Can Miracles Happen

[civ_king]

a) I don't trust the Church, they have a vested interest in this. How about an independent verification?
b) Just because they can't find a perfectly logical explanation, that is no reason to doubt one exists.


Doesn't mean he doesn't make a mistake. Maybe he ran a test that had a false positive/negative. Maybe someone wrote a number down wrong. Maybe his diagnosis was based off of percentages (99 percent of the time, with the given information he could have been correct). Maybe he just had a bad day and made a mistake.

The fact is that even with modern technology and knowledge, much of medicine is still not cetain. Every individual reacts slightly differently and doctors rarely have all the information about what is going on, and there are simply things we do not know.
Doctors use probabilities and experience to make decisions based on the available facts, this isn't mathematics.

In 2001 a Boston man turned to the late Cardinal Henry Newman to help him overcome a crippling spinal condition. Today the same man turned to the archbishop of Westminster to help him overcome impenetrable English accents.

Deacon Jack Sullivan, whose miraculous recovery will lead to the beatification next year of Newman, a 19th century theologian, began a six-day tour with a press conference at Archbishop's House.

With the Most Rev Vincent Nichols repeating questions from the floor so Sullivan could hear and understand them better, 71-year-old Sullivan told his audience about his illness and subsequent cure.

He told the journalists, nuns and priests present: "Wonderful things can happen to an ordinary guy. You don't have to be anybody special. This gives us all hope."

In his case the "wonderful things" came in the form of an inexplicable and sudden recovery from severe spinal disc and vertebrae deformities. One night Sullivan saw a TV documentary on Newman and prayed for his intercession. Next morning he got out of bed and began to walk. He remembered the announcer asking viewers to contact the postulator for the Newman cause should they receive some "divine favour" and called Birmingham Oratory, which was founded by Newman.

"Something very special had happened to me from a very special person," he said. "This thing is real, it's reality."

Medical experts convened by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the Vatican body charged with investigating miracles, concluded his recovery resulted from prayer. Sullivan said his own doctor could offer no medical explanation.

During his first visit to England, Sullivan will go to the Oratory, where he will visit Newman's room, his private chapel and his library. He will also travel to Rednal, where Newman was buried in 1890, and Littlemore, Oxford, where he was received into the Roman Catholic church in 1845. The Vatican must approve two miracles before making someone a saint. Having declared Sullivan's healing to be one, officials in Rome have turned their attention to a teenager in New Hampshire who recovered from severe head injuries after praying to Newman.

Newman is frequently cited as a source of fascination for Pope Benedict XVI and former prime minister Tony Blair, but has yet to arouse the same excitement as St Thérèse of Lisieux, whose relics drew crowds of 286,000 in a recent tour.

Relics from his grave were put on display in Birmingham last year. The church had been confident there would be pieces of bone to be divided among Catholic shrines, but only wood and brass fittings were found when the grave was excavated in 2008.

His path to sainthood has generally faced greater obstacles than St Thérèse, from failure to prove miraculous cures of ulcers to demands by gay campaigners that his body be left in peace in a grave shared – at Newman's express wish – with his lifelong friend, the Rev Ambrose St John.

When asked whether interest in Newman would increase following his beatification, the archbishop of Westminster replied: "Cardinal Newman is a very particular character in a very particular time of English history and English life.

"When he died there was huge and popular support and devotion. It is said 20,000 people lined the streets. I do believe that in the next 15 to 20 years, given the fact of his beatification and an awareness in our society that self-sufficiency is not enough, there will be growing interest in him as a man who lived a very holy life."

Except for the martyrs, Newman would be the first English saint to be canonised since well before the Reformation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/09/us-deacon-claims-miracle-cure

that better?

 

[say1988]

So?
A group convened by the Church declared it as a result of prayer because there was no medical explanation.

How does this counter the point that
a) We have no independent verification. There is nothing to indicate that the panel was independent. There are plenty of religious doctors who would like nothing better than to see evidence of a divine miracle.
b) As I said, medical knowledge is far from an exact science, spinal cord injuries are some of the worst for this. Due to, among other things, every person is different, mental factors, very small variations can make a huge difference, imprecise tests, etc. A few hundred years ago, before the connection between Vitamin C and scurvy was known, a person with scurvy eats a lemon without even paying attention (and completely forgets about it), goes to church and prays, then finds his scurvy getting better. Its a miracle, since there is no medical explanation. Right?

 

[holy king]

after reading this i will now bow down before god and follow all his laws.

no more freaking shellfish for me.

 

[civ_king]

So?
A group convened by the Church declared it as a result of prayer because there was no medical explanation.

How does this counter the point that
a) We have no independent verification. There is nothing to indicate that the panel was independent. There are plenty of religious doctors who would like nothing better than to see evidence of a divine miracle.
b) As I said, medical knowledge is far from an exact science, spinal cord injuries are some of the worst for this. Due to, among other things, every person is different, mental factors, very small variations can make a huge difference, imprecise tests, etc. A few hundred years ago, before the connection between Vitamin C and scurvy was known, a person with scurvy eats a lemon without even paying attention (and completely forgets about it), goes to church and prays, then finds his scurvy getting better. Its a miracle, since there is no medical explanation. Right?

his spine also apparently healed in addition to the blood vessels going back to normal

after reading this i will now bow down before god and follow all his laws.

no more freaking shellfish for me.

Jesus repealed the dietary laws

 

[say1988]

his spine also apparently healed in addition to the blood vessels going back to normal

The human body can be quite resilient and we don't fully understand it. There is no reason to believe that just because we don't understand something that it is not possible. If you took a radio back 500 years what would people make of it?

To paraphrase Arthur C Clarke:
Anything not understood by science is indistinguishable from divine intervention.

 

[Birdjaguar]

b) As I said, medical knowledge is far from an exact science, spinal cord injuries are some of the worst for this. Due to, among other things, every person is different, mental factors, very small variations can make a huge difference, imprecise tests, etc. A few hundred years ago, before the connection between Vitamin C and scurvy was known, a person with scurvy eats a lemon without even paying attention (and completely forgets about it), goes to church and prays, then finds his scurvy getting better. Its a miracle, since there is no medical explanation. Right?

Science takes a giant step backward and reveals it cannot be trusted to show us the truth....

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Actually, I've heard of tests where they put monkeys on typewriters. They tend to bang the same keys over and over again, and then get board and cannot be convinced to keep playing with the things.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Actually, I've heard of tests where they put monkeys on typewriters. They tend to bang the same keys over and over again, and then get board and cannot be convinced to keep playing with the things.

The monkeys bit is way out of date and a poor analogy. Today one might say that "random key strokes on a keyboard will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare". That you could at least try out to see how long it took to get a sentence. Of course, you would want to skip the actual keyboard and just have a computer program that randomly printed one of the 48 choices in an endless stream. My personal opinion is that you'd be hard pressed to get a single page of fully intelligible text no matter how long you waited.

 

[emzie]

1) The Church spent 10 rigorous years vetting this,

Amazing!

2) you do realize that the miracle happened in a first world country right, the doctor who had performed 1500+ of these operations thought it would take many months and is considered the best in the country so is it reasonable to assume the the doctor understands these kinds of injuries well right?

So as so long as the healing described as a miracle is rarer than 1-in-1500....

3) I'm really struggling to find a source for the miracle you presented (as in I checked where the website got it from and can't trace it beyond the book)

Don't bother. I'm not trying to claim miracles happen.

I'm serious, you either present evidence that miracles happen exclusively to a single faith or that unambiguous miracles have happened (amputee example) and I will convert to that faith in a heart beat.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

My personal opinion is that you'd be hard pressed to get a single page of fully intelligible text no matter how long you waited.

Statistical randomness is different from colloquial randomness.

Anyway, for a miracle to be truly a miracle, it must have a low P-value.

 

[Flying Pig]

Actually, I've heard of tests where they put monkeys on typewriters. They tend to bang the same keys over and over again, and then get board and cannot be convinced to keep playing with the things.

Is getting board like getting wood? </cheap joke>

Perspective - a miracle, if it happens, is where something that is really, really unlikely happens by divine intervention; say the doctors say 'this person has a 0.0000001% chance of surviving the life-saving operation' and they do, that could be a miracle. A miracle is not something impossible happening, since in my view even God can't do what can't be done. That's not a very orthodox viewpoint, however.

 

[TheLastOne36]

Of coarse miracles can happen.

But it's through coincidences and extremely low probabilities and with some luck. No god crap.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Is getting board like getting wood? </cheap joke>

At your age that really would be a miracle! </cheaper joke>

 

[civ_king]

So?
A group convened by the Church declared it as a result of prayer because there was no medical explanation.

How does this counter the point that
a) We have no independent verification. There is nothing to indicate that the panel was independent. There are plenty of religious doctors who would like nothing better than to see evidence of a divine miracle.
b) As I said, medical knowledge is far from an exact science, spinal cord injuries are some of the worst for this. Due to, among other things, every person is different, mental factors, very small variations can make a huge difference, imprecise tests, etc. A few hundred years ago, before the connection between Vitamin C and scurvy was known, a person with scurvy eats a lemon without even paying attention (and completely forgets about it), goes to church and prays, then finds his scurvy getting better. Its a miracle, since there is no medical explanation. Right?

You do realize that according to your logic if all the cancer disappeared and amputees regrew their arms that it wouldn't be a miracle because science doesn't understand everything yet right?

 

[Cu Chulainn]

You do realize that according to your logic if all the cancer disappeared and amputees regrew their arms that it wouldn't be a miracle because science doesn't understand everything yet right?

See that would be different. One person's cancer spontaneously going into remission or one spinal cord injury unexpectedly getting better is one thing. Everyone's cancer spontaneously disappearing or a single person's (documented) rapid limb regrowth is another thing entirely and would be evidence that something outside of modern science is occurring. Now whether this "something" is god or another source would be up for debate.

 

[civ_king]

See that would be different. One person's cancer spontaneously going into remission or one spinal cord injury unexpectedly getting better is one thing. Everyone's cancer spontaneously disappearing or a single person's (documented) rapid limb regrowth is another thing entirely and would be evidence that something outside of modern science is occurring. Now whether this "something" is god or another source would be up for debate.

And if it started in one area and spread outward?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Statistical randomness is different from colloquial randomness.

And which "randomness" are you saying will produce our complete Shakespeare?

 

[say1988]

My personal opinion is that you'd be hard pressed to get a single page of fully intelligible text no matter how long you waited.

The chances of it happening are infinitesimal [hell the odds of writing the word "the" with only letters to choose from are 1 in 17576 (ignoring cases) or 1 in 110592 (case sensitive)], but that doesn't meant that it requires divine intervention to occur, it is just very, very unlikely (to the point of being impossible).

You do realize that according to your logic if all the cancer disappeared and amputees regrew their arms that it wouldn't be a miracle because science doesn't understand everything yet right?

A greater sample, unless other causes can be determined, gives it more credance. Especially with sudden regrowh of limbs, since the inability to regrow them is fairly certain.
As opposed to one event, in one of the less understood areas of medical science. The odds of a particular doctor being wrong may be small, but are not near negligable (like the random writing of Shakespeare) due to the nature of medicine.
The odds of every cancer in the world suddenly going into remission, or every doctor to diagnose it to be wrong, are small enough to be negligable, making outside interference (be it divine intervention or not) far more likely a cause.

 

[civ_king]

The chances of it happening are infinitesimal [hell the odds of writing the word "the" with only letters to choose from are 1 in 17576 (ignoring cases) or 1 in 110592 (case sensitive)], but that doesn't meant that it requires divine intervention to occur, it is just very, very unlikely (to the point of being impossible).


A greater sample, unless other causes can be determined, gives it more credance. Especially with sudden regrowh of limbs, since the inability to regrow them is fairly certain.
As opposed to one event, in one of the less understood areas of medical science. The odds of a particular doctor being wrong may be small, but are not near negligable (like the random writing of Shakespeare) due to the nature of medicine.
The odds of every cancer in the world suddenly going into remission, or every doctor to diagnose it to be wrong, are small enough to be negligable, making outside interference (be it divine intervention or not) far more likely a cause.

How odd penicillin would have seemed to people in the Roman Empire

 

[Cu Chulainn]

How odd penicillin would have seemed to people in the Roman Empire

Hence the "something else but not necessarily God" answer. Any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, the potential explanations for the simultaneous eradication of all cancer would be deity or super advanced alien race. From a practical standpoint, I don't know that the options are all that different.