Miracles

Frequently you hear in discussions with believers of claims of miracles. Someone's cancer was cured, another had back problems that went away, someone's car was sliding on the ice, and they prayed and simultaneously regained control, and so on. There are a good number of fallacies at work when people put these forward as evidence for their religion.

The most common type of miracle in my experience is the Unexplainable Miracle. That is, something unusual happened, and the person can't explain it, so they assume it was a miracle. This is known in philosophy as an "argument from ignorance" - essentially what the person is claiming is "I don't know how x happened, therefore I do." Do you see the fallacy there? If you don't know something, then you don't - full-stop. If you come upon a really weird situation, and you can't explain it, the only reasonable thing you can do is accept your ignorance. Pretending you know when you don't isn't an acceptable response.

The next most common (again, in my personal experience) is the Coincidental Miracle: someone prays for something, and they get it.

One good example is a plane crash. The plane goes down, nearly everybody's praying for their life to be saved, and only one of them survives. Not surprisingly, this was one of the ones who was praying for their life. Therefore, they conclude, God must have saved my life. It's a miracle! A real one! Or so they think - it shouldn't be surprising that if most of the people are praying as the plane goes down, the one left over will be likely to have been among the praying ones.

What's more, when it's not one that was praying, they tend to assume it's just a lucky break - or even less reasonably, they give credit to God for saving their life, anyway. But what about all the ones that died? Did God just not listen to them?

The last one I think deserves its own category are Self-Fulfilling Miracles. For instance, someone is told that if a special blessing is given, their pain will go away. This is known scientifically as the placebo effect - in fact, scientists have discovered just what causes the placebo effect. Or, someone has difficulty walking, has a prayer said for them, and is able (temporarily) to walk; another has the flu, and their symptoms lessen after a blessing. What you don't see is someone's broken leg suddenly mending over ten seconds - that would be a miracle.

All of these can be explained the normal way: the placebo effect. Studies have repeatedly shown either a very small positive effect, within the realm of chance, no effect at all, or a negative effect. On average, prayer shows no effect beyond a placebo. This is a very important point for people to understand, that once something is explained, you don't need to explain it again. This is the essence of Occam's Razor, which states that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" - we already know that the placebo effect exists, we already know that it's sufficient to explain these phenomena, and as a result, we don't gain any information or better our understanding of the world by saying it's a miracle. All it does is clutter our worldview.

The main point of all of this is: if there's no difference between a miracle and the way things happen normally, then miracles cease to have meaning - and if something would have happened, "miracle" or not, then it's not good evidence that your religious beliefs are accurate. You'll have to find some other argument.