Coincidence miracles and RT Holland

R.F. Holland gives the example of a child on a railroad track who is playing around the bend from an approaching train, so that neither the child nor the train’s engineer know of the other’s location. The child’s poor mother is up the hill from this developing tragedy, and can see both her son and the train, but because of distance, is unable to do anything. Suddenly, the train slows, and comes to a halt, only a few feet from her child.

The mother thanks God for the miracle, which she never ceases to think of as such although, as she in due course learns, there was nothing supernatural about the manner in which the brakes of the train came to be applied. The driver had fainted, for a reason that had nothing to do with the presence of the child on the line, and the brakes were applied automatically as his hand ceased to exert pressure on the control lever. [R.F. Holland, “The Miraculous,” American Philosophical Quarterly (1965), pp. 43-51.]

Such a story shows an amazing coincidence. Therefore, some have argued that we need to postulate two types of miracles: the “violation of nature” miracle, and the “coincidence” miracle. While in the second sort of miracle, God does not seem to violate any law of nature, the coincidence is such as to seemingly betray his hand.

However, probability theory is sufficient to explain such “coincidences”, and in fact we might even say we should expect them. Furthermore, while many “coincidences” can be listed which resulted in amazing rescues and last minute salvations, in like manner, one can list amazing coincidences where horrible disaster was the result. Therefore, it can be argued that so long as both the good and the bad coincidences are explainable individually by ordinary chance, there is no need to suspect supernatural involvement.

While supernatural intervention cannot be shown to exist, it likewise must be admitted by the skeptic that such supernatural involvement cannot automatically be denied — unless he begins with the presupposition that “God does not exist” or “there is no supernatural” or “there are natural explanations for everything”. Such axioms are no more or less valid than their opposites, since, like the axiom “God exists”, they are unprovable.
Keith Lehrer writes:

The more usual attempt to justify belief in God on the basis of miracles, however, is premised on the existence of violation-miracles. If there are grounds to believe that some law of nature confirmed to hold universally has been violated in such a way that some disaster has been averted, or someone aided, or some insight received, then this is surely some evidence for justifying the claim that occasionally God has intervened in the natural course of things either to bring about a miracle or to reveal something. Are there, then, grounds for believing that there have been miraculous violations of laws of nature? The most celebrated attempt to deny such grounds is that made by David Hume. [Keith Lehrer, Philosophical Problems and Arguments: An Introduction, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1974, p. 347]