The power of Christ...

[HappySkeptic]

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Either miracles are rare, or they are common.

Either miracles break natural order, or are indistinguishable from natural events.

Rare + Breaks Nature:  God's existence can't be often tested, but surely "big" events like the Holocaust would result in miracles, but none are seen.

Rare + Natural: Why imagine a God at all?
Common + Natural: How is God distingushable from nature?

Common + Breaks Nature: God's existence is verifiable, and would have been verified.  God would be part of science.  Magic would be real.
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Miracles are nonsense given the type of world we live in.

Thank you for the reply. Your analysis would be excellent on the classic understanding of miracle as an intervention from God from outside the natural world, but not with what I outlined. This is why I (in company of Borg, Wright and others) avoid the term 'miracle'.

God acts from within the natural order. Mostly you don't notice His action, occasionally you do. There is no natural/supernatural distinction. There are very surprising things that happen, things that signpost God, that imply a power at work. But these are nature aligning itself with God's purposes, pointing us to God, not magic tricks.

As such, they neither break the natural order, nor are indistinguishable from natural events. They are God's actions in the world, which are both common and rare.

An example. A close relative of mine had a recurring back condition which became excruciating after she got pregnant, which also meant the NHS couldn't do anything much to help. She went to a healing service at the church and the following day the pain was gone, and has stayed away.

Now granted, this could be psychosomatic or something 'normal'. But it doesn't matter if it was. We asked God for healing, and we got it.
As Temple said, “When I pray, coincidences happen; when I don’t, they don’t.”

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God acts from within the natural order. Mostly you don't notice His action, occasionally you do.

Perhaps you think this makes sense, but it really doesn't.  

If God does miracles according to prayer, then such things would be testable.  We would have proof of God as a verifiable scientific phenomenon.

Perhaps you would benefit from science training.  The "natural order" means that a model can predict (either deterministically or statistically) how the state of a system will change with time.  If a model can predict what will happen, there is no room for God.

There are only two "outs" that I can think of:

1) to a Deist, God designed the natural order in such a way that we exist, and that both good and bad things can occur (though we have agency to find the good things).

2) to a Christian madly trying to justify prayer: God works at the subtle quantum-mechanical level, skewing the "dice rolls" to help believers, but is very careful to never be caught being "tested".

The first is just a reverence for existence, and is not a type of God worth prayer to.  The second is just self-delusion, IMO, that God is subtly playing with nature in a way that He isn't caught.