Do you believe in miracles?

Being a retired philosophy professor, I have to say "What do you mean by 'miracle'?" If you mean an occasion where God sets aside the laws of nature to bring about an outcome impossible or improbable under those laws at the bidding of some person in deep concern about this outcome, then, no, I don't believe in that. If you mean only that a person praying for an outcome that is improbable or impossible under the known laws of nature brings about that outcome, then I have to go at least to litotes: I don't disbelieve.

The known laws of nature are known to be wrong in at least some of their details, though just where and how has been a matter of dispute for the last century, after a very hopeful beginning in the early 1900s. With a significant part of the universe missing and while chasing a particle that some have said (at least partly seriously) is trying to prevent its own discovery, scientists are coming to a point where they must look for new paradigms for investigation. And many have been offered. I find not incredible one that has not been suggested in scientific circles: that psychic energy (for want of a better term) exists undetected and has effects in the physical world.

I am well aware of the debunking of such a notion: the erroneous reports, incorrect interpretations, conscious and unconscious misdirections, coincidences and what not. But there still seems to be a core of cases that resist explanation from current science and have not been dealt with otherwise because we don't know what else to do. Nor do I have any suggestions what else to do except observe and record carefully and keep an open mind.

So I can imagine a force, springing perhaps from human though, which humans could learn to manipulate to cause effects in the physical world. And one that humans have occasionally actually manipulated, either by accident or by esoteric techniques. The trick in research would be to isolate cases of this sort from those that fall under one or more of the debunking rubrics. Attempts to this so far have been fairly unsuccessful: the best case presented have often been found to be flawed in areas where the researcher had a particular blind spot. But the effort ought to continue.

One hope for improvement is that I do not take this quest as a spiritual one, as a move toward liberation or ascension to a higher plane or absorption into the All, or whatever. Yet it does have a religious base of a sort. If you believe there is a God who laid down natural laws which He will not violate (slipping back into a common mode here) and you allow the possibility of miracles, then you are led to the possibility of (undiscovered) natural laws that explain what appears miraculous given the currently know natural laws.

To clarify one thing, no one (or almost no one and no one we know of) knows how to manipulate this force. If someone happens to hit upon it at one time, lucky for them. If another, in as deep anguish and with as much faith, does not happen to hit on it, bad luck. Not lack of faith or inadequate trying, just not hitting on the right moves, whatever they are (and the successful one appears to be no clearer about that than anyone else -- possibly because they have been pointed in the wrong direction). Something more is required than faith the size of a mustard seed (which, come to look at it, is not all that small a seed after all) and apparently than some rituals, with or without faith. What that more is has yet to be found (or demonstrated not to exist) and we apparently do not know where to look.

This seems very flimsy ground for even just not disbelieving in miracles, but it is a reason which satisfies some sort of rational base, given the postulates of faith.