Scott - in the end, perhaps the issue is over the definitions of the terms “verify” and “miracle” then?

I would not go so far as to say that “verifying” miracles is a “waste of time”. I do think that it is impossible to verify a miracle, but I think that because I think that it is literally impossible to verify any hypothesis in a strong sense. Even in the sciences we do not say that evidence “verifies” a hypothesis, we say only that the evidence is, so far, consistent with a given hypothesis.

So to the extent that we “look for signs”, we are not wasting our time if we understand that the signs will not “verify” in the strong sense. What we can get from the miraculous, if the miraculous is understood in the sense I argued for in my post, is a sense of God’s presence in our lives. My view is that we do not need empirical evidence for that sort of sense, that way of “seeing” the world, and I’m quite certain that empirical evidence is not up to providing that for us even were we to need it.

Your last paragraph sounds pretty similar to the main point I have made in my latest reply to Scott.

Thanks!

Best,
Mike