Miracles refuted, part 1: miracles cannot be coherently defined, so they are dismissed on semantic grounds alone

Apologists have been plagued with the problems inherent in properly defining the word they use routinely when dialoging with skeptics: "miracle".

This is a severe problem because the discussion will be fruitless unless we reasonably guard against using incoherent terms, and the only way to guard against incoherent terms is to define them in a mutually agreeable way, since skeptic and Christian have to first agree on what a miracle is, or could be, before they can move on to discuss possible real-world examples.

I claim that "miracle" cannot be defined coherently, at least not sufficiently to enable scholarly debate about whether they've ever actually happened.  Let's take a look at the possibilities.

First, all definitions are question-begging to some extent.  You only agree that a "car" is defined as "vehicle" because you have already acknowledged that "vehicle" refers to a real-world thing which you've also previously described as "car".  So in ordinary discourse, a skeptic and Christian could not reasonably discuss miracles until they agree on the definition of "miracle".  Furthermore, a skeptic would not be unreasonable to require "miracle" to pass the same criteria, i.e., "miracle" must be defined by something the skeptic already believes is true, or has experience of, since that is the ultimate reason why anybody will agree to define a word the way somebody else defines it.

Second, a miracle cannot be defined as an act of God, since to do so is to close the debate, the atheist doesn't believe in God.  It may be technically true that this can be overcome by the parties first debating God's existence, but it remains just as true that until they resolve their disagreements on atheism, defining a miracle as an act of God does little more than unfairly favor the Christian before the debate gets started.

Third, a miracle cannot be defined as an event that lacks a naturalistic explanation, since otherwise we run the risk of calling a currently unknown naturalistic phenomena a "miracle", and of course, it is reasonable to carefully avoid creating the risk that we define things in a way that causes us to misconstrue reality.  And history abundantly shows that, little by little, phenomena we used to think supernatural, wasn't.  For example, we no longer assert that those who throw themselves to the ground, go all stiff and froth at the mouth while being largely unresponsive, are possessed by a demon, otherwise, we'd have to say demons can be overcome by epilepsy medication.  Christians do not believe Jesus can be phased out by pharmaceuticals.


Fourth, no, the dictionary doesn't help, that would be as stupid as saying God can be established by the simple fact that "god" has a dictionary entry.  The dictionary defines "miracle" in various ways


So there you have it:  an atheist is reasonable to refuse, if they so wish, to discuss "miracles" until they resolve with the Christian they are dialoguing with.their disagreement about God's existence.  And an atheist is reasonable to refuse, if they so wish, to define a miracle in a way that creates the risk that she will later misconstrue a naturalistic phenomena as a miracle.

So if a Christian points to an alleged "miracle" and challenges us to show that a naturalistic explanation is more likely true than the magical one, we are perfectly reasonable to insist that carefully defining our terms before we start the dialogue is crucial to any debate on any subject, and therefore, unless the parties can agree on what "miracle" signifies, trying to debate whether a term corresponds to any reality, without first properly defining the term, simply isn't academically respectable.