For the committed materialist, no allowance can be permitted for the possibility of miracles in the first place (his “prior” will be zero), and therefore even an extremely unusual cure of cancer will be discounted as evidence of the miraculous, and will instead be chalked up to the fact that rare events will occasionally occur within the natural world. The believer in the existence of God, however, may after examining the evidence conclude that no such cure should have occurred by any known natural processes, and having once admitted that the prior probability of a miracle, while quite small,
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If this probability morphs into certainty, that could kill the motivation to study the event, to replicate and apply it, which it should be.
