Weak Reasons! Almost as bad as the "God helped me find my car keys / God helped me get over the flu / I prayed for a Job and I got it / I survived a car crash" therefore there is a God scenario. Purely Subjective. I'll comment...
* Unless the crippled man was followed up afterwards (and it was proven he wasn't one of those types of crippled people who CAN stand up for very brief periods), there are cases of people who think they are healed in the spur of the moment, like at revivals, who can stand briefly, but then after that initial "rush" is over, are back to their normal crippled state. Not to mention, there are many of the same types of tales of the miraculous healings of cripples in *Other Religions*, without invoking the name of Jesus.
* As for the snake, the person making loud noises, weird hand motions, and what have you, could have scared it back to the owner. Not to mention, there are Snake Charmers in India who can do similar things without invoking the name of Jesus.
"Spiritual Experiences", "Feeling The Touch Of God", Etc. People of *All* Major Religions claim to experience those, equally sincere. (I have as well, experienced Personal Gnosis.) Every Major Religion also has Miracle Stories and Divine Intervention Stories.
Do you want to know MY idea of a good miracle? I know of a few, and one even happened to myself. Things that aren't so easily and readily explained. The only types of "Miracle" stories I give any sort of potential credibility to are the ones that are clearly suggestive of being above and beyond mere coincidence. Such as "Divine Intervention" stories that are clearly suggestive that there was an external force at work. One example I can give of this is my own experience...
When I was 15 years old, I was traveling with my mother, step-father, with me and my siblings in the backseat, on the highway heading back home from a vacation visiting my step-father's family in another state.
As we were driving along, unknown and unseen by us at the time, a large highway frate truck in the next lane had us in it's blind spot, and was merging over into our lane, and would have rammed into us from the side.
Just then, our car horn miraculously beeped *BY ITSELF* very loud and very clear three times in succession, and we all glanced over to see the large highway frate truck moving back over into it's own lane, having heard it, mere inches from us.
My step-dad was in absolute shock, and said to my mother, "How did you move over so fast in time to beep the horn? I didn't even see you." She was equally shocked, "I thought YOU had beeped the horn?" Neither of them had, I'd watched from the backseat.
The horn never did that before or since. "Coincidence" or "Anamoly"? Hell if I know. But from personal experience I can see that such stories can happen, and I can just as easily see how when such stories do happen, they generally get mass circulated as Glurge Urban Legends and Chain Emails, reducing credibility of the phenomenon in general. The whole incident left me going "WTF?" for sure.
If a mere coincidence, I can easily see how such an event could be reinterpreted as divine intervention. But if real divine intervention, it was far above the "God helped me find my car keys / I was sick with the flu and got better / I prayed and I got a job / I survived a car crash" types of "Divine Intervention". --- Eteponge
Oh yeah, here are some far more convincing "Miracle" cases, than most of the ones you hear about...
(1):
"In 1962 a man named Vittorio Michelli was admitted to the Military Hospital of Verona, Italy, with a large cancerous tumor on his left hip. So dire was his prognosis that he was sent home without treatment, and within ten months his hip had completely disintegrated, leaving the bone of his upper leg floating in nothing more than a mass of soft tissue. He was, quite literally, falling apart. As a last resort he traveled to Lourdes and had himself bathed in the spring (by this time he was in a plaster case, and his movements were quite restricted). Immediately on entering the water he had a sensation of heat moving through his body. After the bath his appetite returned and he felt renewed energy. He had several more baths and then returned home.
Over the course of the next month he felt such an increasing sense of well-being he insisted his doctors X-ray him again. They discovered his tumor was smaller. They were so intrigued they documented every step in his improvement. It was a good thing because after Michelli's tumor disappeared, his bone began to regenerate, and the medical community generally view this as an impossibility. Within two months he was up and walking again, and over the course of the next several years his bone completely reconstructed itself.
A dossier on Michelli's case was sent to the Vatican's Medical Commission, an international panel of doctors set up to investigate such matters, and after examining the evidence the commission decided Michelli had indeed experienced a miracle. As the commission stated in its official report, "A remarkable reconstruction of the iliac bone and cavity has taken place. The X rays made in 1964, 1965, 1968 and 1969 confirm categorically and without doubt that an unforeseen and even overwhelming bone reconstruction has taken place of a type unknown in the annals of world medicine." (O'Reagan, Special Report, p. 9.)”
Dozens of medical experts from around the world review each reported incident and then must agree that the spontaneous recovery is "inexplicable" in the eyes of science--because of this rigorous screening process since 1862 only 67 Lourdes cases have officially been proclaimed to be miracles, even though thousands of pilgrims have petitioned the Church's medical committee that miracles have also happened to them.
(2):
"In 1990 twelve-year-old Bernadette McKenzie was unable to walk after three operations for a rare spinal condition that left her in intense pain. The nuns at her school in Philadelphia started praying for her, and one day the small girl knelt by her bed and prayed. She told God that she'd accept her fate, but if she would ever walk again she asked for a sign--that her favorite song, Forever Young, would be the next song she'd hear on the radio. It was. She jumped to her feet and ran to tell everyone--all symptoms of her spinal condition had completely vanished, a medical impossibility, and today the Catholic Church is evaluating this incident as a miracle."
(3):
There was also a case I recall seeing on Unsolved Mysteries refering to a little girl who had her bladder removed, and later visited Padre Pio, and he blessed her, and when the doctors examined her again, she had regrew her bladder. Sounds very strange, but on the episode, they had even interviewed her doctors and everything, who were baffled, and shown before and after medical information. (To my recalling, I have the episode on one of my DVDs here.)
I use to have a huge list of these types of cases somewhere. These more anomalous cases are the only ones I pay attention to. "God helped me find my cars keys / God helped me get over the flu" stories don't make me give a second glance.
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