In society today, the word miracle is commonly used to describe unexpected and surprising events: it was a miracle that I passed the exam, however, when it is used in a religious sense, it generally has the extra meaning of being "an act of god". In the Bible, one can find many examples of miracles, but the central miraculous event is the claim that Jesus rose from the dead after his crucifixion, this was easier to accept as the truth in the past, but now modern science and medical advances prove that dead people do not rise again, they can be resuscitated at the point of near death, but do not come back to life after hours of death. Therefore, can people believe in miracles in this modern scientific age? or are miracles a belief held by the superstitious and credulous people of the past? And if science discovers causes for these "events" once regarded as a miracle, does such events conclude an intervention of God?.
It is acceptable to take science as the study of the physical world and to discuss questions about God as a separate question and it is possible to believe in both, that miracles are acts of God, even though there are physical explanations for how they happen. Some people look for gaps in the knowledge of scientists and if they find any unexplained gaps that scientists do not understand, then they believe that this specific unexplainable knowledge is work of God. This type of thinking, where gaps in scientific information are plugged with religious explanation is called God-of-the-gaps thinking. Religious people who use god-of-the-gaps thinking believe that certain areas are out of bounds to science, because they are Gods working, for example the may think that is all life comes from God, then scientists will never be able to understand how it arises. Atheists have the same way of thinking except that instead of looking for what had not been explained (to find a place for God) they look for what had been explained (to try and push out God).
