Why would we think a wildly improbable occurrence (which happen all over the world every day) has anything to do with a divine being (which have never been shown to exist). Surely we’d exhaust all the natural explanations before plumping for the supernatural?
And in any case, before we even get to wondering how something happened the first thing to ask is “did it actually happen?” and “miracles” are always long on anecdote and short on evidence.
Abiogenesis is still very poorly explained- glossed over, really. It’s a degree of spontaneous self-organization we have no contemporary examples of.
Those happen all the time. We just tend to not think of them that way unless it’s a pattern that seems meaningful. Let’s say I flip a coin 1,000 times and get 1,000 heads. Is that a miracle? Any other combination is just as likely. Every time the Powerball lottery is run, the odds of the combination that did come up are 1 in 292 million. That’s a very rare occurrence, but yet it happens twice a week and people don’t call that a miracle.
But the nature of the miracles was such that evidence couldn’t be gathered because nobody saw them coming.
To use an unlikely-and-not-miracle analogy, suppose that one day you are golfing by yourself with no witnesses around and you hit a hole-in-one. How are you going to prove it? You didn’t expect that you’d hit one, and you had no reason to carry around a video camera with you recording everything 24/7. You could show a photo of the ball in the hole, but you couldn’t prove that you’d hit it there from 400 feet as opposed to 4 feet.
The difference is that many people every day hit a hole-in-one, but the call-a-random-number scenario is much, much more unlikely, and without a proof I would always discount such stories as delusions or lies.
Is living to the age of 119 “impossible” if you’ve had two serious bouts of cancer? If it happens is it a “miracle”? I guess we’ll know which on January 2/2022.
are you really 118?
No, I’m 120. She’s my younger sister. 
As my 9-year-old brother said after hitting a hole-in-one on a par 3 course (his first time on a golf course), “Well, that’s what I was aiming for, wasn’t it?”
In that scenario, there’s nothing that violated the laws of physics. Now if you had claimed to have made a hole in zero, and that the ball disappeared off the tee and appeared in the hole without even being hit, Star Trek transporter style, then I would call it a miracle. IMHO the lack or presence of witnesses doesn’t really affect whether something qualifies as a miracle, it just makes one more or less likely to be believable. What makes the miracle is whether or not there were violations of the laws of physics.
1000 heads in a row, though, would be “special” and “meaningful” in a way that most other sequences of coin flips would not. If my calculations are correct, you could flip 1000 coins once per second, and you would expect a result of all 1000 heads about once every 10^{291} centuries.
That’s way more than just winning-the-lottery unlikely. I would suspect some sort of trickery (like, that you had perfected the skill of flipping a coin so that it always came up heads) before I would believe that it happened purely by chance.
But for that to happen naturally, without any trickery, is so unlikely as to be “statistically impossible” even though it doesn’t break any laws of physics.
And I think many people would be comfortable with a definition of “miracle” that included, not just events that break the laws of physics, but at least some events that are statistically impossible in this way.
Why is it any more meaningful or special than any other sequence?
It’s like how winning the lottery might be a “miracle” to the person who won, but to everyone else who bought a losing ticket it’s just Saturday night. If you prefer that type of definition of a miracle, that’s fine, but I don’t see how it’s useful to lump in such events with purported events that violate the laws of physics.
No, it’s not like that. I’m talking about things that are so unlikely that they’d never happen, to anyone, in the history of the universe.
So I guess the conclusion to be drawn is that not only does god play dice with the universe, he cheats.
My conclusion is that it’s only a miracle if God cheats. God can play dice all day, and it doesn’t matter what numbers come up. It’s only when something impossible happens that it’s a miracle. Flip a quarter a thousand or a million or googol times in a row, and get all heads, or all tails, or HTHTHT with the pattern repeating, and it doesn’t matter. Not a miracle. Flip a quarter, and a silver dollar turns up, then it’s a miracle. Roll a billion red six sided dice, and it doesn’t matter what numbers between 1 and 6 come up, or in what order. If a green dice comes up, or a single dice comes up with a 0 or a 7, or a d20 instead of a d6 somehow appears, then it a miracle. Same with a deck of cards. Shuffle the cards and pull a red Jack of Diamonds at the top every single time after a trillion shuffles - not a miracle. Pull a Blue Daimyo of Cherries, or a Green Conquistador of Feathers, then it’s a miracle.
ETA: Those are the sorts of things that would be necessary, though certainly not sufficient. There would also have to be evidence that there wasn’t any slight of hand involved.
Sounds like an episode of Penn And Teller Fool Us.
And it’s sleight.
You got me on my spelling 
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My point is that in order to even qualify as a miracle, at least in my book, it would have to be something that would ordinarily be considered impossible. That doesn’t mean that it was a miracle. It could turn out to be sleight of hand, or something else altogether. Those things can be investigated. There’s no point, however, in investigating a mundane event, no matter how unlikely it might be statistically, because it wouldn’t qualify as a miracle due to being a mundane event.
ETA: IMHO, the biblical miracles like walking on water, multiplying the loaves, and resurrecting the dead, would qualify by this standard. Whether or not they stand up to investigation is a different story, but they at least qualify as miraculous based on their nature.
First, ISTM that you can allow for a figurative, “literary” usage of the word , to signify “something that fills me with awe and wonder in a way mere mundane events don’t”. Or you could have another figurative, “literary” usage that refers to something so damn unlikely you can’t really explain it and wouldn’t expect to come out that way if repeated a million times.
But we’d have to recognize it’s just that, a figure of speech.
Now, to the notion of a “proper” miracle – I agree that in the case of something that if it were to happen would violate known physical laws or our expectations thereof to the point of being presumed impossible, then that could be fairly called miraculous by those so inclined. I would encourage people who so want to continue looking for a real-world explanation, but meanwhile would not begrudge the believer.
Mythical or legenday miracles, we can properly apply to the specific setting thereof. A miracle happens in the story, and there’s probably a point to be made about it, but it functions as part of the story (Biblical literalist often fail to understand that trying to “prove” some of the miraculous events actually detracts from the bigger point being made).
Actually I was agreeing with you.
I think miracle is one of those words that doesn’t really mean anything in the “real” world.
It either means that something is unlikely but fortunate, or it means god did it. Since god is another of those things that doesn’t exist in the “real” world, it leaves the former as the only useful meaning of the word.
The Miracle Mets (1969 world’s champions) resent the term, almost to a man. “We were a goddamned good ballclub, and we accomplished what we set out to accomplish.”