Stanley Jaki, in his book God and the Sun at Fatima, comments on the scientific history of meteorites:

Once the Académie des Sciences in Paris decided that eyewitness accounts about fiery streaks dashing toward the earth should not be trusted, meteorites were discarded from the collection of other scientific academies as well. No less a scientist than Lavoisier changed the written statement of an eyewitness because it countered his disbelief in meteors. Laplace shouted, “We have had enough such myths,” when his fellow academician Marc-Auguste Pictet urged, in the full hearing of the Académie des Sciences, that attention be given to the report about a huge meteor shower that fell at L’Aigle, near Paris, on April 26, 1803.

This is not untypical. Historically, the scientific community showed a similar reluctance to accept the reality of earthquake lights, rogue waves, and other phenomena.

Laplace’s concern, of course, was probably not that the idea of stones coming from the sky seemed to him absurd in itself, but that it did not seem possible to explain it by natural principles known to him. The idea of continental drift was long rejected for this reason, namely the apparent lack of a mechanism that might bring it about.

This concern is not entirely unreasonable. If scientists were to accept all eyewitness accounts as they stand, they might be forced to constantly add new principles in order to explain the most recent stories. On the other hand, it would be reasonable for them to give somewhat more attention to accounts which come up repeatedly, as happened with the accounts of the above phenomena.

Accounts of miracles can in fact be treated much like such accounts. A miracle does not mean something which has never been seen in any age or country, as Hume defines it, but something which does not have natural principles. Thus, for example, if a man rises from the dead we do not (generally speaking) believe that this could have resulted from natural principles. This does not prove that it cannot happen at all, as Hume supposes, but only that if it does happen, it results from some additional principle, above and beyond the principles of nature.