Miracles wreck your confidence in other people

A miracle is an event claimed to have occurred in the natural world that is attributed to divine agency and that cannot be adequately explained by ordinary natural processes, and is known to others only through testimony.

An example is how Jesus allegedly rose from the dead.

When someone believes a miracle story, they are not directly believing what God did. They are believing what a human claims God did. There is no direct access to the event—only testimony.

Because miracles are, by definition, extremely unlikely and outside normal experience, accepting them requires placing more trust in the speaker’s report than in all competing explanations (error, exaggeration, misinterpretation, legend, coincidence, deception, etc.). There is the issue of how if God want to help send you a loving sign of his presence and agency, he would make you depend on another to tell you of it.  Surely he can shine his light through the mundane daily life you experience?  Why would God ask you to let another person control how you see him?  It is about him after all!

The level of trust is unusually high. It asks the listener to treat the speaker’s reliability as stronger than the general reliability of human perception, memory, and reporting—even though humans are known to be fallible in exactly these ways.

This creates an unstable belief. If confidence in the speaker weakens even slightly, the entire miracle claim collapses, because the belief has no independent support. In that sense, the belief is insecure: it rests on a single, fragile foundation—personal testimony—rather than on publicly accessible or repeatable evidence.

Such belief creates a double doubt: doubt in oneself for accepting so much, and doubt in the other for asking it.

To overreach with trust and asking for it is not a sign of faith but of doubt. 

And a miracle is a magical event. For example, if a stone turns into bread then that is a miracle. Religion pretends that miracles are done by God as evidence of his presence and love and are not magic.  But that is a distinction without a real difference.  A witch doing miracles as evidence of her love is still a witch.

Miracles cause judgement. If an atheist does not get visions to help (not force) or make him see that God’s word is true, the believer will have to grant the possibility that God doesn’t bother sending him visions for he is too stubborn to listen even to them. Christians may say they don’t assume that. But there is still a bit of judging there. They still say it’s a possibility. So that is a bit of judgement. Miracles lead to people becoming more judgmental in that sense.

The following is not an argument that a witness to a miracle is lying that it happened, but that miracle beliefs make us unsure of what it was they were lying about.

If somebody makes a miracle claim, you can suspect fraud or a mistake. But showing something is supernatural is happening does not eliminate fraud altogether. For example, if you prove that Padre Pio really had miraculous stigmata, you cannot prove that he really suffered from these wounds though he said he did. Perhaps he used supernatural power to fake suffering. Perhaps he did not have the marks when nobody was looking.  Perhaps the doctors who verified the stigmata had a miraculous vision that the wounds were there and not just superficial.  The supernatural explanation opens up a whole new dimension in terms of the person's honesty. It entitles you to find more things to be suspicious about than you would on the natural level. The interpretation of an event as miraculous violates the rule: any faith should not create unnecessary suffering or inconvenience for people matter more than faith. It should not imply that such treatment is valid.

Suppose miracles are signs from Heaven indicating the truth of God. By revealing through miracles, God is undermining unbelievers. Unbelievers are either liars or mistaken or both. But the fact remains that if we are going to believe in religion, we must limit ourselves to harmless beliefs - beliefs that bring no bother to anybody should they prove to be wrong. Unbelievers would have the right to be alarmed and feel threatened by reported miracles and their followers.

God makes it reasonable by doing a miracle to suspect the witness of being a fraud or mad. It is not Hume we can blame for that. That is the first thing that has to be suspected when faced with such a claim.  Even religion admits that it is hard to show a miracle may be authentic and often real miracles can be dismissed as lacking credibility.  The Catholic Church recognises few out of thousands of claims as plausible.  Some that as plausible as what the Church accepts, are just ignored