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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2249 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 17, 2026

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Actually if you are willing to wait in line and have upper middle class American level resources, you can see a miracle in person if it’s important enough for you. There are pilgrimages specifically to go look at miracles- most famously the tilma of Juan Diego, or the incorrupt saints. The blood of st januarius liquification is also open to the public. Unlike the Easter fire, many of these miracles have been examined scientifically and found not to have another explanation.

many of these miracles have been examined scientifically and found not to have another explanation.

This is a very ambiguous statement. It could mean either of two things:

  1. There were scientific investigations of the phenomenon, but none of it reached the level which would allow to claim, with scientific rigor, that a certain explanation is definitely correct. There are myriad of phenomena like this, from ball lightning to migraines, where nobody has a satisfactory rigorous explanation, that's a common thing. There are theories, of course, but none of them has enogh evidence and explanatory power behind the theory to establish it beyond reasonable doubt.
  2. There were rigorous scientific investigation (or several) that somehow concluded that no natural phenomena, neither presently known nor possible to discover in the future, could explain the observed result, and it is established that a natural explanation of it is impossible. This would be highly abnormal and if that indeed happened I would very much like to hear about it and understand how such thing could be established.

Yeah, I think a lot of atheists just don't really look into it, or assume religious people don't actually experience scientifically evaluated miracles in the modern age, because it would be really challenging to their worldview.

Scott Alexander did a review of Fatima recently where he almost started to get worried, but then decided that there are other less clear claims of similar "Sun-dancing" miracles, which makes the first, most widely-attested and most inexplicable natural somehow? Whatever he needs to do to stay sane I guess.

Yeah, I think a lot of atheists just don't really look into it, or assume religious people don't actually experience scientifically evaluated miracles in the modern age, because it would be really challenging to their worldview.

Or we look into them after reading a post like this and find a bunch of hallucinations and poorly-investigated crap that passes for natural phenomenon. Dare you to go start a top-level about your scientifically evaluated miracles and how good the evidence is.

Most of the primary resources are not on the internet, so it wouldn't be an interesting discussion. I could say, "Giovanni Savino's eye was completely blown out in an explosion, Savino has an feeling of a Catholic Saint's presence, then his eye was back. This is attested to by contemporaneous medical records and interviews with witnesses." And then someone would want a scan of the medical records, which I do not have. And so it goes.

If you are a physician or scientist you can contact the Lourdes Medical Bureau. Its records are open to any physician or scientist who wants to make their own investigation or challenge any particular case recognized as “miraculous.” They have incredibly stringent criteria and throw out 95% of cases most others consider to be genuine healing miracles.

And then someone would want a scan of the medical records, which I do not have. And so it goes.

But that's a totally legitimate response to a highly unusual claim without much more evidence than a report by a highly biased source. Given what we know about human cognition, social dynamics, the malleability of memory etc. it's completely reasonable to dismiss this out of hand unless a durable record of this miracle, e.g. photos of his blown off skull on the construction site and the happily healed Savino in his hospital bed the next day after, exist. If it weren't, on what grounds do you (presumably, given its pagan association) dismiss this list of ancient miracle healings performed by the gods Asklepios and Apollo at the sanctuary at Epidauros?

Why would I deny a list of ancient miracle healings performed by Apollo? God loves all His creatures and may bestow on any of us a healing if we try to reach out to Him the way we know how.

Actual people's medical records are not going to be available online in the clear. I'm sorry. If you're a doctor/researcher you can request them. Does the Church need to digitize more? No question there. Maybe in 100 years a lot of the original copies of witness testimony will be searchable online. They are working on it, but due to the age of the documents and the fact that many are handwritten it is being done with great care.

For the Catholic Church to recognize a miracle healing in modern times, there needs to be objective criteria indicating the disease before the healing, the healing needs to be spontaneous, and it needs to be complete, no remission.

  1. The 1st criterion is that the disease is serious, of unfavorable prognosis.
  2. Secondly, the disease must be known and listed by medicine.
  3. Thirdly, this disease must be organic, lesional, that is to say that there are objective, biological, radiological criteria, everything that currently exists in medicine; which means that still today we will not recognize cures of pathologies without specific objective criteria such as psychic, psychiatric, functional, nervous diseases, etc. (this does not mean that we cannot cure these diseases
  4. Fourth, there should not be treatment to which healing could be attributed.
  5. The 5th criterion concerns the moment of healing itself: healing must be sudden, sudden, instantaneous, immediate and without convalescence.
  6. Finally, after the healing, there are still two criteria: it must not simply be a regression of the symptoms but a return of all the vital functions, and finally, that it is not simply a remission but a healing, that is to say, lasting and definitive.

The existence of objective medical records indicating a disease that can be measured by outside instruments, and then the instantaneous reversal of the disease which is long lasting, is objective criteria and cannot be dismissed as "human cognition, social dynamics, the malleability of memory."

This is an interesting article published by an athiest medical historian who studied the Vatican archives for three years. Dr. Duffin notes:

What diseases were healed through the intercession of saints? Cancer, orthopedic, and neurological illnesses were steadily prevalent in all time periods, but later cases demanded ever-more-stringent proof of diagnosis with, for example, tissue pathology in cancer, X-ray films in orthopedics, and imaging scans or nerve-conduction studies in neurology.

She goes on to report:

Further to my surprise, the Vatican does not and never did recognize miracles in people who eschew orthodox medicine to rely solely on faith. It strives to consider the latest in medical science; it does not want to be manipulated by the wiles of sensationalists or the aspirations of the gulli- ble. Virtually all healing files referred to the treating physicians by name, even if they did not testify in person. Only two complete files of physical healings made no reference to physicians: both were from the mid-1750s in the cause of John of Kanty (d. 1473).34 Doctors crowd these records.
The increasing medicalization of the Western world is evident. From 1800 forward, and across the complete transcripts that I have examined, the average number of doctors making an appearance in each record increases from approximately two to seven. The trend is apparent when expressed either by year of canonization (as shown in Figure 2) or by year of cure. Prior to 1800, the opinions and actions of physicians were described by nuns, monks, or priests; perhaps greater credence was given to witnesses in holy orders, or possibly, doctors were uninvited or unwilling to testify. By the late eighteenth century, however, attend- ing physicians were routinely summoned to give in-person descriptions of the illnesses and the care they had delivered. Even in the earliest records, medical men were mentioned, whether they testified or not. The same was true for other health providers, including dentists and midwives.

New technologies appear in the Vatican records soon after their invention; the aforementioned Wassermann test, elaborated from 1901 to 1906 to identify syphilis, was used in this 1929 case in its capacity as a “scientific fact,” equated with venereal disease.46 Medicalization is appar- ent in the doctors’ words and deeds recorded in many other files. For example, the stethoscope, first publicized in 1819, was used for diagnosis in a miracle worked eighteen years later.47 Three cases had been healed of respiratory ailments in that eleven-year interval where no stethoscope was used; following this miracle, the diagnosis of most heart or lung problems entailed auscultation as a matter of course. A thermometer was used in an Italian woman cured of postpartum fever in 1881.48 Similarly, as tubercu- losis waxed in importance throughout the nineteenth century, the failure to demonstrate Koch’s bacillus to confirm the diagnosis was prominent in medical reaction to a cure effected in 1885, only three years after Koch’s discovery.49 Photography appeared in a file from 1889.50 X rays together with fluoroscopy appeared in the miracle files less than five years after Roentgen’s famous demonstration.51 Blood pressure measurements soon followed.

Also she found many records of proposed miracles being rejected due to insufficient diagnostic criteria:

Testifying in 1908, a Corsican doctor justified his failure to order a bacteriological examination on the pleural effusion of a forty-nine-year- old nun during her illness three years earlier; he was forced to the abject admission that his diagnosis of tuberculosis had been merely “clinical.” With the benefit of hindsight, the three expert colleagues refused to believe that the nun’s ailment, though “grave,” had been tuberculosis and, therefore, beyond a natural cure.62 This disputed healing was not decisive for the pro- cess of Theophilus of Corte (d. 1740); more evidence was needed.63

This is a funny anecdote:

In 1834, a professorial expert criticized his more humble colleague’s use of bleeding some nineteen years earlier in the care of a middle-aged woman with fever; perversely, the supposed medical error made the cure all the more remarkable in his expert (but anachronistic) eyes: not only had the woman recovered from her illness, she had also managed to survive her doctor’s backward treatment.

How severe are these illnesses that are getting miracle claims?

In 1937, an expert physician claimed (quite wrongly at the time) that X-ray-proven tuberculosis was “axiomatically fatal” in the face of any treatment, whether natural or supernatural; he pointed to the patient’s 1926 recovery to insist that the treating physician’s diagnosis of tuberculosis must have been wrong in the first place.

I recommend reading the whole report, it's quite fun and full of interesting things. But the point is, the records are being kept in a complete form, the information gathered is as concrete as possible, reviewed by experts in the fields, and much different from some random rumor that could just be hearsay.

I am not an atheist, but my main problem with those "miracles" are that they are... weird. I mean let's say God, the Lord and Creator of the Universe, wants to communicate with people. How does He establish His creds? Look in the Bible - he appears in a huge column of fire with a booming voice. Clear enough? Want more proof? How about turning your whole river into blood? How about producing water from stone and food from nothing? Those are miracles that make sense. Here's God's power, here's something comprehensible to people - not in how but in what happened and why. Bible's miracles may be not believable to a skeptic as an empirical fact, but they usually make a lot of sense as a narrative, if you understand what I mean. They aren't just random weird unexplained things occurring, they make sense.

Now, producing two vials of blood that change aggregate state, who is supposed to have belonged to a random third century bishop and that now randomly changes its aggregate state at certain times (or maybe other times, or maybe not)? What's that supposed to mean? Why this bishop? Why blood? Why only two vials? Why liquefaction? I know Lord's ways are unfathomable and all that stuff, but we can't just say it every time something doesn't make sense. Catholicism is largely a rational religion, as far as I know, and avoids "shit happens, move along, it's not for you to understand" kind of things. And that's my main problem. Natural phenomena don't have to make any sense. They are just random - the nature has no goals, no intent, no message for us. We're not always supposed to understand them, they are not there for us to understand some message, at least most of them, they're just there.

But the Supernatural is not random. It's supposed to have His Intent behind it. And if you look in the Scripture, you find it all over it, everywhere. But these "miracles" just feel so random for any comprehensible intent... It just does not compute.

Also, Wikipedia (I know, I know, but allow me) has a curious paragraph about this:

While the Catholic Church has always supported the celebrations, it has never formulated an official statement on the phenomenon and maintains a neutral stance about scientific investigations.

I mean, if it's a genuine miracle, why not come out and say so? Why keep neutrality? Looks like the Church's position is much closer to mine: if you folks want to have your fun, go full steam ahead, no harm in that, but when it goes to claiming it's the Lord's hand in action, let's not be so hasty.

Yeah, I don't really get the blood thing and I'm not the one who brought it up. When it comes to Catholic miracles, there are a few different types:

  1. Miracles of healing or protection, which are generally something we believe God bestows on many of His children regardless of their religious affiliation. Just done for the sake of benevolence, or because there was something else that person was supposed to do, to live their lives as a witness to others of God's goodness.
    That said there are some particularly Catholic contexts for certain healings, like Lordes. Lordes is really the biggest healing miracle site in the world with the best before/after documentation by doctors.

  2. Miracles related to states of spiritual ecstasy - levitation, visions, trances, etc. A component of very deep prayer that is good for its own sake, the visible signs of which likely are to spur on others to greater commitments to meditation and contemplation.

  3. Stigmata - Wounds of Jesus signifying a closeness to Jesus, which is also joined to His suffering in a special way for the salvation of souls.

  4. Bilocation/Apparitions - Saints on Earth and in Heaven appear in locations far removed from their physical body. Just seems nifty I guess, helpful to send a message you couldn't otherwise and receive a prayer request or provide counsel.
    Often apparitions of Saints in Heaven are tied to a specific message ("increase devotion to X," "A great calamaty will befall if people don't pray," "I am going to clarify a contentious part of doctrine.") Then the apparition works a sign in the Heavens or on Earth to back up the message.

  5. Incorruptibility - Saintly bodies don't decompose in the same conditions other bodies do. This points forward in joyful hope to the world to come. St. Januarius's blood might be something like this.

  6. Eucharistic Miracles - Someone doubts the presence of Jesus, suddenly a visible change occurs that demonstrates the truth.

  7. Miracles where the visible sign persists long after the initial reason for it disappears to history. St. Januarius's blood might be a sign of this.

Or it might not be a sign of anything. The Catholic Church uses miracles as a sign that it is ok to canonize saints. It doesn't actually like taking a strong position on any specific miracle lest someone's faith be built entirely on that miracle. People who convert to Catholicism on the force of having an experience at Medjugorje are weird and have difficulty becoming spiritually mature. Instead, the only miracle that the Church professes as necessary to defend as reason to believe is the Resurrection of Jesus.

I can kind of get the whole incorruptibility thing, it has a sensible narrative behind it - like, if you live in a particularly good way, your body improves too and does not become filthy after you die. That's a very understandable line of thought. But it never included any blood at all or weird aggregate state changes of it. And with the Resurrection too - that's the narrative that has internal reason which you can appreciate, whether you believe in its factual accuracy or not.

People who convert to Catholicism on the force of having an experience at Medjugorje are weird and have difficulty becoming spiritually mature.

Yeah, that's I think where my problem is. If people go "oh, here's weird stuff happening and those guys are saying that's because of their religion, so I must join", that's a very spiritually weak conversion IMHO. I mean, business-wise you take whom you get, but that's what is called a low quality lead. It turns religious matters into some kind of magicians' contest. And it's not unnatural - that's exactly how the scene between Moses and the Paraoh went in the Bible - but Egyptians were pagans, so it looks like some kind of pretty primitive paganism. Not much removed from worshipping trees and thunder. It's very common I guess - given how widespread paganism has been over history - and could be a first stepping stone, but it's not something that one would really want to brag about if one talks about a modern religion.

I think we agree on a lot. I didn't become Catholic because of miracle claims, but as a Catholic I am able to accept miracle claims into my worldview. It doesn't hurt me if a miracle claim turns out to have been natural causes, a deception, or something in between - both of those explanations make sense in my world view. But I also am able to accept situations where it really does look like the laws of physics were violated somehow. And once I allow for that, there do seem to be a lot of credible miracles tied to Catholic saints or what is called "Vindicatory" miracles surrounding Catholic claims.

I would be far more interested in reading his take on the holy tilma.

This isn’t the first time he’s delved into Catholic miracles and used some combination of just so stories and coincidence to write them off. I kinda respect him for addressing the question, even if he gets a bit lazy about epistemic weights.

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