Miracle
From RationalWiki
A miracle is what you call it when you see something that you can't explain and you're too impressed to try and figure out exactly what happened. Religion is riddled with them because miracles are taken as proof of the truth of religious beliefs. Science tends to take a somewhat less accommodating position towards the concept preferring to work with methodological naturalism.
Many of the miracles reported in the Bible are of the tall-tale variety that include the parting of the Red Sea, bringing back a dude named Lazarus from the dead (he was just sleepin'!), and surviving the raging fires of an oven.
Every once in a while a particularly dim Godbotherer will try to claim a miracle occurred when something medical happens that isn't well-understood, like, say, the seriously amazing spinal-injury rescue of Buffalo Bills player Kevin Everett; while some religious people claimed a miracle kept him from permanent paralysis, most scientific types are more apt to credit years of research on spinal cord injuries, emergency medicine, and dumb luck.
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[edit] Argument from Miracles
The "Argument from miracles" is an argument for the existence of God relying on eyewitness testimony or anecdotes of impossible (or extremely improbable events) to establish the active intervention of a supernatural supreme being (or supernatural agents acting on behalf of that being).
A chief critic of the "Argument from miracles" was David Hume, who defined a miracle thus: "A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined." Hume proposed to deal with miraculous claims by weighing the probability that such an event could occur against the possibility that the supposed eyewitness was either deceived or deliberately deceiving.
In fact, the main problem is that anecdotes are not really the same as evidence.
[edit] "And then a miracle occurs"
This phrase occurs in the famous cartoon by Sidney Harris. There are various forms of pseudoscience and woo which try to substantiate themselves on as-yet-unknown science or technology, because who knows what could happen in thousands of years of frantic technological development? Can you prove it isn't possible! I bet you can't!
Examples include: cryonics.
