Divinity Atlas
Miracles Is the Atlas's Fourth Most Argued With Type
A miracle, in this atlas's own record, is an event a tradition holds to have broken the ordinary run of nature, recorded here as a claim received and handed down rather than as a fact this atlas settles. Counted by type, Miracles is the atlas's fourth most argued with type: 32.7 percent of its recorded facts are debated or debunked, against a baseline of well under one percent, behind only Frequencies, Prophecies and Psi Phenomena.
Twelve Cases Argued, None of Them Closed
Twelve of the thirteen cases carrying the type's contested facts are marked debated rather than debunked, meaning the record holds real competing readings rather than a closed case. The Resurrection and the Feeding of the Five Thousand each carry a debated investigation verdict and a debated skeptical explanation in the atlas's own record, and the same debated skeptical-explanation status recurs on the Miracle of the Sun's 1917 mass sighting at Fatima, the Wedding at Cana, the Raising of Lazarus, and the Incorruptibility of the Saints. The Guadalupe Tilma carries a debated investigation verdict too, distinct from the wider apparitions narrative: this entry covers the physical relic itself, what a 1979 infrared study found in the image and what the documentary historian Stafford Poole found, and did not find, in the written record. The Splitting of the Moon carries a debated skeptical explanation, the atlas noting that Muslim exegetes are themselves divided on how literally to read the Quranic verse describing it. The Hanukkah Oil story is debated on a gap the atlas treats as the central fact rather than an embarrassment: the oldest surviving accounts of the Temple's rededication describe the eight day festival without mentioning any oil miracle at all. And Honi the Circle-Drawer's rain carries two accounts side by side, the Mishnah's story of a circle and a drought ending exactly as demanded, and Josephus's separate record of a rainmaker generally identified with him whose own story ends in a stoning.
The One Case Closed, and Two That Nearly Were
Only one of the thirteen carries a debunked rather than a debated status, and the atlas names it as a deliberate model case. On 21 September 1995, worshippers at temples across India and abroad reported that images of Ganesha, and soon other deities, accepted spoonfuls of milk, which appeared to vanish; within the same news cycle a physicist had already demonstrated the mundane cause, and the atlas records the case chosen specifically as a model for honest debunked status reporting. The Liquefaction of San Gennaro's Blood shows what keeps a case at debated instead: the Church has never permitted direct chemical sampling of the sealed relic, so even though the chemist Luigi Garlaschelli and colleagues reproduced the same liquefying behavior in 1991 using a thixotropic gel made from materials available in medieval Naples, the relic itself was never tested. And the Lourdes cure of Vittorio Micheli, chosen by the atlas as one citable, fully documented case among roughly seventy the church has recognized and formally recognized by his archbishop in 1976 after two medical reviews, still carries its own debated skeptical explanation, because a panel finding a cure medically inexplicable is a verdict about the limits of present knowledge, not a closed question, which is exactly what keeps a case argued even at its most carefully documented.