Can a Modern Person Believe in Miracles?

The assumption behind this question is that science has shown miracles to be impossible. But look closely at what science actually does: it describes the regular patterns of nature—how things normally behave. A miracle is, by definition, an exception to the ordinary course, an act of God within his creation. Science can tell you what usually happens; it cannot, by itself, prove that nothing but the usual can ever happen. The claim “the natural order is a closed box that nothing outside can reach into” is not a finding of any experiment. It is a philosophical assumption—naturalism—brought to the evidence, not drawn from it.

And that assumption quietly begs the whole question. Of course, if you assume in advance that no God exists and nothing can act on nature from beyond it, then you will conclude no miracle ever happened. But that isn’t a discovery; it’s the premise dressed up as a conclusion. The honest approach is to ask the prior question first: does God exist? If there is a Creator who made the natural order and sustains its regularities, then he is hardly trapped by them. The one who set the pattern can act outside it. As the angel told Mary, “nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). Paul put the challenge directly: “Why is it thought incredible by any of you that God raises the dead?” (Acts 26:8).

In fact, science depends on the very regularity that makes miracles recognizable as miracles. If nature were chaotic, nothing would stand out as extraordinary; it is precisely because water normally doesn’t turn to wine that the wedding at Cana means anything. Miracles are not violations of a system Christians don’t understand; they are rare, purposeful acts of the God who authored the system.

So the real question is never “can miracles happen?” in the abstract—it is whether a particular one did. And Christianity stakes everything on one testable, historical claim: that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead. Weigh that on its evidence. If it happened, the door to the others is open, and the whole faith stands or falls with it (1 Corinthians 15:14).