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Miracle
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==Naturalistic explanations== A miracle may be false information or simply a fictional story, rather than something that truly happened. A miracle experience may be due to [[Cognitive bias|cognitive errors]] (e.g. [[overthinking]], [[jumping to conclusions]]) or [[psychological disorder|psychological error]]s (e.g. [[hallucination]]s) of [[witness]]es. Use of some drugs such as [[psychedelic]]s (e.g. [[ecstasy (drug)|ecstasy]]) may produce similar effects to [[religious experience]]s.<ref>{{cite web |title=The Salvia divinorum FAQ |date=July 30, 2012 |quote=Those who think of the salvia experience in religious, spiritual, or mystical terms may speak of such things as enlightenment, satori, and "cleansing the doors of perception." |url=http://www.sagewisdom.org/faq.html |website=SageWisdom.org |access-date=August 26, 2007 |archive-date=August 16, 2001 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20010816113130/http://www.sagewisdom.org/faq.html |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Adamson |first1=Sophia |last2=Metzner |first2=Ralph |title=The Nature of the MDMA Experience and Its Role in Healing, Psychotherapy, and Spiritual Practice |url=http://www.maps.org/research-archive/mdma/revision.html |website=maps.org |publisher=MAPS |access-date=16 December 2018 |archive-date=10 October 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181010061017/http://www.maps.org/research-archive/mdma/revision.html |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Watts |first=Alan |author-link=Alan Watts |title=Psychedelics and Religious Experience |journal=[[California Law Review]] |volume=56 |pages=74β85 |number=1 |date=January 1968 |doi=10.2307/3479497 |jstor=3479497 |url=https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1110164 |access-date=2023-06-08 |archive-date=2022-12-21 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221221085344/https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1110164 |url-status=live |url-access=subscription }}{{void|comment|Fabrickator|public open access via Berkeley Law Library}}</ref> ===Law of truly large numbers=== {{main|Law of truly large numbers|Littlewood's law}} Statistically improbable events are sometimes called miracles. For instance, when three classmates coincidentally meet in a different country decades after having left school, they may consider this ''miraculous''. However, a colossal number of events happen every moment on Earth; thus, extremely unlikely coincidences also happen every moment. Events considered ''impossible'' are therefore not so{{snd}}they are just increasingly rare and dependent on the number of individual events. British mathematician [[J. E. Littlewood]] suggested that individuals should statistically expect one-in-a-million events to happen to them at the rate of about one per month. By his definition, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.<ref>{{cite book |author=J. E. Littlewood |url=https://archive.org/details/mathematiciansmi033496mbp/page/n115/mode/2up |title=A Mathematician's Miscellany |publisher=Methuen & Co. Ltd. |year=1953 |location=London |pages=104-105}}</ref>
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