The Six Judgments of a Miracle Claim

The mature analytical model can be expressed as six judgments. Lambertini does not number them in this modern form, but his practice repeatedly distinguishes them.

Lambertini’s procedure also shows why distinct judgments in a miracle inquiry must not be collapsed.

An initial threefold distinction separates causal, theological, and semiotic judgments; the fuller model developed here expands these into six stages.

At the causal level the question is whether created nature can account for the event.

Could created nature account for this?

That includes ordinary nature, unknown natural mechanisms, medicine, psychology/imagination, fraud, and even angelic or demonic created powers.

At the theological level the question is whether divine agency is rightly inferred.

If created causes are inadequate, is this rightly attributed to God?

At the semiotic or vindicatory level the question is what God thereby signifies or attests.

If God did it, what did God thereby signify or attest?

extraordinary ≠ miraculous

miraculous ≠ automatically vindicatory

vindicatory ≠ unlimited vindication

This threefold set of non-equivalences is a compact statement of the analytical logic of miracle discernment.

This may be even more useful than the seven famous medical criteria.

At the end of Chapter IV, Lambertini says doubt about an alleged miracle can arise from four distinct sources.

First, testimonial doubt: the witnesses may be unreliable, deceptive, inconsistent, or insufficient.

Second, natural-causal doubt: the event may really have happened, yet it may not actually exceed nature either in the thing done or in the manner of its occurrence.

Third, preternatural/deceptive doubt: even granting the event and some excess beyond ordinary powers, there may remain suspicion of demonic illusion or operation.

Fourth, angelic-capacity doubt: an event may exceed visible corporeal nature without exceeding invisible created spiritual nature.

This yields an unexpectedly modern-looking evidential ladder:

Did it happen?

→ Was it naturally explicable?

→ Was it merely preternatural or deceptive?

→ Did it exceed the relevant created powers?

→ only then: what theological significance does it have?

A three-judgment model is directionally correct, but Lambertini’s practice supports a finer-grained analysis.

This is another philosophically important point.

Lambertini directly rejects the objection that one would have to know every law of nature before identifying anything as miraculous. His answer is roughly that one need not possess exhaustive natural science; what matters is established regularity: bodies of the same nature operate according to the same laws, and the same causes under the same relevant circumstances ordinarily produce the same effects. The inquiry is therefore comparative and causal, not dependent upon scientific omniscience.

In contemporary language, his reasoning is closer to a disciplined causal inference from stable regularities than to:

“We know absolutely everything nature can ever do.”

That makes Lambertini harder to dismiss with the standard “science might explain it someday” objection. The proper question becomes evidential:

How well established is the claimed natural incapacity in this case?

That is a defeasible judgment, but defeasible does not mean irrational.

Lambertini does not use these six modern labels as such; they are an analytical reconstruction of the architecture of his text. But every level is visibly present.

And that gives us an even more precise set of non-equivalences:

extraordinary ≠ miraculous miraculous ≠ automatically divine attestation of every surrounding belief divine attestation ≠ attestation of the agent's personal sanctity sanctity-attesting miracle ≠ validation of every opinion of the saint private conviction ≠ ecclesial proof absence of known explanation ≠ positive identification of divine cause

That is the mature Lambertinian architecture.

Lambertini, De Servorum Dei IV.1, ch. IV and subsequent applied chapters. The six labels are an analytical reconstruction, not Lambertini’s own numbered scheme.