quote:Jag: Question for this thread: Why do people so readily search for any answer other than a Christian God? They seem to go to great lengths to accept any explanation but God for miracles.
quote:Rorshach: This is *such* a massive topic.
If you tell me that someone's bone was instantly healed, I'm sure you'll understand if I'm a bit incredulous. It's not unreasonable of me to reserve judgement on the basic facts until I've seen documented evidence.
This is the problem with anecdotal evidence. It's essentially word of mouth. Remember that story about the man in Africa that was resurrected after being dead for a few days? It appeared all over the evangelical community sometime last year. The problem was, the actual facts of the case were NOT undisputed, despite what evangelical sources claimed. Claims and counterclaims surrounded the case. Unfortunately under the circumstances, a proper, thorough investigation was and always will be impossible.
Carl Sagan's mantra "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" rings true here. Why shouldn't an anecdotal claim of a miracle be held to a high standard of evidence? Considering the implications of a miracle - such as the resurrected man in Africa - why should anyone be asked to believe the story simply on word of mouth? If that's the standard we use when considering miracles, then we also have to accept many other claims that we would otherwise disregard as spurious.
Assuming the event has been documented, more considerations come into play.
The first consideration is the actual cause of the event. JAG, you asked why people resist Christian explanations for seemingly miraculous events. That question is a double edged sword. Why do you insist on a Christian interpretation?
Remember, you're the one that insists that 150 years worth of astronomy, biology, paleontology, physics and archeology as well as multiple other fields are incorrect in some of their most basic notions (thinking of old universe/Evolution here). If our systematic observation of the natural world can go so wrong for so long, then don't you realize that you lose your own basis for calling an event supernatural? Our distinction between natural and supernatual lies in our understanding of the natural world. You claim that our most basic notions of the natural world are false - therefore by your thinking, we lose our best stand for distinguishing between natural and supernatural. So why should I believe that a particular event is a miracle wrought by the Christian God? It could be a natural event that our deeply flawed sciences simply don't understand.
You might dismiss that last paragraph as too abstract to mean anything. But think about it. How long has humanity been assigning supernatural causes to events it did not understand? Is thanking the corn god for making the crops grow because you don't understand how seeds germinate really different from claiming the Christian God caused a particular event that we don't understand?
When Galileo was studying the sky, he was working without the benefit of Newton's laws of physics. He had no idea how the planets moved through the sky. He was willing to consider that angels pushed them. Why do we always have to resort to "angels pushed it" when an unusual event occurs?
There's yet another consideration. If a particular event is naturally impossible in principle - as an instantly mended bone would seem to be - then you still have to understand that this event, this fact of the mended bone, does not speak for itself. There is no reason to connect a supernatural event to a particular view of the supernatural. You're the one that assigns a Christian signifigance to the healing. Any Christian signifigance is not self evident. A new ager type might acknowledge the supernatural nature of the healing, but claim that it was the person's own personal energies that performed the healing.
I'm the second poster.
Edit: That discussion is a year old and I'm kind of wishing I had said some things differantly, but I still think my initial post is good.
The Catholic church considers visiting the shrines of saints to lead to miracles, and every now and then they certify one. However, this is rather rare. So rare, in fact, that at some shrines when it was counted up how many miraculous cancer cures, the rate was found to be lower than the expected rate of spontaneous cancer remission (based on reasonable estimates about number of visitors with cancer and such).
Now, this says nothing about the miraculous (or non) nature of such remissions, but it is an interesting tidbit about the standard of evidence some apply.
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It seems there are some people that will believe anything and everything is a supernatural event. Others don't take note at all of the anomalies of life. Makes me think of X-files with Scully always blowing off anything out of the ordinary. Mulder, on the other hand, IMO, went too far the other way. But since the show featured supernatural events of every conceivable kind, the show made Mulder out to be correct time after time. I recognize that that is an unrealistic "TV setup".
While I think it is a fault to be *too* much like Mulder, I think it is more of a fault to be too much like Scully. But maybe that is because I tend more towards Mulder myself. The Scully mindset doesn't make as much sense to me.
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quote: So rare, in fact, that at some shrines when it was counted up how many miraculous cancer cures, the rate was found to be lower than the expected rate of spontaneous cancer remission (based on reasonable estimates about number of visitors with cancer and such).
Out of curiosity, does anyone know the cause behind spontaneous recovery of cancer? Has it been studied or documented? If it hasn't been, it should. After all, it could lead to a cure, could it not?
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Spontaneous remission is, of course, abundantly studied. There are no doubt several possible reasons for every sort of cancer, and there are hundreds (thousands?) of sorts of cancer. Of course, some sorts (and reasons) can likely be classes together. For instance, some people no doubt secrete some enzyme under certain circumstances which shuts down certain sorts of cancers (as that's a common thing humans do, secrete enzymes, and enzymes can do all kinds of interesting things to cells).
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Is it? It seems like whenever I hear of someone "spontaneously recovering" from something, the doctors shake their heads, say they don't know how that happens, and that is the end of the story. This seems to me to be "Scully" behavior.
What if the secretion of special enzymes is one way in which God answers prayers? After all, God works in mysterious ways.
But seriously, if the secrets to spontaneous recovery can be unlocked for the benefit of mankind, that is a good thing.
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quote:It seems like whenever I hear of someone "spontaneously recovering" from something, the doctors shake their heads, say they don't know how that happens, and that is the end of the story.
With how many doctors have you discussed this? I, myself, was subjected to a fair amount of study simply because I regained partial hearing in my right ear after all the nerves in that ear were thought to be dead; this was sufficiently unusual that they "experimented" on me.
If that was special enough to intrigue medical researchers, I can only imagine how much they'd love to study someone whose bones spontaneously healed overnight.
Its important to understand that your hometown doctor isn't a researcher, generally speaking. However, there are thousands of doctors (and others) doing research on such things all the time.
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quote:The Catholic church considers visiting the shrines of saints to lead to miracles, and every now and then they certify one. However, this is rather rare. So rare, in fact, that at some shrines when it was counted up how many miraculous cancer cures, the rate was found to be lower than the expected rate of spontaneous cancer remission (based on reasonable estimates about number of visitors with cancer and such).
Now, this says nothing about the miraculous (or non) nature of such remissions, but it is an interesting tidbit about the standard of evidence some apply.
I've seen this before, but always as something someone read somewhere. Can anyone provide a link to the actual study?
Also, fugu, the standard for miracle certification in the Church is very long and involved and not often performed outside the process of canonization. If the study compared only certified miracles, it would absolutely be expected to be below the rate of spontaneous remissions.
Most potential miracles are at most given the status "worthy of belief," which means that the investigation has uncovered no natural explanation for the event and that the event is consistent with Catholic doctrine on miracles.
A friend of ours had a baby that was born deaf. A few days later the child's hearing was normal. I don't have any agenda in needing to insist that this was an unexplainable miracle. (Though it may have been.) I wonder, how often are reasons for things like this discovered? It seems like insight into these things would have great value.
I guess what I am wondering is, how often does such research yield results.
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"Tom, did they learn anything from their research?"
Sadly, I really don't know. I was pretty young at the time, so they didn't feel too compelled to tell em exactly what they were doing -- even though I'm sure I would have appreciated the layman's version -- but do recall that they spent a lot of time trying to determine whether the nerves had actually regrown or simply repaired themselves somehow.
Now that I think of it, I'm rather curious. I'll see if my mother can't put me in touch with the researchers in question, or if they told her more than they told me at the time.
Carl Sagan. While Sagan was certainly a bit, ah, pretentious in many ways, he was also a pretty darn good scientist. Its important to note, however, that this seems to have been merely a thought experiment, not a formal study.
As that link includes a fairly thorough explanation of the consideration (near the bottom), I think that's sufficient digging. Its also worth noting that, based on the standard being applied by the CMIL (International Medical Committee of Lourdes) as described in the lourdes-france link above, that the rate of accepted miracles be less than the rate of spontaneous remission is a necessary consequence.
However, that was pretty much my point by the reference, that the standard applied for miracles by the Catholic church, as an example organization that judges the standards of miracles, is quite stringent.
One interesting thing I noticed is that Catholic miracles, at least those evaluated as possibly having happened at Lourdes, must be supernatural. While the statement (by a bishop) acknowledges that those things labeled as possible miracles by the CMIL might be just God-of-the-gaps instances, it is clear that the intent is to find things which are genuinely inexplicable by now and future science -- that is, which are truly supernatural.
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posted
Thanks for the links. I've never seen it attributed to Carl Sagan before. I'd love to see the original article or speech where he lays out the numbers and assumptions, because I'd be interested to know where he gets cancer rates from going back 100 years. It strikes me as anti-scientific to so casually ignore all the other remissions that may or may not have happened and have not been reported or certified, and I'd like to know if he actually did this or not.
I have no belief in Lourdes one way or the other - I pretty much accept that 65 times or so, someone was cured in a way that cannot be explained by the medical knowledge of the time, and believe this is entirely consistent with God's behavior as I believe in Him.
Dagonee BTW, that Lourdes site has the tiniest text.
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Its not anti-scientific in a thought experiment, Dags, that's part of the point of thought experiment, to make guesstimations based on ultimately unavailable, but reasonably guesstimable, data. Also, even if we cut out all possible cancer remissions before, say, 1950, the expected number would still be something on the order of 25 or more.
However, to explicate why this is expected behavior a bit more, the committee only ratifies as possible miracles things which are inexplicable as far as they can tell by modern medical science. Some spontaneous remissions "suggest" possible reasons by their nature, and thus would not fall into this category, for instance.
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Right. Which is why I consider it anti-scientific. He's comparing apples to oranges. The idea that there might have been remissions not included in the 3 that involved cancer (of the 65 certified cures) is basic and obvious. It's equivalent to saying, based on the number of robberies reported in the press, crime has gone down (or up). He compared a subset, whose nature as a subset is obvious and easily verified, and compared it to the expected rates of a superset.
He let his desire to make a point overcome his traditional careful scientific reasoning IF the representations of what he actually said are accurate.
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Oh yes, his interpretation of the thought experiment's definitely flawed (and that of the speaker), the thought experiment itself (determining the numbers) is pretty reasonable, though.
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If the numbers are at all obtainable, I'd love to see such an analysis done. And the methodology is sound as reasonable means to analyze whether X relic or artifact does cure people.
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