Remember when you were a kid staring at the clouds looking for shapes or faces of people you knew? Do you also recall that if someone did not point out a familiar shape, you were blind to it until they did so?
Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, and is not a fallacy of reasoning but a fallacy in perception.
Defined
Yale neurologist, Dr Steven Novella observes that
"Pareidolia is a consequence of the fact that our brains largely work through pattern recognition - making connections among various ideas, memories, or images. We are also very visual creatures and so are particularly good at visual pattern recognition - still better than the best supercomputers (at least for now). The most familiar visual pattern for humans is the human face. Even as infants we prefer to look at human faces over other stimuli. We have a large portion of our visual cortex dedicated to seeing and remembering faces. This is likely due to evolutionary pressures to be able to instantly recognize friend from foe, but also to be able to read subtle facial expressions."
Examples
Number Pareidolia
Facial Pareidolia
Religious Pareidolia
Conclusion
Pareidolia is a natural consequence of our evolutionary biology
which can affect our interpretations depending upon our culture.
Religious pareidolia will interpret a recognizable pattern as some kind
of miracle. In the Christian west, we see the virgin Mary. In Muslim
countries numbers from the Quran, or the word Allah are perceived. The
Face on Mars is an example of the influence by popular culture.
Our brains are very sophisticated pattern seekers, however, it is
bad and rushed judgment to conclude a supernatural significance to the patterns we
perceive.
In order to establish an actual miracle like the examples
above, we would first need to rule out pareidolia, or other natural
causes.