Regardless of the explanations given, hundreds of millions of people around the world sincerely believe that suprahuman forces are at work or that miraculous healings occur. Indeed, those who deny such forces (however defined) are clearly a minority of the world’s population.[62] Whether one likes it or not, it is neither charitable nor plausible to simply dismiss the existence of such sincere claims, however one chooses to explain them. By analogy, it is plausible that many ancient claimants also sincerely believed that they reported such phenomena accurately, rather than that they were
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