Miracles need to be defined as to what they are, and what they are not first. A miracle is not going to be a phenomena that happens of which we don’t YET have a scientific explanation of. If it was then gravity was a miracle but now it isn’t. The same would go for many things. It is true that the ancients did think that the sun rise and sets were not explained by science, due to the fact that science had not been discovered for most of human history. They did tend to think such things were governed by gods or were gods. In this way many such things in the ancient world were considered miracles. However the criteria of unusualness/uniqueness would be a big definitional marker for a miracle. In fact this is probably the main one for the ancient world devoid of convincing scientific understanding. This is, in part, why more miracles seem to happen in the past, or in primitive cultures than our own. Even given the unusualness definition, this is still going to be the case because of unusual events from nature that happen over long time scales, like volcanoes for instance. They are unusual events from the human perspective in a world without global news. So these were often thought off as miracles as a result, even more than the sun going up and down because it was considered unusual.
The ancients seemed to have had a gradient scale for miracles in a way we don’t think of in modern times. Unexplained things from the gods, although considered miraculous, were not at the high end of this gradient if they were things that happened all the time, as with the sun and moon going up and down in the sky, hence the unusualness definition comes into play. Events in this second category of how rare the event was increased the notability and import of the miracle, so that the word miracle begins to resemble what we would think it should mean from a modern perspective. However they still didn’t have science as their baseline, but they did have a third category that increased an event right up to the top of their miraculous scale. This would be agency detection. So if an event that was, unexplained, unusual and caused by human or other perceived intelligent agency in terms of seeing it happen from that agency, then it really was at the top of tree in terms of the miraculous and seen as a full proper miracle.
In a word where the bass line for nearly everything was kind of a miracle, baring the extreme mundane or taken for granted things of everyday life, like the effects of gravity which was not even thought about in objective terms, it might seem as though no room is left for a real miracles in the modern world where science explains so much. Even I as a Christian can see clear evidence in the scriptures of events deemed as from God having their explanation from science. I won’t go into that much, as I am sure the atheists will beat me to it and they would have a valid point in doing so. However there is much more to this subject than meets the eye. It would be easy to dismiss all miraculous claims as undiscovered science, or made up or exaggerated stores by the ignorant, willing or otherwise. This is why understanding science is so important when it comes to those who believe in miracles like I do. Unfortunately that means I would have to go into that subject as well. LOL
For the moment however I shall just post this as it is, in order to point out that David Humes approach is a bit too simplistic a way of looking at it. I think there are miracles today in exactly the way they have always happened in the past, albeit I think the real miracles of the past have often been misunderstood, and I don’t mean unknown or known phenomena explainable in theory at least, by science, that is sometimes confused as a miracle. I mean stuff that cannot by definition be explained by science when one understands the limits of science. This is not God of the gaps because of the limits of science. Just a few thoughts.
