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 th... Read more on Catholic.com