ABSTRACT
The concept of a miracle is sometimes thought of as marking a border between science and religion, that is, between the phenomena that belong to science and are subject to scientific understanding and scientific explanation and those which belong to religion and are subject to religious explanation and understanding only. As such, it is a concept whose analysis can be extremely useful in getting clear about the nature of both types of understanding, even if it is only to show, as I hope to, that there is no common frontier between the two and that there are no phenomena that are in the ambiguous, even contradictory, position in which the traditional popular view of miracles places them. This ambiguous position consists in their being considered to be phenomena which seem at first sight to belong to the scientific sphere, that is, are of the right type to get a scientific explanation, but are somehow such that they “obviously” never will or can get such an explanation. That is what is supposed to be so striking and challenging about them. They are meant to challenge the run of scientific law and lawfulness itself.
