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WillowOne's Positions

Miracles

My Positions

  1. No miracle has ever been verified under conditions that would rule out error, fraud, or ordinary causes. I do not hold that any has occurred.
  2. The miracles that would be easy to verify never happen. The ones that are claimed are always of the kind that happen anyway.
  3. The institutions that certify miracles apply a standard of "medically unexplained", which is a measure of our ignorance, not of anyone's divinity.

Notes

  1. The philosophical case is made under Argument from Miracles: David Hume's point that it is always more likely that testimony is mistaken than that nature was suspended. This note is about the modern record, which is what the argument predicts.
  2. Lourdes. Some two hundred million people have visited since 1858. The Church has recognised seventy cures, the most recent in 2018, every one of a condition with a documented rate of spontaneous remission or misdiagnosis. No amputee has left with a limb, no one born without eyes has left seeing. If the spring were doing anything, its cure rate would be the worst in medicine. Anatole France, looking at the discarded crutches, asked where the wooden legs were. He is still waiting.
  3. Canonisation. A saint needs two miracles, and the miracle is established by a medical board declaring that it has no natural explanation. That is the Appeal to Ignorance written into procedure. The first miracle attributed to Mother Teresa (1998) was the disappearance of an abdominal cyst in a woman who, her doctors and her husband said, had been treated with medicine for the condition and recovered because of it. The board found otherwise, because the board was looking for a saint.
  4. Apparitions and objects. The "dance of the sun" at Fátima in 1917 was seen by a crowd that had been told to stare at the sun, and not by anyone else on Earth. Weeping statues have been found with reservoirs; bleeding hosts have been found with bacteria; the "Hindu milk miracle" of 1995, in which statues across the world drank milk from spoons, was capillary action and was reproduced with a teacup. The camera phone has been in two billion pockets for fifteen years and has not caught a single miracle, though it has caught a great many birthday cakes.
  5. Every religion has them, and they cancel. The materialisations of Sathya Sai Baba were filmed and were sleight of hand. The believer in one tradition dismisses the miracles of the others on exactly the grounds I apply to theirs, and if the argument from miracles worked it would prove all religions at once.
  6. What would change my mind. The same thing I set out under God: a documented limb regrown, a verified cure of something that does not remit, recorded before and after by people with no stake in the result. The standard is not high. It is the standard applied to every drug on the market.

Sources

  • Lourdes Medical Bureau, list of recognised cures, 1858–2018
  • France, A., Le Jardin d'Épicure (1895), on the crutches at Lourdes
  • Nickell, J., Looking for a Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions and Healing Cures (1993)
  • "Mother Teresa's miracle: Doctors dispute", BBC News, 2002, and The Guardian reporting on the Besra case, 2003
  • Haynes, R., "Milk-drinking statues", New Scientist, September 1995

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