Laser-eyes Mary toast would be miraculous.
But I would double that, just to be sure, for a few reasons.
- There may have been miracles occurring during scriptural times that were not recorded. John 21:25 strongly implies this.
- There are some “acts of God” that aren’t counted as miracles, like John’s entire vision in the book of Revelation. There’s also things like the angel with the flaming sword guarding the Garden of Eden after the expulsion, which isn’t counted as miraculous. Even if meant metaphorically it could still be counted as miraculous since there is agency behind it.
- Miracles that aren’t terribly dramatic or could be attributed to purely natural forces, but are nevertheless to divine agency, like the hardening of Pharoah’s heart in Exodus.
- Not necessarily miraculous things but supernatural occurrences, like the appearance of angels.
So we have about 240 miracles within the time described in the Bible, which I will estimate at 2300 years, from creation up until John at Patmos. I’m actually going from the patriarchs (2200 B.C. or so) past Jesus and ending at the letter-writers (around 100 A.D.). I’m not a young earth creationist so I wouldn’t necessarily include pre-Noah miracles within this time frame. I will this time just for the sake of argument. I’m also including the Babylonian exile years, a time where there was no canonical scripture written.
So it ends up being around 10 miracles per year, being liberal, which is a little less than once a month. If we go by the non-multiplied number it’s less that once every few months on average. Most of the miracles listed on that page were either not very spectacular in the sense that they could be reproduced by natural means (although with a heavy dose of coincidence). If they were very obvious miracles, they were localized, like Balaam’s donkey talking or Lazarus rising from the dead. There seem to be very few large-scale miracles, like the pillar of smoke and fire that followed the Israelites in the desert or the sun and moon stopping in the sky in Joshua.
I have no real point in this, just some interesting observations.
“For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.”
-C.S. Lewis, Miracles
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