The credibility of miracles is to my mind simply a question of evidence.
Any extraordinary event, such as a person doing a thing totally foreign to his character, is improbable a priori.
But the law does not allow that the best of men is incapable of committing the worst of crimes, if the evidence proves he did.
Nor can the most extraordinary violation of nature's laws be pronounced impossible if supported by sufficient evidence, only the evidence must be strong in proportion to the strangeness of the circumstances.
But I cannot see that the uniformity of nature is any objection to the occurrence of miracles, for as a rule a miracle is regarded not as an event without a cause, but as due to a new cause, namely the intervention of a superhuman person.
Many of the best known miracles are such that one may imagine this person to effect them by understanding and controlling some unknown natural force, just as we control electricity.
Only evidence is required to show that he can do so.
But on the other hand the weakness of every religion which depends on miracles is that their truth is contested and not unreasonably.
If they are true, why are they not certain? Of all the phenomena described as miracles, ghosts, fortune telling, magic, clairvoyance, prophesying, and so on, none command unchallenged acceptance.
In every age miracles, portents and apparitions have been recorded, yet none of them with a certainty that carries universal conviction and in many ages contemporary skepticism was possible.
Even in Vedic times there were people who did not believe in the existence of Indra.
The miraculous events recorded in the Pitakas differ from those of later works, whether Mahayanist literature or the Hindu Puranas and Epics, chiefly in their moderation.
They may be classified under several heads.
Many of them are mere embroidery or embellishment due to poetical exuberance, esteemed appropriate in those generous climates though repugnant to our chilly tastes.
In every country poetry is allowed to overstep the prosaic borders of fact without criticism.
Then an English poet says that- The red rose cries She is near, she is near: And the white rose weeps She is late: The larkspur listens, I hear, I hear: And the lily whispers, I wait-- No one thinks of criticizing the lines as absurd because flowers cannot talk or of trying to prove that they can.
Poetry can take liberties with facts provided it follows the lines of metaphors which the reader finds natural.
The same latitude cannot be allowed in unfamiliar directions.
Thus though a shower of flowers from heaven is not more extraordinary than talking flowers and is quite natural in Indian poetry, it would probably disconcert the English reader.
An Indian poet would not represent flowers as talking, but would give the same idea by saying that the spirits inhabiting trees and plants recited stanzas.
Similarly when a painter draws a picture of an angel with wings rising from the shoulder blades, even the very scientific do not think it needful to point out that no such anatomical arrangement is known or probable, nor do the very pious maintain that such creatures exist.
The whole question is allowed to rest happily in some realm of acquiescence untroubled by discussions.
And it is in this spirit that Indian books relate how when the Buddha went abroad showers of flowers fell from the sky and the air resounded with heavenly music, or diversify their theological discussions with interludes of demons, nymphs and magic serpents.
And although this riot of the imagination offends our ideas of good sense and proportion, the Buddhists do not often lose the distinction between what Matthew Arnold called Literature and Dogma.
The Buddha's visits to various heavens are not presented as articles of faith: they are simply a pleasant setting for his discourses.