Lawrence Krauss on The argument from miracles

Lawrence Krauss approaches miracle claims as a physicist: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence for miracles has never come close to meeting the standard required to overturn well-established physical laws. The laws of nature, as understood by modern physics, are not suggestions or tendencies — they are descriptions of how the universe actually works, confirmed by centuries of testing. A claim that these laws were suspended requires evidence of extraordinary quality, and no miracle claim has ever provided it.

Krauss has been particularly critical of the way miracle claims are used in religious apologetics. He argues that believers apply a double standard: they are rigorous sceptics when evaluating the miracle claims of other religions but credulously accepting when it comes to their own. A Hindu miracle and a Christian miracle are evaluated by exactly the same evidentiary standards by an impartial observer — and by those standards, neither passes muster.

In his public debates, Krauss frequently points out that the decline in reported miracles correlates precisely with the rise of recording technology and controlled investigation. The age of miracles, it seems, ended just when we developed the tools to test them — a pattern that suggests the miracles were never there to begin with.