Are miracles possible?

When people ask whether miracles are possible, they are often really asking a deeper question: does God exist, and if so, is he personally active in the world he made? Once that question is answered, the possibility of miracles largely follows on its own. Science studies regular patterns and repeatable processes in nature; it is simply not equipped to declare in advance that a free personal agent, whether human or divine, could never act within or upon that system in an unusual way.

Framed this way, objecting to miracles on 'scientific' grounds alone often smuggles in an unproven philosophical assumption, that no such personal agent exists beyond the material universe, rather than offering genuine scientific evidence against the possibility.

The philosopher David Hume argued in the eighteenth century that because our uniform experience of natural law is so consistent, it is never rational to believe a miracle report, since the evidence against it, drawn from all of regular human experience, will always outweigh the testimony for it. This argument has remained influential, but many philosophers, including believing ones, point out a circularity in it: Hume's argument only works if we assume in advance that natural law is absolutely inviolable and that no evidence could ever be strong enough to justify an exception, which is precisely the question at stake, not a neutral starting point.

If God actually exists and genuinely acts in history at particular moments, then Hume's uniform 'experience' of nature simply would not include those moments, and appealing to that experience to rule them out in advance becomes an exercise in begging the question rather than sound reasoning.

It is also worth noting that Hume's standard, if applied consistently, would rule out believing almost any surprising but true event, since rare things by definition go against the bulk of our ordinary experience. Historians regularly accept well-attested but highly unusual events, an unlikely military upset, a one-in-a-million medical recovery, without demanding they first be probable on average. What actually justifies believing a miracle report is not whether the event is common, but whether the testimony for it is early, multiply attested, and offered by people with no evident motive to lie, precisely the kind of evidence the resurrection has in its favor.

The God described in Scripture spoke the universe into being out of nothing (Genesis 1:1) and continues to uphold all things by his powerful word (Hebrews 1:3). Jeremiah marveled that nothing is too hard for the God who made the heavens and the earth by his great power (Jeremiah 32:17). For a God with that kind of power and that kind of relationship to creation, performing what we call a miracle requires no more effort or difficulty than any ordinary act of providence, since both flow equally from his sustaining power.

Once the existence of such a God is granted, even provisionally for the sake of argument, miracles stop being strange intrusions into an otherwise closed system and become entirely unsurprising, expected acts of a personal Creator who remains free and active within what he made.

Miracle claims in Scripture are not simply asserted with no evidence offered; the central miracle of the Christian faith, the resurrection of Jesus, can be examined using ordinary historical method, weighing early testimony, multiple attestation, and the transformed lives of eyewitnesses. That evidence, explored more fully in discussions of the minimal facts argument and the historical case for the resurrection, gives good reason to trust that this particular miracle claim rests on solid historical ground rather than wishful legend.

A natural follow-up question is why biblical miracles seem clustered around a few key periods, the exodus, the ministries of Elijah and Elisha, and the ministry of Jesus and the apostles, rather than scattered evenly across all of history. Scripture itself suggests these clusters mark moments when God was authenticating a new stage of his redemptive work, confirming Moses as his chosen deliverer, or confirming Jesus and the apostles' message as truly from God (Hebrews 2:3-4, John 20:30-31). Miracles in Scripture generally function less as random displays of power and more as signs pointing toward a specific revelation God wanted his people to trust.

This does not mean God has gone silent or inactive since. Christians differ on how frequently miraculous healing or other direct divine intervention occurs today, but nearly all agree that God remains sovereign, personal, and free to act, whether through what looks like an obvious miracle or through the quieter, no less real providence of answered prayer, medical breakthroughs, and sustaining grace in hardship.

Many people ask this question not out of philosophical curiosity but because they are hurting, wondering whether God can, or will, act in their own suffering, their prayers, their circumstances. The gospel's answer is a resounding yes: the same immeasurable power that raised Jesus from the dead is still at work for those who trust him (Ephesians 1:19-20). At the same time, Scripture is honest that God does not grant every request the way we ask, as Paul himself learned when his own plea for healing was met not with removal of his suffering but with the promise of sustaining grace (2 Corinthians 12:8-9).

God is not distant, and he is not bound by the laws he created. He is free to act, and he invites your honest prayers, trusting his wisdom whether he chooses to intervene visibly or to walk with you through the difficulty itself.