If you don’t believe in God, how do you explain miracles?

On a case by case basis.  The above question was asked as a Christian ‘gotcha,’ by a person who presupposed that miracles occurred.  Many of them didn’t happen.  Many of them did not occur as believers believe.  Some have a very naturalistic explanation.  Being touched with a piece of wood from a Saint’s coffin, and recovering from smallpox, is more likely from natural resistance and remission and placebo effect, than from any supernatural intervention.

Let’s look at one of the biggest and best-known – The Miracle of Fatima.  I debated with a Christian one night, and wrote that 30,000 people attended.  He ‘corrected’ me, and insisted that there were 40,000!  Another Christian Apologist online recently upped the ante to 70,000!  The number of people who believe something, in no way affects the truth of the claim.

Three young children were not where they were supposed to be – at home, doing chores.  In fact, they may have been where they were not supposed to be, doing things they weren’t supposed to do.  When their parents called them on their absence, they made up a story about being delayed because they had seen a vision of the Madonna.

No-one would doubt a religious vision – would they??!  But when the questioning continued, they doubled down, and claimed that she would return on a specific day.  Remember that!  The “miracle” was supposed to be another vision of the Madonna.

Soon, word spread, and people from far and wide walked to get there.  Who was milking the cows, and feeding the livestock?  The day was heavily overcast, with the sun barely visible through heavy clouds.  Some of them had walked for days to get there.  They’d been promised a miracle and, by damn, they were gonna see one.

As the day wore on, and the promised Madonna had not appeared, some of the faithful stopped looking at ground-level, and started looking into the sky, and at the obscured sun – never a good idea.  Thirty – or forty – or seventy thousand people were reported to “witness the miracle.”  After the hearsay claims were removed, the only actual, reported, printed, evidence came from two newspapers, who interviewed just six people.

No-one, including the children, was reported to have seen the Madonna.  Two people said that they saw nothing.  One guy claimed that the sun spun like a disc in the sky – a symptom of optic overload.  One guy claimed that the sun got larger and smaller, at one point almost touching the Earth – again, a symptom of neurological excess.  If the sun got that close, it would sear the life off half the planet.  Two people said that the sun jerked back and forth in the Heavens.  This is caused by spasms of the muscles controlling movement of the eyes, from trying to stare at the same spot for an extended time.

If the sun moved, it would break the bonds of gravity, and the Earth, and the rest of the Solar system, would drift apart.  No-one else on Earth noticed any such movement, including scientists at observatories, who were studying the sun.

So….  No-one saw what was promised.  Some people saw nothing.  Some people claimed to see physically-impossible things, who did not agree with each other, or anyone else on the planet, and which have a natural explanation.  I couldn’t get Jesus ticketed for double-parking his donkey with that ‘evidence.’  How do I explain miracles??  Delusion, desperation, gullibility, and self-deception – with a little bit of science and psychology thrown in.