Making the lame walk again.

[The Grand Nudger]

By a "miracle," I was referring to the idea of physical miracles only such as the belief in the splitting of the moon, turning water into wine, being born of virgin (having no father), humans being resurrected from the grave, and all these other seemingly impossible physical phenomenons that are mentioned in the Scriptures.

The phenomena, in each of these cases, is the belief. A phenomena is an observable occurrence, none of these things qualify as such, since their occurrence has not been established at all. Surely there must be some example of a miracle that isn't wholly comprised of a belief in miracles? In any case (just to be thorough), I don't think the belief in any of these things is inexplicable...and it has been reproduced many times.

Of course, there are many miraculous things that happened in peoples' lives as you may agree with, but those are not physical miracles, but more like coincidences or something that happened to them at the right time, at the right moment, and in the right way that benefited them or removed them from a great danger in one way or another. A miracle could also be some kind of an amazing skill that someone developed one day.

How can you make a determination between their experiences and the "genuine article"? If a modern pistol were transported into the very distant past and fired once as a demonstration...no one would be able to reproduce that event, and no one would be able to explain that event with the laws of nature, at least those known to them. Why is this not a miracle (like the "physical miracles" above), and how might it even differ from the contents of those beliefs in miracles you mentioned above. You seem to be using some other (as-yet unspoken) criteria besides reproducibility and the understanding gained by reference to the laws of nature.

Still, there is a lower level of "miracle-ness" to those miracles than the physical miracles that I mentioned above. That's the difference.

I don't think you've actually given me much to weigh in on with regards to a difference between either the beliefs or the "lesser miracles" that follow. If the only difference being referenced is our varying level of knowledge with regards to natural law (which would seem to be the case here) then I think that the "difference" between these two types of things is much more a difference in our ability to explain any given thing...I haven;t seen a difference between the events themselves established, and aren't we being very generous with words like "event" to begin with?

Between two inexplicable things, how do we determine that one is a miracle and the other is not? Or, is everything a miracle until it is explained. Then, once explained, how can it cease to be a miracle if it ever was a miracle? All of this again assumes that a "miracle" is more than an appeal to ignorance....an assumption I'm starting to question.