Morbo is my favourite background character on Futurama

Um actually it doesn't - a miracle is defined as:

Do we though? I guess this is the crux of my point. Today in this day and age, if something you couldn't explain happened would you call it 'magic'?

But I'm disputing that. You may look at an LCD and think it's technology but I'm pretty sure anyone wouldn't think [because of their lack of understanding] it might as well be magic.

My apologies - my definition of magic is pretty much the dictionary defintion:

Sure I get that - but is that the definition of 'magic'? I would think that's the definition of inexplicable.

But my point is that now, in this day and age people don't equate "I don't know how this works" to "it must be magic" or "this is indistinguishable from magic".

Yes but they would know it's not 'magic' but science. Just because people can't explain something they wouldn't automatically say it was magic. I believe most wouldn't.

Some form of force field.

Well I'm not certain of most folks - I'm not a scientist, I'm a business man. Also I don't think people who believe in transubstantiation consider it magic - it's a part of their religion so I would consider that faith. But as for the rest of your list

But break that down. Someone appears in a flash of light - that's easy a million things could cause a bright flash of light - like flashes. Swing a hammer that returns? Perhaps it's a mini drone of some sort. Summon lightning? We seed clouds now for rain that causes lightning.

No I don't think it is. We gave up thinking things were caused by magic pretty much in 18th century as science came to the for. If I see something inexplicable it's not going to appear as my definition of magic, it's going to appear as my definition of well, inexplicable.

I don't think that's the case. We don't understand dark matter, but we're not calling it magic.

That's not really an answer. The point is that I don't think there is anything now that if we saw it we wouldn't start applying the scientific method to work it out.

Not really. We all started off as non-life - our compenents were made in suns and distributed in supernovae - we're made of matter and if you can manipulate matter at the atomic scale (which we can do very primitively using scanning tunneling electron microscopes) then you could achieve this. At the literal…

Really? You'd consider those magic?

OK - so what would be "sufficiently advanced" for you to think it was magic?

I think you'll find the other 70% knew how to loop footage on the cam and were out doing mob hits.

That Arthur C Clarke quote – I’m not sure it’s relevant anymore. Sure if you go and meet a tribe that’s been isolated and living in the jungle then it might hold. But assume alien space craft appeared in the skies – would we consider this magic or physics that we didn’t understand yet? I’m pretty sure it would be the…

This is a good reference: