Warning: Minor spoilers.

Mel Gibson's character undergoes a paradigm shift (change of mind) based on a "miracle" M. Night Shyamalan has contrived for the ending of his movie. What's a miracle? Do such miracles occur?

A miracle is a violation of the normal order of things. They can involve the impossible, or merely the highly improbable. In my experience, unlike magic tricks, God's miracles solve real problems while teaching an important theological point.

As a child I had a Sunday school teacher named Vi Lurvey, a loving, kind, frail old lady. After knowing her for a while, She told us about something which had happened to her, and brought in the newspaper clippings about it for us to read.

She'd been taken hostage by a gunman for several days. She's prayed for him, and told him about Jesus, and prayed for God to help her, too. As I remember it, at one point, he decided to end it all, and take her along too. But he discovered something had gone terribly wrong: His gun was visibly bent out of shape, to the point where it was unusuable. (I, the young skeptic, was very careful to get clarification on this point -- it she claimed it was bent in an obvious way they would have noticed it before.)

Eventually, at her urging, he gave himself up to the police.

Coincindence? Possibly: the laws of physics don't prevent a gun from going out of shape spontaneously. Its horribly, horribly unlikely, but not completely impossible. It could even happen at just the right time to save the life of a little old Christian lady who'd been praying to God for help. But that's less likely still -- we assume spontaneous gun-bending occurs a lot, and we just remember the cases where it saves little old ladies lives.

Or both could have hallucinated the unbent state of the gun, and then snapped out of it at just the right point in the story to tell an important theological point.

Lastly, Vi Lurvey could simply have been a pathological liar, and either conspired with her accomplish (and would-be gunman) to send him to prision and dupe the police, or she could have fabricated the story and newspaper clipping and got her relatives (who I knew) to back up the story, just to dupe me.

James Randi tells me that these options are more likely than God's intervention. James Randi tells me this, because James Randi has already assumed his conclusion: Miracles cannot happen, their probability is near zero. But when I go in, assuming neither, I find reasonable evidence for miracles, and thus consider their implications.