The Miraculous Case for Catholicism

Joe Heschmeyer examines the evidence of miracles and the case they make for Catholicism’s validity.

Transcription:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. What do we make of miracle claims? On the one hand, they’re all over the old and New Testament. On the other hand, I think as Christians it can be a little awkward that it’s like, oh yeah, but miracles sound ridiculous to many modern people and certainly to non-Christians. Miracles can be a source of mockery and derision. Take for instance, Richard Dawkins book, the God Delusion, which he suggests that miracles are just something unsophisticated. People believe in his words, he says, sophisticated theologians aside and even they’re happy to tell miracle stories to the unsophisticated in order to swell congregations. I suspect that alleged miracles provide the strongest reason many believers have for their faith in miracles by definition violate the principles of science. Now, let’s unpack that. Is it true number one, that miracles are just for the unsophisticated, while the rest of us are too smart for that?

And number two, do miracles violate the principles of science, whatever that means. That’s what I want to explore today. But before we get there, I want to give Dawkins a little more time to make his case. He claims the last king in the Belgians Badin is a candidate for sainthood because of his stand on abortion. That’s an oversimplification, but neither here nor there, earnest investigations are now going on to discover whether any miraculous cures can be attributed to prayers offered up to him since his death. I am not joking. That is the case and it is typical of saint stories. I imagine the whole business is an embarrassment to more sophisticated circles within the church. Now, there’s two things I want to point out here. Number one, this isn’t an argument, it’s a sneer. It’s just like surely you’re not dumb enough to believe that, but he doesn’t ever tell you why it’s wrong or what’s wrong with it other than the demonstrably untrue claim that it violates the principles of science, which again, he doesn’t really defend or explain how it does that.

But second, even in the story that he’s telling where people go looking for claims attributed to his intercession, notice that there’s something like a scientific process going on there. Meaning if you want to know, well, does this drug do anything good? Does it help? What do you do? You go looking to see what benefits is it claimed to have. And then the next step is you rigorously evaluate the purported positive effect. You do things like clinical trials, and as we’re going to see, there’s something remarkably similar that happens when it comes to miracles, which is to say the whole process of approving miracles within the Catholic church looks much more scientific than many people, Christian or non-Christian realize. And for this, I would turn to the work of Dr. Jacqueline Duffin. Now, there’s a couple of things you should know about Dr. Duffin. Number one, maybe most importantly, in some ways she’s an atheist, so she’s not coming at this as some believer trying to vindicate the idea of miracles.

Number two, she’s well qualified as both a hematologist, like a blood doctor, but also as a medical historian, someone who’s done a tremendous of academic work on the history of where different advances in science come from. And number three, she unbeknownst to herself, played an important role in the confirmation of a miracle. So long story short, in the mid eighties in her capacity as a hematologist, she was given bone marrow aspirate and she was giving them blind meaning she doesn’t know why she’s been given them, and she’s just asked to examine them, and she looks at the microscope and realizes there was severe acute leukemia that had a remission and then a relapse and then a remission again. And she assumes naturally that the person must be dead and that this is involving some kind of lawsuit only to discover to her surprise that the person was alive and attributed their recovery to the intercession of Canada’s first native born sink. But you know what? I’m going to actually let Dr. Duffin give the story in her own words.

Clip:

Well, it began in my role as a blood doctor, a hematologist when I was very young and I was asked to read a set of bone marrows blind, and it turned out to be a case of very aggressive leukemia, and the patient clearly went into remission for a short period, then relapsed and then went into remission again. So I imagined that it was for a lawsuit and that the patient must be dead because the type of leukemia she had was so aggressive, and I could tell from the slides that it was about eight years earlier and it turned out that she wasn’t dead and that this was the case that was used to be the final miracle in the cause for canonization of Canada’s first saint.

Joe:

So scientifically, she sees this person should be dead and then discovers to her surprise the woman isn’t dead and attributes her recovery to the intercession of now Saint Marie Marguerite Deville. Now this leads Dr. Duffin on a really fascinating journey. She’s invited to come to the canonization of the saint, and so she ends up in the Vatican, she gets to meet Pope John Paul ii, and it leads to this brilliant kind of idea that she has to use this as a launching point to do the kind of research that she does. Now, here’s what you need to know. As I mentioned, she’s not just a hematologist. She was also at this time the Hannah Chair of the History of Medicine at Queens University, a position that she held until 2017. She was also the president of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine and the American Association for the History of Medicine, which means this is a woman who in addition to being a medical doctor, has done a lot of academic work in the history of where medical advances come from.

So she has this kind of light bulb moment when she’s inducted in the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in 2019. She’s described as a medical historian, a hematologist and inspirational researcher, a teacher and an advocate, and they lauded her for the fact that she understands the role history plays in making sense of science. How did we come to know the things that we know and that she talks about this in her book History of Medicine, a scandalously short introduction. So what is her brilliant insight that she can access now the Vatican Secret Archive, she’s well poised as someone who has not only met the Pope, it’s not only been to the Vatican, but has played this role in the canonization of a saint, despite not herself being a Christian at all. And she thinks, why don’t I do a little research about where all of this stuff comes from?

That is she realizes that her own documents are in the Vatican Secret Archives because of the role that she played her paperwork in terms of the hematology report that she does. Looking at these slides, she realizes it’s there and then she starts to realize like, oh, there’s so many other aspects from earlier cases that would be here for centuries. Wouldn’t it be great as a historian and a doctor to get your hands on this to see what does it look like? How do we come to this idea that different things for miracles as opposed to other things? And so she ends up making three research trips to the Vatican. She’s given permission to go into the Vatican Secret Archives, and there’s someone who works with her to bring her different files all the way up to 1922 files since in Sealed that we’re not going to get into all the details, right, but she makes three research trips to the Vatican between 2001, 2003, and she wants to know the following questions.

Number one, what proportion of the miracles worked through the intercessions of New Saints were healings of physical illness, the kind of thing that she has the most background in when we’re talking about miracles, what do we mean by a miracle? Is this an actual physical cure or is this something else? Number two, what diseases were cured? Number three, how many miracles like mine? She says, meaning the one she looked at entailed cutting edge science and the testimony of skeptical even atheist scientists like her. Finally, what was the experience of other doctors whose medical work led them to a liturgical encounter, as she calls it, and how do these things change through time? Now, the results of this, she ends up getting information on more than 600 miracles pertaining to 333 different canonization or beatifications. I’ll explain that difference in a second. And so she gets, for every person canonized a saint from the early 17th century up to when she’s writing this, she has at least one miracle that was attributed to their intercession and many beatifications as well.

So she has a very thorough record. This is not a small sample size that she’s working with, and she finds that in almost all the miracles greater than 95%, we’re looking at healing from physical illnesses. So this is the kind of thing that she’s qualified to look at, and these are miracles from 36 different countries, five different continents, a bunch of different languages. Usually there’s a Latin in translation. She’s able to follow pretty well, especially when they’re talking about the medical aspect because again, in addition to being a historian, she’s a doctor, what does she find? Number one, she finds that the church is actually slow to accept reported miracles. This is not just a case of credulous and unsophisticated people believing just any report of a miracle that comes their way in order to swell the congregations quite the opposite. She finds, for instance, this is actually a slow and deliberate sort of process and each stage of the process can take many years.

Now, this is helpful just to understand where we are in the whole story. You have what’s called a cause of canonization. If somebody dies and seems to have led a holy exemplary life and people are really looking up to them in the model Catholic and wanting to imitate them, asking for their prayers at intercession, eventually you can open what’s called the cause of their canonization. These days you have to wait at least five years to open the cause. It used to be until 1917 you had to wait 50 years. Now that’s going to weed out a lot of ordinary holy people, meaning, oh, grandma died. We all loved grandma. Wouldn’t it be great to have her declared a saint? But if people aren’t still looking to your grandma 50 years from now as this model of holiness, she may well be in heaven, but we’re not going to take the time to confirm this using the whole process of canonization that’s reserved to people who are really looked up to in venerated in a broader kind of swath of the church.

So the next step, if you open the causal canonization, the person’s named a servant of God, and then if scholarly biography is prepared, they look at all the paperwork. They really try to delve into did this person lead a heroic life? They’re looking for what’s called heroic virtue. And if the church determines yes, they move on to the next stage, they’re called a venerable. This is when the miracles come in, you’ve done the natural process by this person has a popular claim, they’re revered as holy. We’ve looked closely at their life and they certainly seem to be holy. But now we have to really turn this over to God and in order to be beatified, go from being a venerable to a blessed, there has to be at least one miracle that’s confirmed. After you become a blessed, another miracle is needed in order for you to be declared a saint.

Now, even this is simplifying the process a little bit, and it’s a different story if we’re talking about martyrs because they have kind of a different track to St Hoods and say, die for the faith, we’re going to leave martyrs aside and just look at the non martyr saints. What she realizes is that along the way, it isn’t that the church is just trying to find miracles anywhere and is happy to confirm anything as a miracle. There’s actually people who have the job of being what was then called devil’s advocate, and this is a position that Cardinal Inger actually occupied and their role as devil’s advocate is to argue maybe they’re not a saint. Here are all the reasons. We might doubt that it is something like peer review. They’re testing the robustness of the claim that Joe Smith is a saint. They’re looking for imperfections in the exemplary life.

They’re contesting the claims of the postulants that people putting forward the cause for canonization. They’re unmasking either deception or wishful thinking on the part of the person who claimed to have experienced a miracle, and they’re identifying errors in medical judgment. Now, this is going to be really important, meaning you may claim there was a miracle, but if the church looks into it and says, you know what? Maybe not. Maybe the doctor just made a mistake. They’re going to toss it. They’re not going to consider that as an authentic miracle for the cause of canonization. So the role this plays is much less credulous and unsophisticated than people like Dawkins assume. It actually is much more rigorous of a process. That’s the first thing she realizes. The second thing is that she realizes that these medical miracles rely upon cutting edge technology. Now obviously what cutting edge technology looks like varies by age, but she realizes that when a technology is introduced, we very quickly find it in the Vatican records, meaning that when we’re looking at these cases, they want to know were the latest and greatest diagnostic techniques used.

Like for instance, the stethoscope, which is introduced very shortly after it was invented, and it’s not just diagnostics. We’re looking for cutting edge therapeutic interventions as well, meaning miraculously cured patients are going to be the ones that were treated with the best drugs available or best surgery available, whatever the best kind of medical intervention is. And so we find sulfa being used by 1945. It had only been invented I think in the 1930s or produced in the 1930s. We find penicillin by 1951, that sort of thing. So what we’re looking at is not, oh, the local witch doctor tried to rub some herbs together and it didn’t work, and then the person recovered on their own, and we’re going to call it a miracle. It’s not that at all. It’s rather that scientists and doctors using the latest and greatest diagnostic and therapeutic technologies are doing everything they can for the person and not getting a result, but then through the intercession of some saint, they are getting a result.

We’ll get into that in a little deeper in a moment here. But another thing she discovers is that many medical miracles, that’s a tongue twister, followed unsuccessful surgeries and interventions, meaning it’s not just that the latest and greatest technology is used, it’s that the latest and greatest technology is being used properly but not producing the good results. So she looks at a couple different concrete cases. For instance, a Spanish engineer named Antonio, he had surgery and transfusions in the 1980s, and not only does it not work, he actually goes into a coma, but he recovers from the coma through the intercession being made to genoa Torre Morales. So it’s not, again, you maybe have this model that, oh, these pious holy people are unwilling to get good treatment because they just want to leave it up to God and leave it up to the intercession of the saints.

And that’s not what’s happening. For them to be considered, they had to have gotten good medical care. If you break your leg and your leg just heals on its own and no doctor ever looks at it to determine it was even broken in the first place, we don’t have a basis to determine if that was really a miracle or if it’s just a normal recovery of a leg. But if you have a condition where a doctor can diagnose it and say, we can’t do anything for this, or we’ve done everything we can and it’s only making the issue worse, well now we’re in a situation where we can analyze an actual miracle claim. So in addition to Antonio, there’s also the case of an American Jesuit who similarly, he’s got coronary bypass surgery, a bunch of other things for herniated discs and it doesn’t work.

Instead, the intercession of the French Jesuit, Claude to Columbia is attributed to its cure. So this is the kind of thing that we’re looking for, and I hope that becomes really clear that this is not just, oh, this person was sick of, then they got better. It’s a much more involved process than that as she puts it, A miracle story garners credibility when the patient’s deteriorating condition defies best practice. In other words, the person is not getting worse because they didn’t get the treatment they should have gotten. The person gets the treatment, they should have gotten whatever the best practice is of that day, and they’re getting worse nevertheless. But to be in a position to qualify best practice must have been given. Doctors in their up-to-date medicine are essential to the clerics. When the church is looking at this, they want to know was this person treated at a natural level the way they’re supposed to have been treated?

That is a tricky and sometimes awkward question because it means the doctor is sort of on trial. So she gives the example of, for instance, in 1908, a corsican doctor, a doctor from Corsica who basically it comes out, he didn’t do everything that he should have, and as a result, with the benefit of hindsight, his three expert colleagues refused to believe that the nun’s ailment though grave had been tuberculosis. He didn’t do all of the steps he should have done to confirm that it was tuberculosis in the first place, and therefore we don’t know if she miraculously covered from tuberculosis or if she was just misdiagnosed by the doctor. As a result, more evidence was needed. They refused to accept this as a miracle. All that is to say there are probably a lot of miracles that the church is saying no to, not because of just being cynical, but because we just can’t say for sure if they were miraculous.

They don’t meet the kind of standards and the conditions we’re looking for to determine if there was authentically a miracle here or not. And so if you haven’t done the work you should do as a doctor in terms of the diagnosis and treatment, we don’t have the paperwork. We don’t have the evidence to conclusively say this appears to be a miracle or not. That’s one of the things Dr. Duffin finds. Another thing that she finds is that the medical miracles rely upon medical experts regardless of religion. In other words, it’s not just that Dr. Duffin is some strange anomaly as an atheist. It’s that throughout the centuries the church is turning to qualified doctors or people who are reputed as qualified doctors, not turning to pious faithful Catholics or people who are devout believers in miracles. That is not the question as she puts it, she said, gradually I began to understand the process cannot proceed without the testimony of a physician. The doctor need not believe in miracles. The doctor need not be a Roman Catholic nor even a Christian, but the doctor must fill two absolutely essential roles. What are those roles? Number one, the doctor has to be in a position to declare the prognosis hopeless, even with the best state-of-the-art kind of technology.

So this is related to the fact that when a situation is bad enough that the person is just they’re going to die. There’s nothing more you can do. You then call the family and tell them to summon the priest. So the doctor has to at some point basically wave the white flag and say, we’ve done everything we can. We cannot using human earthly medical interventions, do anything more for this patient and they’re going to die. And so the doctor comes in, excuse me, the priest comes in and gives last rights to the patient, and many of these miracle stories happen after that’s been done after last rights. What used to be called extreme unction was given they do the anointing of the sick, they prepare the person for death, and then they have a miraculous recovery through the intercession of some saint.

And as Dr. Duffin points out, no doctor, religious or otherwise is going to lightly tell a person, oh, your family member is about to die. Go call the priest, have them perform last rights because as she points out, it’s a public admission of medical failure. You’ve said as a doctor, I can’t do the thing you asked me to do. I can’t restore the person to health, I can’t treat them, I can’t do anything for them, and that’s not the kind of thing that a doctor is likely to take lightly. So the credibility resides on trust in the physician’s acumen. In other words, the degree to which we take this seriously corresponds to how well we trust this doctor is qualified to say Nothing more can be done for this patient. So what the church is looking for is not the holiest, most devout, most credulous doctor though doctor most likely to believe in miracles, nothing like that.

What we’re looking for is a doctor who’s qualified to say, this person who’s going to die, and there’s nothing else we can do. This is especially helpful if the treating physician is also an academic. This is someone who’s done work in this area, not just as a frontline doctor, but also done medical academic work. Like Dr. Duffin herself, a doctor is a good witness. She says, not for being a good Catholic or even a believer in miracles, but for being demonstrably skilled in medical science that we’re looking for the best doctors. This is a much more scientific process than people realize, but the second thing we’re looking for, she describes it as equally if not more important to the recognition of a miracle, is to express surprise at the outcome. Now, elsewhere, she points out that even the word miracle comes from the word wonder or marvel, that it’s not enough for this to just be a qualified doctor.

The doctor has to be able to say, I don’t know why this person recovered. And she says, here’s the rub. Although the doctors must have used the best scientific medicine available, they can take no credit for the cure. In other words, a doctor who comes in there and says, this person was extremely sick. No one else in the world could have cured them, but I can cure them in this incredible doctor. Okay, well, it sounds like it wasn’t a miracle then. You’re just a really good doctor. The doctor has people to come in and say, I did everything I could. It didn’t work. And then for reasons I can’t explain, the person still got better on their own or maybe not on their own, but not because of my intervention. As a doctor, that’s what they have to be able to say. She says, A religious miracle defies explanation by science.

Now notice there’s a big difference between that claim that science can’t explain the miraculous and dawkins claim that miracles violate the principles of science. No rather miracles go beyond the merely scientific. That doesn’t mean they’re violating them, that just means that there’s not, the entire world isn’t explainable through the natural sciences. Now, anyone with half a brain should realize that whether you believe in miracles or not, there’s all sorts of elements of human experience that fall outside the domain of science. This is why science isn’t the only class we have in school. You’re not going to explain poetry through science. You’re not going to explain human relations and love and all of this adequately through merely a scientific explanation. So when she says, a miracle defies explanation by science, that is true, but it doesn’t mean it violates the principles of science. Hopefully that distinction is really clear.

It’s one thing to say this goes beyond science. It’s another thing to say it’s anti-scientific as Dawkins incorrectly says, so notice there’s this role where we have to say science cannot explain why this person is alive and not dead. As puts it, she says, traditionally arrogant medicine must confess its ignorance. Now, remember, she’s saying this from the perspective of medical experts and academic and the historian of medicine in so many different languages. One after another of the treating physicians proclaim their wonder at the recovery of their patients, and then she quotes several of the adjectives they use to describe their own surprise or marvel or wonder. Ification, incredulity amazement at the fact the patient recovered that this is what we’re looking for, that doctors are stunned that this person is alive and not dead, that this person recovered instead of getting worse. There’s another twist to this as well, which is that when you’ve got these many cases non-believing doctors, you’re going to have some who simply refuse to acknowledge that a miracle has occurred because in their opinion, miracles never happen.

Meaning you’re going to get some of the kind of dawkins variety who are just dogmatically opposed to the idea of miracles. They’re also going to be doctors who disagree with each other. You’d find doctors disagreed with each other in anything else where they just read the same data in different ways. So what do we do in those kind of cases? Well, she says, you find this phenomenon in the 19th century, late 19th century where physicians especially those who hadn’t been involved in the original treatment, suspected patients of being hysterical. Now, if you’re familiar with the idea of hysteria, it was the idea that women in particular had these kind of irrational things. So even the word hysteria comes from the same root of hysterectomy. The idea is women’s physiology just makes them irrational, and so someone thinks they’re sick, but it’s just because delusional or they think they’ve recovered and it’s because they’re delusional.

And so these other doctors who weren’t involved in the original treatment look askew at the idea. There’d been an actual treatment and say, well, probably more likely the patients just fake the cure. Now, this also means that they think the original physician must have made the wrong diagnosis. So you have that. Now, I want to point something out real quick here. Those doctors were wrong. We now know hysteria is not a real thing. Probably what was actually happening is people really had been sick and had recovered and overly skeptical. 19th century doctors simply refused to listen to patients and refuse to believe even the treating physicians. All that’s to say what we find the church doing here is being even almost harsh in the treatment of these alleged miracles where it’s not just we’ll believe any miracle claim that comes along. It’s rather holding them up to this high standard that is sometimes irrationally high because the people involved refuse to believe in the very possibility of a miracle.

As she says, when a miracle was laden with medical controversy, it rarely became the final miracle in a process. Disagreement among the doctors was sufficient to weaken the cause and let credence to the rigorous doubts cast by the devil’s advocate. Except on rare occasions, more evidence will be needed in order for the canonization to proceed. So even if you’ve got two groups of doctors and one group is just irrationally opposed to the fact that this could be a miracle and they’re saying no, the other group of doctors has misdiagnosed it or they treated it wrong or the person was just delusional, they’re imagining it. They’re hysterical. Even though have good reason to believe that the more skeptical scholars are actually being a little irrational themselves and the way they’re analyzing the evidence, the mere fact that there’s controversy over whether or not the person really was sick really did recover et cetera, means that’s enough to put an asterisk next to the alleged miracle and we’ll just put it on the shelf and not use that. We don’t want to just take any old miracle claim that comes along even if an actual miracle occurred, we need something more than that, which is a pretty remarkable standard.

Now, having said that, it is not required that the doctor says yes, this was definitely a miracle. You’re going to find some doctors who don’t believe in miracles. What is required is that they can’t explain scientifically how they recovered. If they can explain, if they can say under these conditions, a person will naturally recover or given this treatment, maybe that’s what did it. Well, that ends the miracle claim. Again, maybe a miracle did happen, but because there’s a plausible natural explanation, we’re not going to treat it as a miracle. It’s been falsified, so to speak. Consequently, she says, doctors serve essential witnesses from science, the polar opposite of religion. Now, I don’t think science is the polar opposite of religion. I think even in this way kind of working through this falsification, the church is treating miracles in an extremely scientific sort of way. Again, whether you believe in miracles or not, holding up the phenomenon saying, this person claims it was a miraculous divine intervention, is there a natural explanation is exactly the right question, and if there is a natural explanation that doesn’t actually prove the natural explanation is right and the supernatural one is wrong, but because there is enough reason to have what you might call reasonable doubt about it, we won’t treat it as a miracle even though it might be.

So what you find over and over and over again or what duffin finds and looking at centuries worth of cases over and over and over again, miracles are being held to an extremely high standard, not the kind of low credulous standard that people like Richard Dawkins imagine in their kind of sneering contempt. Okay, so that raises a question for at least me and maybe you given this, given that there are literally hundreds of carefully researched miracle claims, that there’s no obvious scientific explanation how it’s anything other than a miracle, despite again, rigorously examining it and inviting people to offer some non miraculous explanation, how is it that Dr. Duffin herself or for that matter, anyone else remains an atheist? Now I want to listen to her claim, which I think is really fascinating, and then see what we make of that.

Clip:

The church would explain it saying that is the miraculous touch of God. You don’t have a problem with that as a scientist.

No, I don’t have a problem with the miraculous touch of God as a scientist. I personally am an atheist. I don’t believe in God, but if the patient believes that she prayed to someone who interceded with God on her behalf and she has that explanation as a belief, my belief that someday we might find a scientific explanation is no different in the sense that it is a belief.

Joe:

I find Dr. Duffin thinking here really fascinating because she’s saying a couple of things. She’s basically saying there’s two ways of analyzing this evidence. One is saying, okay, this defies all scientific explanation and therefore it does seem to be miraculous. It seems to be the touch of God and the other is to say, well, we just don’t have the science to figure it out yet, but someday we will. She leans towards the latter but acknowledges that this is not something that she knows. This is just a belief she has apart from any kind of evidence, but I would actually push on that even a little further and say, well, I respect her humility in acknowledging that she’s not scientifically showing. This is actually just, she’s not saying there’s actually a scientific explanation for all of this. She’s holding out almost a belief of faith that maybe someday there will be, she should have reason to doubt that meaning she’s looked at things that are now centuries old and it isn’t as if coming at it as a modern 21st century doctor, she’s saying, oh, well, these people in the 18th century thought these were miracles, but now I can see that none of these are miracles.

She doesn’t report anything like that, and so it does seem to be a little irrational to hold the belief that maybe in the 22nd century, all of this stuff will be explained away. At a certain point, the merely natural explanations haven’t delivered on their promises, including the promise that even if they can’t deliver today, they’ll deliver tomorrow. It just hasn’t happened. So at a certain point to continue to hold onto that belief in spite of the evidence does appear to be irrational. And I want to say this in the last steps episode I did on the demonic case for Catholicism, I pointed out that when it comes to supernatural claims or preternatural claims about ghosts and demons and exorcisms and everything else, the religious person is actually in the position of being the open-minded observer. They’re willing to evaluate every claim because we believe these things are possible, but we don’t believe every claim is true.

So we have to evaluate case by case, well, did this really happen or was this person delusional or are they lying or fill in the blank? Whereas the person who is an atheist, materialist who denies the spiritual realm, who denies that there really are ghosts or demons or exorcism, has prejudged every case coming down the line before they’ve ever happened. It would be like having a juror who says, I don’t believe murder is a thing. I don’t think anyone’s ever actually so violent they would kill another human being. Well, they haven’t heard the evidence of the case and have already come to a conclusion that’s prejudging in a strange kind of dogmatism. Well, likewise, the person who says, I don’t believe in miracles is prejudging every miracle claim before they hear it. No matter how much the evidence points to an apparent miracle, no matter how much science has no answer, and in fact science can say this person will die.

Dr. Duffin sees this is an aggressive form of leukemia. She’s not unaware of aggressive leukemia as a hematologist. She knows what this means, and yet the person is alive and not dead. It’s not just this is a realm of science we don’t know much about. It’s said, no, no, no. We do know a lot about this and we know the person should be dead and it isn’t. So I hope that’s clearly, this is not like we’re believing in miracles because we don’t know anything about hematology. It’s we believe in miracles because we know about hematology and know this person is alive and shouldn’t be by any natural explanation. Nevertheless, you’re going to find people who dogmatically hold that miracles are impossible. I’m reminded here of a pretty famous 1997 New York Review of books essay by the atheist and evolutionary biologist, Richard Luon. He’s reviewing a book by Carl Sagan, so both of them are scientists, both of them are atheists, and yet Luton still realizes that Sagan is being irrational in his anti-religious atheism, that he’s being irrational in kind of his judgment of believers.

In the Lawton’s words, he says, what seems absurd depends on one’s prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks the cons substantiality of Father, son and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity in deep trouble two’s company, but three is a crowd. In other words, it’s easy to scoff. It’s easy to sneer at ridiculous sounding religious claims just as it’s easy to scoff and sear at ridiculous sounding scientific claims, but that just shows your own prejudice. It doesn’t actually show the truth or falsity of the thing. When you have people like Richard Dawkins just sneering at religion, he’s not disproving these claims. He’s just sure a lot of things sound silly if you take a very silly version of them and don’t do any work to actually carefully analyze them, but that just shows your own biases and prejudices.

It doesn’t show the absurdity of the position itself, but Lentin then says something really remarkable. He says, our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. Now, as he’s about to make clear, it’s not that science and supernatural can’t coexist. It’s not that science disproves the supernatural or the supernatural violates the principles of science. It’s rather that the methodology of science can’t discover the supernatural by definition because the tools and methodology used don’t work in analyzing the supernatural the most you can say scientifically is there’s no scientific explanation for X that then leads to the exact position we find ourselves in. Where there are hundreds of cases where science can’t explain it, does that mean there’s a miracle or not? That’s the kind of question we find ourselves in.

There’s a group of scientists who are going to say, no, it must just be impossible, and the long is going to say, you are not coming to that conclusion on the basis of the evidence, you’re not coming to that conclusion because science requires that you have a dogmatic commitment. That’s what’s actually going on here. In his words, he says, we take the science, excuse me, we take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated, just so stories because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. So let’s unpack what this means, okay? First, it’s not just that there’s silly sounding things in science. That’s fine. It’s also that science has promised this futuristic world that never quite comes.

We don’t have the flying cars. We don’t have the kind of futuristic world, 19th century futurist dreamed of Those promises never quite materialize. We’re constantly being told they’re just around the corner. Likewise, we’re constantly being told Science will someday soon disprove religion. It’ll someday soon disprove all these miracle claims. It’ll someday soon do all these things that it never actually does, and yet there are people who still hold onto this. And what’s more the just so stories. Now, if you’re not familiar, just so stories Rudyard Kipling, 19th century, it’s these kind of silly children’s stories. How did the camel get its hump? It was like a horse, but he kept complaining about things and saying, hump, hump, hump. And finally he’s cursed by having a hump. Now, what a just so story does is it explains the evidence, but it doesn’t actually prove it. You can look at that.

If you took the camel getting its hump and thought that literally happened, that would actually explain the scientific evidence. It would explain why camels have humps. It’s a quite silly explanation, but you’re not getting there because you’ve proved it. You’ve just told a story that explains the evidence. I hope that distinction makes sense. The evidence didn’t lead to a conclusion. You told the story about the evidence. What Lentin points out, and I think many people don’t realize is a lot of science still works in this way. So if you say, why do I have a sense of beauty? Scientists can tell you a story. Maybe you were evolved to have pattern recognition and then as a happy side effect, you happen to have a sense of awe and wonder at beauty in the world that really make a ton of sense, but it sort of explains the evidence.

But notice the evidence didn’t prove that. It isn’t as if they discovered some gene and said, aha, this gene proves this is how you ended up with a sense of wonder and beauty. Maybe that’s just around the corner, but we haven’t found it yet and it’s been just around the corner for a long time, and instead of actual evidence, we just have a story. So in saying this, please make it very clear, I’m not knocking science at all. I’m knocking people who’ve turned science into something that it’s not who tell these stories and pretend that that’s the same thing as science, who tell these stories and pretend that’s the same thing as evidence. That’s what I’m critiquing, and that’s what Lawon is critiquing saying. We settle for these stories, not because this is where the best evidence leads because it’s not, but because we have this prior dogmatic commitment to materialism.

What’s materialism? Materialism is the idea that matter is all there is. So you reject the of any spiritual reality, angels, demons, God, you name it. So there’s no predator natural. There’s no supernatural. All there is is nature. All there is is matter. Science doesn’t prove that science can’t even in principle prove that because science is only looking at the natural world. So expecting science to prove that would be expecting a Latin American history course to teach you about astronomy, it’s the wrong field. It’s not the right, that’s not the kind of thing that’s ever going to discover the sort of principle that you’re wondering about. If you’re wondering, is there anything other than matter? That’s not a scientific question. It’s a good question. But that’s not the kind of thing that the scientific method is designed to discover or is capable of discovering as long implicit.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world. But on the contrary that we are forced by our apriori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations. No matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated put simply, it’s not that the scientific method arrives on the scene and then proves that matter is all there is. It’s rather that you have a group of scientists who are convinced that matter is all there is using tools that can only find material causes. They haven’t come to that as a conclusion. They’ve started with that as a set of blinders because they’re only willing to accept things that fall in this narrow category of material causes. And Lawton goes on to say, moreover, that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.

The imminent scholar, Louis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything to appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that. At any moment, the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. Think about it like this though in chess, this is a manmade system. You can do things like let your opponent take their move back. Now, the rules of chess don’t allow them to take their move back once they’ve let go of the piece. But you could still say, that’s fine in this case. I know you didn’t mean to move that one, or you made a mistake. And just as a gentleman, I’ll let you take it back, that does it violate chess? Not really. It goes beyond the rules of chess, but it doesn’t, chess doesn’t disprove the possibility that you can let your friend take a move back because as a manmade system, you as a man can go beyond it.

Well, likewise, if nature is a divine made system, it’s not shocking that God can interact and interfere and go beyond the rules in all sorts of ways that aren’t predictable by the rules themselves. And so to treat the rules as if they’re binding upon God that he can’t do anything about them is actually itself quite irrational. So I mention all this to say in closing from a scientific perspective, there are literally hundreds of carefully examined cases for which the best explanation is that there is an actual miracle, that there is no scientific explanation, and so your only conclusions are this was actually a miracle or shrugged the shoulders and say, we don’t know. Maybe there’s something we don’t know about yet. And you can always do that no matter how good. If you had literally seen the resurrection and saw Jesus Christ rise from the dead, you can still shrug your shoulders and say, well, 99.8% of the time when people die, they don’t come back from the dead.

But maybe there’s some condition we don’t know about. You can literally always do that, but at a certain point, it’s so patently irrational to deny the miraculous. This is not a case of just credulous, unsophisticated people coming to this conclusion. Credible, careful thinkers. Sophisticated thinkers can say, this kind of evidence cannot be explained by the science, by the natural explanations, by none of the tools we have in our modern arsenal can explain this. It appears in terms of inference to the best evidence, excuse me, inference to the best explanation to be divine. So I offer that just to say I think there is a strong miraculous case for Catholicism. I think we have abundant evidence to say miracles do exist, and Catholic saints, through their intercession, do produce miracles that they pray for things and they really do happen in the world, and we have for centuries been able to document and observe carefully these things happening. Nevertheless, the nature of miracles is such that you can always ignore that evidence. You can always close your eyes to it. You can always say no to it. So that’s the miraculous case for Catholicism in a nutshell and why I would be hesitant of any kind of dogmatism that rejects the possibility of miracles out the gate. For Shameless Poper; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.