In my view, we can distinguish different kinds of miracles:
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Effects that regularly happen in the ordinary world become miracles if they happen in an extraordinary way: the transformation of water into wine at Canaan you refer to, or the multiplication of bread and fish, or the speaking ass of Balaam.
When we speak we order the outcomes of our brains acting spiritually from outside space-time.
The ordinary natural processes by which water becomes first juice in the vine, and thereafter wine, are also sort of speech: invisible intelligences (God, angels) speak to us “very slowly”.
When Jesus did transform the water into wine he was acting upon water molecules as we act upon the firings of the neurons in our brains when we speak. So the water became wine suddenly.
Since we cannot act upon water molecules from outside the space-time, such miraculous effects are beyond our operational capabilities, nonetheless they belong to the regularities of the ordinary world that can be described by mathematical algorithms. -
Deeds that are beyond the human operational capabilities and additionally do not belong to the regularities of the ordinary world: resurrection of dead people, walking on water.
Death is defined as the irreversible breakdown of all brain functions. By irreversible the physicians mean a damage beyond our capability to repair. The resurrection of Lazarus was an effect happening in the ordinary world. From the perspective of QM it can be considered an outcome that happen with very low probability. Same thing for the walking on water.
Although such miracles cannot be considered regularities in the ordinary world they do not violate any inexorable law of nature simply because there is not such a thing as an inexorable law of nature. -
Miracles of the types 1 and 2 referred to before can also happen in a way that they are witnessed by only a particular group of people: Resurrection, Pentecost, Ascension, Transfiguration, the dancing sun in Fatima (October 13, 1917).
Think on Pentecost: each group heard Peter and the Apostles really speaking in their native tongue. What Greeks heard was as real as what Parthians and Arabians did. The visible physical reality did depend on the observers watching at it.
Such observer dependent physical reality is at the core of QM paradoxes like the Schrödinger Cat and Wigner’s Friend. It arises when one applies the quantum superposition algebra to macroscopic objects.
The ordinary visible world we live in is possible precisely because quantum superposition is limited and does not apply to the so called macroscopic world. But this does not mean that the ordinary world is the only possible one.
In Pentecost God “did not fake reality” but created different parallel real worlds during a short time. One can think about Pentecost as an event where a speech is simultaneously translated by many invisible intelligences. What reveals that also in the ordinary world when we heard someone speaking our native language, actually we heard the speech because there is some invisible intelligence “bringing to our ears” the louds the speaker is uttering.
I fully agree to this! In the ordinary world God lets things happen when we perform certain operations. It is the world governed by mathematical algorithms we can grasp: If I type your phone number in my mobile your mobile will ring no matter whether I pray or not. By contrast the only way we can move God to perform miracles is by prayer.
@mitchellmckain as very well expressed a similar idea in another thread: