And I already asked: what event—even one you don’t know of—could not receive a natural explanation? (And of course that does not include events that get a natural “this requires further analysis”; there are plenty of those.)

Almost no event that I can think of, aside from a splitting of the sea like at the Reed Sea, or a soccer ball passing through a wall while remaining intact, or a person just flying through the air for no reason. But of course those are events I don’t actually imagine happening.

I’m sure that if you saw the splitting of the Reed Sea, you would try to give it a scientific explanation, and the same goes for other things. If it were a one-time event, then these would be speculations that cannot be verified (unless you had a really good simulator), and maybe you would even go with some quantum event of tiny probability. If the sea has a 10 to the minus a million chance of splitting at any given second, you can expect that to happen once, and the fact that it happened during your lifetime is not surprising, because your lifetime is not objectively special. If it were a recurring event, then it would already become an empirical phenomenon, even if it were strange and no explanation had yet been given for it—just as the fact that sometimes there is an inverse relation between the temperature of something and the time it takes to freeze is a strange thing that apparently has no explanation right now, but it simply remains a scientific puzzle. I assume that even a rain of frogs or jellyfish suddenly falling from the sky would look to you like a miracle if it were not a familiar phenomenon (and not really explained).

I don’t see where you’re going with this. You asked what I would regard as a miracle, and I answered. Beyond that, this whole discussion doesn’t seem relevant to me, because even if I don’t regard anything as a miracle, so what? Does that prove that there are miracles? It means that the existence of miracles cannot be proved, and the question remains up to our common sense. According to my common sense, as long as it has not been proved that there are miracles, there are no miracles.

It is very relevant, because you claim that there were miracles in the past, and I say there is nothing new under the sun—either there were not, or there are today as well. (I do not rule out the possibility that there were and now there are not, except that there is no reason at all to assume that, because the only thing that changed is our perception, not the behavior of the world.) And each of those possibilities is very different from your view.
It is even more relevant when one remembers that every divine intervention in the world is a miracle, and that includes His speaking with a person, meaning prophecy. Here too science will claim that every person who claims prophecy has a natural explanation, and you too would probably send *anyone* who claimed prophecy for hospitalization. And again you would have to claim that once there was prophecy and today there is not. But that claim has no justification at all. Of course the question of prophecy is much more important than the question of miracles.

Well, no.
The miracles in the past were diagnosed by prophets (and by the Torah itself). They can know. In extreme cases I too would diagnose miracles (as I wrote to you, and for some reason you keep ignoring that).
And beyond that, I do not send for hospitalization anyone who sees miracles in ordinary cases; I simply disagree with him.

A. It is a bit circular to say that the miracles were diagnosed by the prophets, since prophecy itself is a miracle (and I now see that you wrote exactly this in the comments on the heresy column, and very well said).
B. True, you wrote that you would diagnose miracles, but I argued that if you are sufficiently honest with yourself you will see that this is not true. (I don’t like telling other people what they really think, but you started…) You are welcome to explain why a rain of jellyfish is less of a miracle than a sea splitting. If I didn’t know such phenomena existed, it would seem equally strange to me. In any case, when I encounter such a phenomenon I will ask what could explain it—and that is exactly what you too would do. David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear, and to me that doesn’t look any less impressive than a soccer ball passing through a wall. True, he admitted from the outset that it was a trick, but I assume that even if he had not said it was a trick, and instead had said that he has powers and really would make the Statue of Liberty disappear, and you were in the audience, you would probably think there was a trick here. That is probably also what would happen if you saw a soccer ball go through a wall. If that soccer ball did not pass through a wall out in the open field but rather in a laboratory, you would probably start thinking about your physical theories. I do not see any difference between a soccer ball passing through a wall and a piece of paper causing an artillery shell to recoil backward, but when Rutherford saw something like that happen in the lab, he understood that his physical theory was probably wrong and did not think it was a miracle. I am absolutely certain that you too would think that way if you saw it happen in a lab. In short, it seems to me that you have not thought enough about the situation in which you would diagnose miracles. (It is much easier that way to believe in miracles, just as it used to be much easier for you to believe in Torah from Heaven when you had not examined the arguments of biblical criticism because it did not interest you; after you did examine them, we heard different tunes.)
C. I did not say that you send for hospitalization someone who sees miracles, but someone who claims prophecy. My argument was that prophecy too is a kind of miracle, and there is no way to diagnose it either. Today anyone who claims it will be sent—even by you—to a psychiatrist, and the prophets back then were no different. There is no reason to think that if you met Jeremiah you would think any differently than you do about every modern prophet.

By the way, the claim that the miracles were diagnosed by the Torah is very nice, because basically you are saying that you learn the laws of nature from the Torah. It follows from your words that if I had a physical theory that explained the falling hailstones on the descent of Beth Horon, then that theory would be rejected by virtue of the prophetic statement that it was a miracle. That is certainly an interesting idea, but I would have expected to hear it from people like the one they are mocking now in your column in the context of medical statistics, not from you.

Okay, this really is a waste of time by now. A scientific experiment is something repeatable, and as such it is not a miracle. The Torah says there will be prophets and gives criteria for testing them. If you believe in the Torah, you believe in prophecy. What does that have to do with our own day? Are you claiming that today there are prophets? It seems to me we are repeating ourselves and have exhausted the discussion.

I’m glad you agree regarding a scientific experiment.
I still maintain that there is no case at all in which you would think you are seeing a miracle (for example, the disappearance of the Statue of Liberty).
In exactly the same way, I maintain that there is no case at all in which you would think the person standing before you is a prophet.
Pushing miracles and prophecies off into the past is meaningless. It only gives you a way to believe in the Torah without any justification. If there is no scenario in which you would believe in a miracle or a prophet today, then that would be true of the past as well. And again, if you saw David Copperfield splitting the Reed Sea, I am sure you would not think it was a miracle.