What do you mean by miracle? | Lee Strobel & Mark Mittelberg
What Do You Mean By Miracle?
By Lee Strobel & Mark Mittelberg
What do you mean by miracle? I hear that term used in so many ways.
So do I—sometimes even by myself! I was recently driving through downtown Houston, its streets choked with cars at rush hour, as I inched toward a skyscraper where I was due for a meeting. Suddenly, against all odds, I spotted a vacant parking space adjacent to the door.
“A miracle,” I mused—and maybe it was. Or maybe it wasn’t.
The truth is that we often throw around that term too loosely.
Not long ago I set my computer to search for the key word miracle among the news stories on the Internet, and all sorts of articles popped up:
“Boat captain rescues ‘miracle’ cat thrown off bridge”
“Miracle on Water Street: A doctor witnesses crash, saves man’s life”
“Miracle baby born the size of a tennis ball now home”
A football player was said to need a “miracle” to resuscitate his sagging career
A diver who survived hitting his head on the platform is called a “miracle man”
So what’s the best way to define the miraculous?
Philosophers and theologians have offered various descriptions. Augustine was poetic, saying a miracle is “whatever appears that is difficult or unusual above the hope and power of them who wonder.” Scottish philosopher David Hume was skeptical: “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.” Oxford’s Richard Swinburne was straightforward, calling a miracle “an event of an extraordinary kind, brought about by a god, and of religious significance.”
Personally, I’m partial to the definition offered by the late Richard L. Purtill, professor emeritus of philosophy at Western Washington University:
A miracle is an event:
Brought about by the power of God that is
a temporary
exception
to the ordinary course of nature
for the purpose of showing that God has acted in history.
This obviously sets real miracles apart from much of what is described today as “miraculous”—including, I’ll have to admit, my finding a parking spot in Houston’s rush hour!
Lee Strobel is founding director of The Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics at Colorado Christian University. He is the New York Times best-selling author of The Case for Christ and three dozen other books.
Mark Mittelberg is a bestselling author, speaker and apologist. He is the Executive Director of the Lee Strobel Center at Colorado Christian University.
This is an excerpt from The Miracles Answer Book by Lee Strobel & Mark Mittelberg. Used with permission.