How the Church "documents" "miracles"

I'd immediately seek a second and third opinion!

The Catholic Church also uses medical over-servicing and malpractice to document miracles.

One of the 'miracles' used to make ex-Pope John Paul II a saint was a South American woman who developed a severe headache diagnosed by her GP as migraine. She and her family weren't happy with that diagnosis so she went to a tertiary medical centre and a neurosurgeon performed cerebral angiography and found 'a fusifom aneurysm' of one of the cerebral arteries and she was sent home more or less to die. So she prayed to Pope John Paul II and surprise, surprise several months later she was still alive, so the neurosurgeon repeated the cerebral angiography, and it was normal.

A miracle! God praise John Paul II! The Catholic Church was scratching around looking for a second miracle so as to make a conservative pope a saint to balance out making a liberal one a saint too, so she was flown to Rome. And a third cerebral angiography was performed, which was again. Miracle confirmed!

Well actually, all that can be said about the first cerebral angiography is that it showed aneurysmal dilatation of one of the cerebral arteries, one of the causes being migraine (and the GP was right). The first cerebral angiogram might have been reasonable - the surgeon might have been questioning whether the patient's headache was due to a subarachnoid haemorrhage from a leaking berry aneurysm, which is a completely different beast.

The surgeon somehow got it in his mind that the patient had an aneurysm and then proceeded completely down the wrong track ignoring other possibilities. Medical negligence? Medical malpractice?

The Catholic Church then compounded it with the third cerebral angiography, which was definitely medical malpractice - doing a medical procedure which is of no possible benefit to the patient. But with possible risks. Sticking a needle into the carotid arteries and injecting contrast medium isn't lacking some risks.

The neurosurgeon and Catholic apologist Michael Egnor has commented on this case taking a similar credulous view of it being a miracle.

I have no objections to the general thrust of the article. However, Mother Teresa set up hospices, not hospitals. The key difference is that a hospice is a place where you go to receive care before you die. People hope to walk away from a hospital. People who check into a hospice don't check out. She basically set up places to reduce the level of discomfort of people who were facing their final days and had nowhere else to turn.

Setting religion aside, let us not belittle the work of someone who gave a substantial portion of her life to help people.

However, Mother Teresa set up hospices, not hospitals.

Wow, I heard this on NPR this morning, so my comment is already thought out.

My comment will be divided into two parts, which deal with different aspects of the issue at hand.

1) This is the internal Catholic Church standard for confirming what they consider to be miracles and granting sainthood. It doesn't work for me, but so what? I have zero problem with it and don't see why anyone else would, either. Don't find it convincing? Don't join the Catholic Church. Or do join the Catholic Church but tell your confessor that you have doubts about the standard for miracles. Whatever. Being a Catholic is voluntary.

However, moving on to the second part of my comment, I don't personally find the miracle investigation process to be convincing.

2) I personally disagree with the idea that this standard is sufficiently rigorous. For me a number of questions are unresolved.

A) Even if we concur that cures were miraculous (and I don't necessarily concur with that at all; see below but for now...), even if we concur, and even if we concur that the person who was miraculously cured prayed to Mother Theresa, how do we know that a third party didn't cause the miracle. For example, what if someone else was, unbeknownst to us, praying to St Francis, and St Francis really caused the miracle. Merely saying that there was some prayer to person X, and there was a miraculous cure, does not rigorously show that person X caused the miracle.

B) While I strongly with Dr. Duffin that humility is important in the medical profession (she made a statement to that effect that I heard on NPR), I disagree with her two implied conclusions. First, that if she did not detect a medical explanation for a recovery, there must be no medical explanation. And second, that if no-one can discover a current scientific explanation, there must be no scientific explanation.

One of the cases in question was apparently an acute leukemia case. I certainly hope Dr. Duffin rigorously reviewed, ideally with the help of a hematopathologist, all peripheral blood and bone marrow morphology, all cytogenetic and molecular testing results, and all flow cytometry/immunophenotyping results. I've seen at least one benign proliferation of lymphoblasts and at least one bizarre but benign reactive response to fungal pneumonia that that mimicked a neoplastic disorder. However, when all the data was put together, those cases could be differentiated from neoplastic proliferation. But it can be very complex.

I'd also add that there may be a remission rate even for some severely malignant conditions. Such a spontaneous remission rate would be massively below 1% and it would be the height of irresponsibility to counsel hoping for it. Nevertheless, while the immune and other systems fight established cancer rather poorly, the body does mount some defenses. Rare remissions from poor prognosis malignancies may be highly unusual, but don't need to be supernatural.

What about the delusions of grandeur people must have to think like this? The conclusion

"I cannot explain this, therefore it is a miracle"

implies

"I am so smart and well-educated that only a miracle can prevent me from finding an explanation".

So, they think they are some kind of "Explanation Man" superhero whose superpower only fails when God works a miracle. To them, miracles are what kryptonite is to Superman.

harold said: 1) This is the internal Catholic Church standard for confirming what they consider to be miracles and granting sainthood. It doesn't work for me, but so what?

I'd also add that there may be a remission rate even for some severely malignant conditions. Such a spontaneous remission rate would be massively below 1% and it would be the height of irresponsibility to counsel hoping for it.

Fortunately, unlike the IDists, they're not calling it science, nor, analogously with ID claims, suggesting that we replace current medical science with interventions by the Designer.

But as far as methodology goes, I wonder by what other methods anyone would ever determine that a miracle took place, assuming that one isn't demanding levitation such as Joseph of Cupertino allegedly exhibited, or if it isn't a matter of the sky opening up and a giant hand reaching down to the afflicted at which point the disease is cured. What I'm thinking is that this method of determining whether a miracle makes sense to a lot of people, and was once, before science with its statistical methods, an attempt to in fact approach the method reasonably. The trouble is that it depends on outliers being miracles, when today we properly consider them to be outliers. We can even concede that some could be miracles, the trouble being that we can't really determine them to be anything but unusual results. That's epistemology.

One just can't get to miracles by finding unusual outcomes, you really do need the levitating priest or the heavens opening to consider a miracle to be the likely cause of some unexpected change in prognosis (even then it's hard to be sure, but if the "miracles" recur with predictable "miraculous" results, they're probably miracles or previously unknown physics, or some such thing). But I remain far less troubled by a religion using what we now "know" (we do have good reasons, but we could be wrong) to claim a piece of woo for itself than by IDists stuffing God into their gaps and pretending that it's legitimate science. Fortunately, the latter has proven to be too much for most of today's society.

Glen Davidson

" But I remain far less troubled by a religion using what we now “know” [to be bad epistemics] (we do have good reasons, but we could be wrong) to claim a piece of woo for itself than by IDists stuffing God into their gaps and pretending that it’s legitimate science."

aehchua said: I have no objections to the general thrust of the article. However, Mother Teresa set up hospices, not hospitals. The key difference is that a hospice is a place where you go to receive care before you die. People hope to walk away from a hospital. People who check into a hospice don't check out. She basically set up places to reduce the level of discomfort of people who were facing their final days and had nowhere else to turn. Setting religion aside, let us not belittle the work of someone who gave a substantial portion of her life to help people. [Bolding mine]

ThomasK said: What about the delusions of grandeur people must have to think like this? The conclusion "I cannot explain this, therefore it is a miracle" implies "I am so smart and well-educated that only a miracle can prevent me from finding an explanation". So, they think they are some kind of "Explanation Man" superhero whose superpower only fails when God works a miracle. To them, miracles are what kryptonite is to Superman.

eric said:

harold said: 1) This is the internal Catholic Church standard for confirming what they consider to be miracles and granting sainthood. It doesn't work for me, but so what?

IMO having some obvious flaws in the methodology undermines the authority of the church, rather than supporting it. So in this case, the "so what" for me is that they are kicking an own goal by lowering their standards.

I'd also add that there may be a remission rate even for some severely malignant conditions. Such a spontaneous remission rate would be massively below 1% and it would be the height of irresponsibility to counsel hoping for it.

Yes, the statistics are another issue. Any low-but-non-zero remission rate for bad diseases will likely mean many people per year will experience a remission (just because there are 7 billion of us). About one out of every seven people on Earth is Roman Catholic, so if the church wants remission stories, I bet they could easily cherry pickfind a few legitimate cases per year at least. Other faiths could in theory do the same thing, but they don't seem as interested in it. Still, it is interesting to think about how the RCC would respond if some Sunni cleric pointed out that there were more miraculous remissions amongst Muslims praying to Allah than Catholics praying to God. What could they say that wouldn't undermine their own methodology?

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad said: But as far as methodology goes, I wonder by what other methods anyone would ever determine that a miracle took place, assuming that one isn't demanding levitation such as Joseph of Cupertino allegedly exhibited, or if it isn't a matter of the sky opening up and a giant hand reaching down to the afflicted at which point the disease is cured.

Over at Massimo Pigliucci's blog "Plato's Footnote", he has a four part discussion of Paul Feyerabend's "defense of astrology". I think it fits well with this topic. One of the issues is does something appearing like science that really isn't science cause harm to society in general or just for the individual.

https://platofootnote.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/paul-feyerabends-defense-of-astrology-i/

eric said: IMO having some obvious flaws in the methodology undermines the authority of the church, rather than supporting it.

You know, when people become famous, other people try to tear them down. I would point out that there have been replies to Hitchens etc. and the other detractors. Such replies include commentary on the various methodologies used to assess the Little Sisters (only exploring negative commentary, quote mining), biases in the worldview of the detractors (e.g., not recognizing the substantial cost differential between hospitals/hospices, the need for far greater levels of medical expertise in a volunteer organization), flaws in the methodology of detractors (e.g., not actually interviewing people at the site) as well as failures to understand the catholic mindset (e.g., with regards to criticisms of Mother Teresa's self-doubt).

In fact, many of the criticisms applied to Mother Teresa employ the same strategies used by science deniers.

Generally, Mother Teresa is recognized as a person who actually tried to do something decent with her life. Without CONVINCING evidence to the contrary, let us not knock her. It makes us look petty.

aehchua said: You know, when people become famous, other people try to tear them down. I would point out that there have been replies to Hitchens etc. and the other detractors. Such replies include commentary on the various methodologies used to assess the Little Sisters (only exploring negative commentary, quote mining), biases in the worldview of the detractors (e.g., not recognizing the substantial cost differential between hospitals/hospices, the need for far greater levels of medical expertise in a volunteer organization), flaws in the methodology of detractors (e.g., not actually interviewing people at the site) as well as failures to understand the catholic mindset (e.g., with regards to criticisms of Mother Teresa's self-doubt). In fact, many of the criticisms applied to Mother Teresa employ the same strategies used by science deniers. Generally, Mother Teresa is recognized as a person who actually tried to do something decent with her life. Without CONVINCING evidence to the contrary, let us not knock her. It makes us look petty.

aehchua said: Generally, Mother Teresa is recognized as a person who actually tried to do something decent with her life. Without CONVINCING evidence to the contrary, let us not knock her. It makes us look petty.

Do not expect a rational response from any member of an organization that still uses ghosts and demons to "explain" suspect events. The Catholic Church is still peddling demonic possession as an "explanation" for some real or imagined medical problems.
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/tags/exorcism/
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/20/living/pope-francis-devil/
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92541
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11533635/Pope-Francis-effect-leads-to-exorcism-boom.html
etc...

aehchua said: You know, when people become famous, other people try to tear them down. I would point out that there have been replies to Hitchens etc. and the other detractors. Such replies include commentary on the various methodologies used to assess the Little Sisters (only exploring negative commentary, quote mining), biases in the worldview of the detractors (e.g., not recognizing the substantial cost differential between hospitals/hospices, the need for far greater levels of medical expertise in a volunteer organization), flaws in the methodology of detractors (e.g., not actually interviewing people at the site) as well as failures to understand the catholic mindset (e.g., with regards to criticisms of Mother Teresa's self-doubt). In fact, many of the criticisms applied to Mother Teresa employ the same strategies used by science deniers. Generally, Mother Teresa is recognized as a person who actually tried to do something decent with her life. Without CONVINCING evidence to the contrary, let us not knock her. It makes us look petty.

And now, she will be recognized as someone who's ghost will respond to certain magic words (but not others) by healing some people's cancer (but not the vast majority), some of the time, in a seemingly arbitrary fashion!

I don't have enough familiarity with the data to be sure but would expect that either Catholic versions or versions by professional shocking angry atheists, of Mother Theresa's life, would both incorporate substantial bias. In either case putting together an objective assessment would both require a heroic effort at emotional control, and would likely disappoint the intended customer base and harm sales.

As I said earlier, I have no issues with the general thrust of the original post. I agree that the way miracles are investigated falls far short of “rigorous standards.” Where I raised a concern was with attacking Mother Teresa herself. I note the original argument stands without such attacks, and “projects more class” if such arguments are omitted.

aehchua said:

I don't have enough familiarity with the data to be sure but would expect that either Catholic versions or versions by professional shocking angry atheists, of Mother Theresa's life, would both incorporate substantial bias. In either case putting together an objective assessment would both require a heroic effort at emotional control, and would likely disappoint the intended customer base and harm sales.

She has been documented cleaning the wounds of lepers. Would you do that? I don't know if she is a greedy embezzler, or a rabid anti-abortionist or whatever else she has been claimed to be. I don't know how much of her life is myth. I know that before she became a famous person she was willing to comfort and nurse dying people who had all kinds of horrible diseases that no one else wanted to deal with at risk to her own health. Are there other people like that out there? Yes! It doesn't make her willingness to do these things any less impressive.

Re "The RCC can canonize whomever it wants "

Anybody of sufficient caliber, anyway.

Is 0.22 caliber sufficient?

The Post ran an article the other day, updated from last year, Why Mother Teresa is still no saint to many of her critics. The article cites, inter alia, two academic articles, but one (University of Montreal) is to a broken link and one (The Lancet) is not, shall we say, readily available.

The whole point of this "miracle" thing of the catholic church is meant to sustain the churches power over its adherents and to show the world that their god is alive and on their side and can readily intervene in human affairs. Once someone is recognized by them for sainthood, it adds an extension of the polytheistic deity structure whereby people can now pray to additional sub-deities and have additional images in their homes, i.e., Lares were guardian house deities in ancient Roman religion, or commonly St. Christopher medallions. To believers, they don't doubt the church's claims, to skeptics, they can shoot holes in the idea all they want as obviously there's no rigor to the church's process.

DavidK said: The whole point of this "miracle" thing of the catholic church is meant to sustain the churches power over its adherents and to show the world that their god is alive and on their side and can readily intervene in human affairs. Once someone is recognized by them for sainthood, it adds an extension of the polytheistic deity structure whereby people can now pray to additional sub-deities and have additional images in their homes, i.e., Lares were guardian house deities in ancient Roman religion, or commonly St. Christopher medallions. To believers, they don't doubt the church's claims, to skeptics, they can shoot holes in the idea all they want as obviously there's no rigor to the church's process.

This is supposed to be an evolutionary science versus ideological evolution denial blog. What is an attack on Catholic dogma even doing here? Is PT now an official “anti-religion, any religion” blog? Please let me know so that I can remind myself to stay away.

I agree. The intent was not to criticize the catholic church, but it was quite legitimate to criticize the method used by the church to examine the "evidence" for or against sainthood. What the church sets as its criteria, however loose they may be, is not the question, but what is relevant is the use of science, or claims to use science/objective thinking, to verify such evidence by its "scientific" examination.

I was going to add an addendum, so to speak, to my earlier comment, but I think that DavidK has it exactly correct. It seems to me that it is acceptable at some level to think that Agnes Bojaxhiu or Francis of Assisi or any saint you like has performed a miracle. What is not acceptable is to claim you have proved it solely because contrary evidence is lacking.

Matt Young said: I was going to add an addendum, so to speak, to my earlier comment, but I think that DavidK has it exactly correct. It seems to me that it is acceptable at some level to think that Agnes Bojaxhiu or Francis of Assisi or any saint you like has performed a miracle. What is not acceptable is to claim you have proved it solely because contrary evidence is lacking.

You are trying too hard. Of course the Church pretended to be scientific when it employed a scientist to examine the evidence. Of course that is not as bad as what creationists do; no one said it was, and there were no straw men. Why do you distort (or extrapolate on) what was actually written? Your discussion seems very tendentious.

Matt Young said: You are trying too hard. Of course the Church pretended to be scientific when it employed a scientist to examine the evidence. Of course that is not as bad as what creationists do; no one said it was, and there were no straw men. Why do you distort (or extrapolate on) what was actually written? Your discussion seems very tendentious.

Matt Young said:

This is supposed to be an evolutionary science versus ideological evolution denial blog. What is an attack on Catholic dogma even doing here? Is PT now an official “anti-religion, any religion” blog? Please let me know so that I can remind myself to stay away.

Sigh. Since I am the author of the post, I suppose I need to respond to this charge. 1. By what stretch of the imagination was this post an attack on Catholic dogma? If it was an attack on anything, it was an attack on irrational, post-hoc thinking. I labeled it slightly off-topic, but it seemed to me entirely appropriate to a blog devoted to science and anti-science. 2. Similarly, it is unfair to claim that, because of this one article, PT has become anti-religious.

They’re using a religious standard which has a non-coincidental resemblance to science, since it comes from medieval scholarship and philosophy, which were precursors to science.

I notice that when creationists are critiqued, there is little tendency for a general atmosphere of bigotry or paranoia against other Protestants to develop. Yet oddly, even though American political creationism comes from Protestantism, when Islam or Catholicism come up, the vitriol appears stronger.

"I’m willing to conjecture openly that this reflects a cultural bias against Catholics that is part of his mental make-up at all times, whether he is in an Anglican phase or an atheist phase. After all, Anglicanism is the religion that drove him to atheism; you’d think he’d pick on the religion he’s familiar with"

As an ex catholic myself, could it be that he is more anti catholic than anti anglican because the catholic Church acted most despicable, more so than any other religious organiztion in history:
the destruction of heretics in the wars against the cathars
during the times of the inqusition
their power play during the 30 year war
the witch hunts
the negative influence on the culture by the church and orders during the time of the conquest in South America
the churches concordate with the Nazis in Germany
the churches dealing with sexual child abuses and their utterly insensitive and often outrageous dealing with the problem including denial and lying
the churches debt to the children of native tribes in Canada during the times of teh residential schools

Could the reason be the vast chasm between the power and wealth and their dealing and taking responsibility with problems caused by their priesthood and orders?

Matt Young said: The Post ran an article the other day, updated from last year, Why Mother Teresa is still no saint to many of her critics. The article cites, inter alia, two academic articles, but one (University of Montreal) is to a broken link and one (The Lancet) is not, shall we say, readily available.

One of the best accounts is Mother Teresa: The Untold Story, by Aroup Chatterjee, who spent hundreds of hours researching her. He found that what was propagated about Mother Teresa was only partially true, and much of it fiction. For example, the ambulances donated by a Calcutta businessman were, in fact, used by her nuns as taxis to ferry around in Calcutta. Her nuns refused to pick up dying persons within even 200 meters of the compassion house. (Chatterjee has recorded his telephone conversations with the nuns and reproduced them verbatim in the book). He found children tied to beds and little to comfort dying patients but aspirin. That just scratches the surface as far as lack of medical care. In short, she was a fraud.

... critiques that the Catholic church is polytheistic. ... To even make the critique is to imply that monotheistic religions are superior...

I'm only here for the Bob Byers comments.

Where is he, dammit!

Red Right Hand said: I'm only here for the Bob Byers comments. Where is he, dammit!

If you check soon you will see that he is over at the Uncommonly Dense pit, doing his usual flopping like a fish out of water routine.

All those crutches, and not one wooden leg.

Now almost 40 years later, that mystery woman is still alive and I still cannot explain why. Along with the Vatican, she calls it a miracle. Why should my inability to offer an explanation trump her belief? However they are interpreted, miracles exist, because that is how they are lived in our world.

Matt Young said: Jacalyn Duffin, the hematologist, has an article, Pondering Miracles, Medical and Religious, in the Times. The money quote, it seems to me, might be,

Now almost 40 years later, that mystery woman is still alive and I still cannot explain why. Along with the Vatican, she calls it a miracle. Why should my inability to offer an explanation trump her belief? However they are interpreted, miracles exist, because that is how they are lived in our world.

eric said:

Matt Young said: Jacalyn Duffin, the hematologist, has an article, Pondering Miracles, Medical and Religious, in the Times. The money quote, it seems to me, might be,

Now almost 40 years later, that mystery woman is still alive and I still cannot explain why. Along with the Vatican, she calls it a miracle. Why should my inability to offer an explanation trump her belief? However they are interpreted, miracles exist, because that is how they are lived in our world.

Sounds like you characterized her position accurately in the original post; fuzzy. IMO she and the Vatican are playing word games, switching between the sense of 'very unexpected and surprising but positive outcome' and 'physics-defying act of this particular God' in mid-sentence, trying to equate them. Nobody questions that the former occurs; but its also true that the former does not imply the latter.

TomS said: Is there ever a 'very unexpected and surprising but negative outcome'? Or, for that matter, 'very unexpected and surprising but neutral (or ambiguous, or dependent on one's point of view) outcome'?

The number of "miracles" required has been lowered to two, and this within the past couple of decades. Lowering standards to save money, or to improve PR by creating more saints? I believe the sainthood rate has climbed sharply in recent years.

Matt G said: The number of "miracles" required has been lowered to two, and this within the past couple of decades. Lowering standards to save money, or to improve PR by creating more saints? I believe the sainthood rate has climbed sharply in recent years.

Interesting topic with some interesting comments. On most days I would want to point out that this illustrates that religious thinking is anti-scientific, yada, yada, yada; today it just strikes me as a pathological example of Bayesian reasoning: if your prior for miracles is 1 (that they exist and happen often), then your conditional probability for any unexplained occurrence is also high. Which reinforces your prior.

One of my nieces is like that. When she was at a specialty shop that sells spare parts for dishwashers, there just happened to be another customer there who could tell her how to install the part she bought - miracle!

JimV

Point of information: does the canonization process consider evidence that the candidate for sainthood wasn't saintly at all? Did the church address the many criticism of (now) Saint Theresa? And when evidence surfaces that people declared saints were actually very bad or at least very problematic people, is there a process for sanctifying 'em? I know the church declared that some ancient saints never actually existed, but that's different. I'm thinking of characters like Serra who reduced the Indians of California to slavery and got so many of them killed or Saint Bernardino, a particular vicious antisemite or Saint Thomas More who burned people at the stake for holding a different opinion about the eucharist.

Jim said: Point of information: does the canonization process consider evidence that the candidate for sainthood wasn't saintly at all? Did the church address the many criticism of (now) Saint Theresa?

aehchua said:

Jim said: Point of information: does the canonization process consider evidence that the candidate for sainthood wasn't saintly at all? Did the church address the many criticism of (now) Saint Theresa?

Both Hitchens and Chatterjee (creators of works critical of Mother Teresa) were invited to testify as part of the canonization process.

TomS said: I don't know the particulars of this case, but there is a person assigned to represent the case against sainthood, known familiarly as the "Devil's Advocate".

Though of course, the more of them there are, the less importance there is to any given one of them.

eric said: Hitchens and Chatterjee DID get asked to be Advocatus Diaboli in the case of Mother Theresa...They were basically ‘honorary’ devil’s advocates, nothing more.

eric said: Hitchens and Chatterjee DID get asked to be Advocatus Diaboli in the case of Mother Theresa...They were basically ‘honorary’ devil’s advocates, nothing more.

aehchua said: I think Chatterjee commented afterwards that what the church was looking for wasn't what a regular person would look for. Of course not. The institution has its own unique set of values and what Chatterjee's testimony would have demonstrated is Mother Teresa lived and breathed those values.

At one level, I get what this article is saying: that the RCC sets a ridiculously low bar for examining the alleged "miracles" of people being considered for canonization, and that they are predisposed to accept any evidence whatsoever that supports their foregone conclusion.

At another level, though, what's the point? Miracles don't happen, full stop. We know this, to a more than reasonable degree of certainty, so what level of proof WOULD be acceptable? What SHOULD they be doing?

TBPlayer said: what level of proof WOULD be acceptable? What SHOULD they be doing?

Well, they seem to like having control of reproducing, so that should be easy enough.

It’s an internal Catholic religious standard. It’s free expression. It has only a tenuous connection to evolution denial (yes, it’s an example of religion using a different standard than science, but not of a religion denying established science, in fact it’s an example of the opposite, a religion scrupulously making sure that their claims aren’t directly disprovable by science).