Firstly, I do believe in miracles. If you do not believe in miracles you may end up in jail. One miracle that I certainly believe is the 1-1.5 million Jews died in gas chambers in Auschwitz. It was a miracle, since there could not have died more than 400,000 Jews in Auschwitz according to the calculation that I made by adding the figures from the best official estimates. That is, I counted how many were taken by Nazis in the West, Western Poland or transported from east to west and subtracted how many died in other places and how many survived in the camps after the war. This gave an upper bound of 400,000. Yet 1-1.5 million died. As it happened, it was possible no matter what basic mathematics says. If I find an error in my calculation, I will fix it, but sadly I have not found an error and I made the calculation a long ago, when it still was legal to doubt the numbers. So the only possibility is a miracle. Nothing is impossible to God and miracles still happen in our time. What is so strange with it? I guess it is not illegal to believe in miracles in Christian countries. That would be a violation of the right to practice an accepted religion. I guess it is not illegal to add and subtract numbers taken from accepted estimates.
I also believe in the miracle that the official reason for the collapse of the WTC buildings is true. It was a miracle, since laws of physics were violated. Additionally I believe that Oswald was the lone shooter in Dallas and while I count 4-5 shots from the Dictabelt, there were only three shot by Oswald. Miracles happen and they do not need to follow our laws of physics or logic.
Did Jesus make miracles? Did Jesus even exist? Modern scholars agree that Jesus did exist and that he intentionally filled at least one Messianic prophesy: riding a donkey to Jerusalem. It follows that he claimed to be the Messiah and because of that claim he absolutely had to make miracles. Therefore he did make miracles. These miracles were probably similar as miracles made by later Jewish Rabbis. A typical miracle is that a poor but pious Jew prays for help from God and in the morning finds a bread from his windowsill and inside the bread is a coin. He thanks God for the miracle. Was any law of physics violated? Did the coin materialize from nothing, or did somebody maybe put the bread there in the night? It is not important. The essential fact is that a miracle happened.
Did Moses make miracles? We may assume that the story of the Exodus is largely based on the expulsion of the Hyksos. The story, as we now have it, is rather different than the Egyptian account of this event, but it is the old right of history writers to change history to their liking. According to the story Moses punished the Egyptians with ten curses and each one of them was a miracle. I cannot know what actually happened, but have no difficulties in believing that disasters more or less of the type that the story describes did happen. Thera erupted about a hundred years before Hyksos were expulsed and some of the plagues of Moses may have a model in the after events of the eruption. Naturally, the story has been composed later and it is probably not more faithful to the course of events that the true story of Estonian Viking Lembity is to the Kalevala poem of Lemminkäinen. Yet, were there miracles in the original story of the Exodus? I would imagine yes. People associated the Exodus with miracles. There probably were miracles of some kind, that is, what were considered as miracles at that time or later.
If we insist that a miracle means an event that violates laws of physics or logic, then we of course have the number of deaths in Auschwitz and the fall of the WTC, but they are not so good as examples because in order to verify that they really were miracles you would have to check it yourself. Fortunately there is a miracle that has been many times checked and it is accepted by the main stream physics: the EPR paradox. It actually is a miracle. I know only one logically satisfying explanation for it, but people, who do not believe in miracles will have even harder time believing that explanation: history changes in the experiment, thus time is not real, thus space-time is not real, thus there is a real world and the physical world is not real. Well, that is just the old Maya concept, too religious, naturally.
But is it true that biblical miracles were intended to be understood in this way? No. The miracles by Jesus were signs of the Messiah. They did not need to be miracles in our sense of the word. They were needed to fill prophesy of Messiah making miracles as Messiah was like Moses and Moses had made miracles. After Josephus Flavius declared Vespasianus as the Messiah, a miracle was created: Vespasianus healed a man in Egypt. We can be fairly sure that this miracle was not violating laws of physics, but it was needed to fulfill prophesy.
Sure, simple people believed in these miracles. Many Jewish Rabbis made miracles in those times and later. Nicodemus ben Gurion, who with Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, stopped the movement of the sun in Talmud. Are these stories symbolic? Were priests cheating the people? Those are incorrect questions. That religion included miracle makers. God had the power to make miracles, thus righteous people could make miracles. It is quite stupid to ask if these miracles were real in our modern sense of the word miracle. There is no doubt that there were miracle makers in that culture, as in many other cultures. As well we can believe that people talked to God as to a person. This must not be understood in the modern sense. It was part of their religious culture.
Certainly one can believe in different ways. In a legal court one can believe that the official history is correct, among mathematicians one can believe that arithmetics is correct. Saint Paul said a great wisdom when he stated that to the Jews he is a Jew and to the pagans he is a pagan. There are various forms of the truth, depending on the situation.