordered the dealer to redeal. This time every hand was four of a kind. The players stalked off in disgust, muttering. To them there was no miracle, just trickery.

But what about me? The memory of that event has followed me down through the eerie corridors of life, sneaking up on me late at night, eliciting a sense of disbelief at times and awe and wonder at other times. I can not so easily shrug the thing off as trickery.

You see, I was the dealer.

@WilliamFleming that would be eerie. And I cannot claim I have never experienced odd occurrences. I choose to hold to mathematics until otherwise proven. That night would have been a good night to have played the lottery (And not Shirley Jackson's)

I agree. A miracle is something that can not happen in the natural world (e.g. raising the dead). If anything happens in the natural world, it might be an extremely rare event but it is NOT a miracle.

@TheMiddleWay I don't have any actual problem in principle with using "miracle" in a hyperbolic rather than literal way, my malfunction is more that the religious will then claim it's a divine miracle of direct intervention by supernatural beings or forces. Even that doesn't bother me except that some of them will claim that this is "proof" that god intervenes in human affairs or that "prayer changes things", when it is most manifestly NOT, because:

The unusual / unlikely / unexplained are not miracles. While an oncologist can give you fairly accurate odds of survival or expected time to death in the general case, these are only odds and expectations, not ironclad predictions, because there are many known and unknown and even unknowable variables that go into such calculations. While it is known that for example a pancreatic cancer victim who follows the usual diagnostic trajectory typically has about 6 months or less to live, there is the rare outlier who survives way longer than expected or even who recovers for reasons that aren't well understood. In that event we can be pretty confident that the eventual explanation will be a natural explanation for such outliers that we'll understand better in the future; it's far less likely to be intervention by invisible beings. In fact, because the supernatural is inherently non-falsifiable there's no WAY to substantiate supernatural intervention, so that's actually outside the realm of what's possible to legitimately claim to know or to justify believing anyway.

Doctors can't really "give you no chance", they can only say that it's highly unlikely you will survive, and to overcome your resistance to adjusting your expectations to your new reality, they may hyperbolically say, there is "no chance" of survival. But if you press them to unpack that, they don't have some absolute knowing, and can't. Doctor's knowledge is limited and not a physical law.

@TheMiddleWay If a scientist or technician says there's zero chance they are engaging in hyperbole and/or overreach. Likewise when they say something is 100% certain.

People beating the odds is just people beating the odds ... or more accurately, people's experience falling outside the typical. So no ... if a patient survives despite what medicine expects, that's not a miracle. It's an exception, which may or may not be fully explicable.

And yes, a theist will tend to want to explain gaps in knowledge in terms of divine influence, that's basic "god of the gaps" reasoning; and a non-theist will tend to assume that which falls outside human knowledge and understanding is either beyond our finite intellectual and perceptual abilities and thus forever unknowable to us, or, will eventually be incorporated into our ever-increasing understanding of and grasp of the natural world.

Really the difference between those two general groups of people lies largely in their [un]willingness to sit with uncertainty. To most theists, not being able to stake a knowledge claim is intolerable and must be resolved via contrived explanations that are conveniently unfalsifiable. Non-theists have learned to move beyond this investment in their own rightness and are willing to admit they don't know what they don't know, and that's okay.

Science, unlike religion, is not a system that can legitimately promise 100% certitude or comprehension / explanation. That's the province of religion. That's theism's basic snake oil. Because science produces about 300% more actual understanding and innovation and potential for positive change and reduction of human suffering vs religion, sometimes people get a little arrogant and start thinking IT has all the answers religion claims to. It does not. The scientific method, properly followed, has only the answers we are currently capable of perceiving, understanding, verifying, documenting and applying, while religious faith, properly followed, is only right as often as a stopped clock. That's the ACTUAL difference between the two.

@TheMiddleWay String theory is not actually a theory, it's a hypothesis. It's one of the unfortunate wrong uses of the term "theory" in a scientific context. Worse: it's not, to my knowledge, a scientifically valid hypothesis, in that it is non-falsifiable. Such hypotheses are sometimes floated in science, so that people can look for ways to falsify them and hopefully make them scientifically valid, but you're correct, when science does this, it's not got any firmer epistemological ground to stand on that does religious faith. Although it sometimes can have more truly plausible ground to stand on in that the hypothesis can at least be shown to not be inconsistent with proven theory -- whereas often all religion has for its assertions is that it's not inconsistent with other aspects of its own self-ratifying dogma.

Science isn't designed to provide 100% certainty and the fact that some people try to use it for that purpose doesn't change that fact. Conservation of energy in a closed system is not a 100% certainty, it is more of a 99.999999% certainty.

Actual scientific theories (established explanatory frameworks), ever since they began to be put forth under the aegis of the modern scientific method (roughly around Newton's time), have never been falsified, even though there's still a teensy possibility that one could be. They have been elaborated for edge cases (e.g., we still use Newtonian physics for everyday uses, even for most celestial mechanics; but it's not sufficiently accurate at very large or very small scales, which is why we have general relativity and quantum electrodynamics. These things don't invalidate Newtonian physics, they just extend its utility).

Because no established and accepted scientific theory has ever been invalidated, that system of thinking has been validated and the odds of an actual scientific theory being overturned are extremely remote, so remote that for practical purposes they are 100% certainties even if for technical philosophical purposes they are not.

It is rather like me knowing what my name is. As a semantic shortcut I can state that I know my name with 100% certainty, and have 100% agreement from everyone who knows or has known me, that this is my name. But technically I could be wrong or misled. One of my older brothers could, for all I know, tell me tomorrow that on his deathbed my father confessed that they had actually given me a different name, or that I was a foundling or an adopted child with a different original given name. But I have no actual basis to think that my name is other than it is, so in practice I don't go to those places.

So it is with conservation of energy in a closed system. No one has ever observed a counterexample despite doubtless millions of person-hours of observation, so it's unlikely they ever will. You're not going to conduct your life any differently in that scenario than if this law was something we were literally 100% certain about. However ... that doesn't change that science is still just a consensus about the likelihood of something, even when that likelihood approaches 100%.

@WilliamFleming That's like asking why things are as they are. Things can't be other than they are. And if things were not reasonably predictable we wouldn't be able to usefully think about anything in the first place. It also speaks to the "fine tuning" argument, which is a problem of perspective bias. To a puddle, it's perfectly "designed" to hold the shape of water. To an outside observer, water just conforms to what it has encountered.

@mordant

To say that things can’t be other than they are might be a satisfactory explanation for you, but I am not satisfied. Things are as they are and it is s profound inexplicable miracle.

@TheMiddleWay I think we're on the same page and you've basically restated my views in different words and with a different emphasis.

I said previously that we overstate our certainty to compensate for people resisting unpleasant realities (e.g., your child is going to die and trying to prevent that will just add to their suffering). And sure, if someone lucks out, they might claim god was their trump card, and that would be a baseless claim, but it's a claim they can make if they want. Our actions must be informed by probabilities, not improbabilities and certainly not by impossibilities.

To suggest we aren't 100% sure of anything doesn't in any way mean that we NEED to be. 99.999% certainty, or even 90% certainty, is highly useful and actionable information for virtually any practical purpose that I can think of. Often, even 60% will do, as most matters just aren't life-and-death consequential.