ABSTRACT
This chapter covers three variants of the basic meaning: intervention miracles, contingency miracles, and natural miracles. In religious traditions sometimes events in this last sense—an event that goes against the laws of nature— are regarded as having religious significance and attributed to religious founders, saints, and prophets. An intervention miracle is an act of God by which God intervenes in the natural order and causes an event that goes against and so "violates" a natural law, an event that is physically impossible. Of course, that religious people do this does not in itself show that events thought to be contingency miracles really are miracles, really are in some way due to God's action. Natural events that some religious people have seen as natural miracles, for which God may be thanked, include the birth of a child, a sunset, a seascape, a smile, the movement of our hand, and much more.
