Experience of miracles (Christianity)

A miraculous event is experienced as one defying rational explanation. It communicates with and transcends the empirical world of man, leading to perceptivity for permanent proximity of God beyond the world of experience. This perceptivity must be constantly renewed under the dulling and stifling of worldly influence. The ordinary effect of such a sudden confrontation with what appears a bizarre fact is rejection by the mind, which refuses to consider it. One knows at one level that something is impossible and could not have happened and yet one is convinced at another level that it has. Faith and devotion to God preserve the sense of wonder so that, having determined that the miraculous event is not explicable in natural terms, it is accepted as an event directly intended and caused by God with the aim of an historical dialogue with God.

Miracles demonstrate the multifaceted nature of reality, each part depending on the others which together form a whole greater than the sum of the individual parts. A 20th century model of the universe, with the influence of relativity and uncertainty and the acceptance that there is a randomness at the level of the smallest particles and waves, finds a transcendence of natural law at the macro level easier to accept than did the rationalists of the 19th century. If the function of whole of material nature is accepted as to express the will of God, God's miraculous intervention in history is seen as the bringing into play of a new mode of that function. Nature is at that point released from the confines of scientific law into a higher realm of natural law, as part of God's self-communication in free grace to man, providing a testimony of the work of God's saving will. To the Christian, the decisive miracle is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, anticipating the final destiny of man and his promised perfection.

Some would claim that miracles can be performed by great exponents of evil as well as of good, a capacity of the mind which can be used by either. They are said to obey laws at a higher plane, supernatural in that they are above the nature one knows. This is claimed by those who look on such experiences as a break-through from another plane of being to which most are strangers, but natural, for instance, to Jesus. Aldous Huxley discounts the miraculous as clearly existing but being of relatively little importance.