Miracle Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ==Naturalistic explanations== A miracle may be false information or simply a fictional story, rather than something that truly happened. A miracle experience may be due to [[Cognitive bias|cognitive errors]] (e.g. [[overthinking]], [[jumping to conclusions]]) or [[psychological disorder|psychological error]]s (e.g. [[hallucination]]s) of [[witness]]es. Use of some drugs such as [[psychedelic]]s (e.g. [[ecstasy (drug)|ecstasy]]) may produce similar effects to [[religious experience]]s.<ref>{{cite web |title=The Salvia divinorum FAQ |date=July 30, 2012 |quote=Those who think of the salvia experience in religious, spiritual, or mystical terms may speak of such things as enlightenment, satori, and "cleansing the doors of perception." |url=http://www.sagewisdom.org/faq.html |website=SageWisdom.org |access-date=August 26, 2007 |archive-date=August 16, 2001 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20010816113130/http://www.sagewisdom.org/faq.html |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Adamson |first1=Sophia |last2=Metzner |first2=Ralph |title=The Nature of the MDMA Experience and Its Role in Healing, Psychotherapy, and Spiritual Practice |url=http://www.maps.org/research-archive/mdma/revision.html |website=maps.org |publisher=MAPS |access-date=16 December 2018 |archive-date=10 October 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181010061017/http://www.maps.org/research-archive/mdma/revision.html |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Watts |first=Alan |author-link=Alan Watts |title=Psychedelics and Religious Experience |journal=[[California Law Review]] |volume=56 |pages=74β85 |number=1 |date=January 1968 |doi=10.2307/3479497 |jstor=3479497 |url=https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1110164 |access-date=2023-06-08 |archive-date=2022-12-21 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221221085344/https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1110164 |url-status=live }}{{void|comment|Fabrickator|public open access via Berkeley Law Library}}</ref> ===Law of truly large numbers=== {{main|Law of truly large numbers|Littlewood's law}} Statistically improbable events are sometimes called miracles. For instance, when three classmates coincidentally meet in a different country decades after having left school, they may consider this ''miraculous''. However, a colossal number of events happen every moment on Earth; thus, extremely unlikely coincidences also happen every moment. Events considered ''impossible'' are therefore not so{{snd}}they are just increasingly rare and dependent on the number of individual events. British mathematician [[J. E. Littlewood]] suggested that individuals should statistically expect one-in-a-million events to happen to them at the rate of about one per month. By his definition, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace. Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page