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What is a Miracle?

This Rock Volume 19, Number 1   January 2008     Reasons for Hope By Cherie Peacock   Letters   True Education Liberates By Rollin A. Lasseter   How We Got Where We Are   Inaccuracy is Lying   The Connection between Education and Prayer   Today: Not Education but Social Engineering   The Sin of Sloth: What the Couch Potato and the Workaholic Have in Common By Leon Suprenant   Further Reading   Former Anglican Clergymen Bolster British Catholicism By Joanna Bogle   Who Worships in the UK?   Loaves and Fishes: Fashionable Priests and the "Miracle of Sharing" By Steve Ray   Read the Different Accounts of the Miracle   What is a Miracle?   What Did the Fathers of the Church Teach?   Damascus Road Episcopal Clergyman Discovers True Home By Chris Findley   By the Book Latter-Day Saints and the "Great Apostasy." By Tim Staples   Eyes to See Ugly as Sin By Michael Schrauzer   Truth be Told The Popess Who Just Won’t Go Away By Robert P. Lockwood   Quick Questions   Last Writes By Karl Keating    Subscribe    Permissions

A miracle is not simply a natural event which seems bigger than life. A miracle is the hand of God acting within nature to produce an effect that neither man nor nature unaided could do on its own. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia’s entry on Miracles:

A miracle is said to be above nature when the effect produced is above the native powers and forces in creatures of which the known laws of nature are the expression, as raising a dead man to life, e.g., Lazarus (John 11), the widow’s son (1 Kgs. 17). A miracle is said to be outside, or beside, nature when natural forces may have the power to produce the effect, at least in part, but could not of themselves alone have produced it in the way it was actually brought about. Thus the effect in abundance far exceeds the power of natural forces, or it takes place instantaneously without the means or processes which nature employs. In illustration we have the multiplication of loaves by Jesus (John 6), the changing of water into wine at Cana (John 2). . . . A miracle is said to be contrary to nature when the effect produced is contrary to the natural course of things.