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A survey from the Pew Forum on Religion showed that a vast majority of Americans, nearly 80%, believe in miracles. The results are from a wider study, "Religion Among the Millennials." Greg Smith from the Pew Forum on Religion talks about the widespread belief in miracles.

An extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing or accomplishment - that's Merriam Webster's definition of the word, miracle. But it goes on: An event manifesting divine intervention, a wonderful occurrence. And from that alone, you might conclude that our understanding of miracles is murky at best. A new study from Pew complicates things a bit further.

The study shows that young adults, the so-called millennial generation, don't attend church services regularly, are less inclined to express religious preference or affiliation than their elders, but profess widespread belief in the afterlife, in heaven and hell and in miracles. Nearly 80 percent of all Americans, in fact, say they believe in miracles.

So what is your definition? And do you believe? 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can join the conversation on our Web site, that's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. Here to help us to understand what this Pew survey says is Greg Smith, senior researcher at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. And thanks very much for being with us.

Mr. GREG SMITH (Senior Researcher, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life): Thank you for having me.

CONAN: And how do you account for this apparent discrepancy between great belief in what you would describe as supernatural events, miracles, the afterlife and lack of religious affiliation?

Mr. SMITH: Well, I think what you've hit on here is a belief, a religious belief, a belief in certain supernatural occurrences that is very widespread among the American public across a wide variety of groups. As you mentioned, about eight in 10 people say they believe in miracles. That's true of the young people and older people alike.

CONAN: Yeah, the difference is statistically insignificant, 79 percent.

Mr. SMITH: That's exactly right. And one of the things we see is that even people who are not part of a particular faith, people who are unaffiliated with any particular religion, even this groups says they believe in miracles, more than half of the unaffiliated say they believe in miracles. And so what you're seeing here is that - is more evidence of the religious nature of most people in the United States even those including many young people who may not be formally may not be formal members of a particular religious group.

CONAN: Did you define miracle in the survey?

Mr. SMITH: Not in so many words. What we did is we asked people a very straightforward question. Basically, do you agree or disagree that miracles still occur today just as in ancient times?

CONAN: Ah. Well, that gives you some context. Ancient - might that be taken as a word for biblical?

Mr. SMITH: Well, some people might have taken it that way. We don't use that word in our question. But you're right, it does put in a little bit of context that in terms of something that perhaps was common at one point, maybe people think that it doesn't go on anymore, but obviously the survey shows that most people do believe these things still occur.

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I quoted an article by Luhrmann herself and you quoted an article by someone hostile to religion who is twisting her words.  I remind you in her article she said,

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Science cannot tell us whether God generated the voice that Abraham or Augustine heard. But it can tell us that many of these events are normal, part of the fabric of human perception.

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Here is her speaking in an interview:
Clicky

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SBA: Thinking about religious experience in the language of daydreams and the like, how do you walk the line in your research between psychological reductionism where there is no such thing as God, and the reverse?

TML: Well, I think that if there is a God, then God speaks to us through our minds. So you need to accept and understand the psychology to understand the process. You can read When God Talks Back from different perspectives. From the purely secular angle, you might say that these people are just making it up, which demonstrates that it is all imagination. But from a religious angle, you might see the puzzle as: If God is always speaking, why doesn’t everybody hear? It’s really helpful to walk that line. I genuinely don’t think I have the right to pass judgment. And I don’t think that passing judgment is the point. Given that the question of ultimate reality is fundamentally undecidable, it’s more interesting to ask what we can know if we treat that seriously.

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Your kind of experience is explained within psychology and it is not considered authentic. Live with it.

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You have no idea what my experiences with God are. Anti-theists always love to call religious people delusional when studies show that atheists are the ones more likely to be living in the grips of mental illness.

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Revelation