ABSTRACT
If “miracles” are defined as events that appear to depart from nature’s normal course, and so are judged to have a supernatural cause, belief in them was almost universal prior to the rise of modern science. The tendency to explain events by supernatural rather than natural causes sometimes became so extreme as virtually to obliterate the distinction between a natural and a supernatural event (for instance, in earlymedieval Christendom), but it is clear that most conceptions of the miraculous presuppose some such distinction. In surveying the many attempts that have been made in the past two millennia to grapple with a concept that straddles the boundary between natural science and religious belief, our attention will focus largely on attempts to clarify the natural/supernatural distinction and to show how an event could be judged to fall on one side or the other of the dichotomy. There have always been some, however (such as Plutarch, Friedrich Schleiermacher, R.F. Holland), who have been ready to argue that an event can be classified as both, and in almost every age some who have denied any intelligible application to the term “supernatural.”
