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Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 17, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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.

Have you read a few of them? They explicitly claim conscious dialogue with both gods in their full pagan, wider-Greek-pantheon persona, i.e. a much stronger and clearer experience compared to Savino sensing the characteristic smell of St. Pio. Unless God used to like to role-play before becoming a dad, this isn't something that you can file away as "God as seen through various cultural filters", it's an alternative provenance of miracle healing that is straightforwardly contradictory to the Christian tradition.

As for the report: I can't imagine how in the world you think that this strengthens the case for the reality of miracle cures. IMO the most telling part is this:

Using all 636 medical miracles for which I have a “diagnosis,” the miracle cures before 1800 were of visible conditions detectable by any- one, laypeople and medics alike: skin disease, fevers, blindness, convul- sions, paralysis, and lameness. In the nineteenth century, the diagnoses amenable to miracle cure concentrated on specific internal organs and on specified fevers, such as tuberculosis.

Why would this change occur? Isn't it extremely suspicious that right as reliable documentation and photography come around, the diseases amenable to miracle cures shift from bombastic stuff like curing blindness and resurrection to much more murky things which, while treatable and sometimes curable with modern medicine, aren't exhaustively understood in their full breadth to this day? Right after this the author makes the argument that stuff like diseases affecting internal organs can only start to appear once medical instruments get good enough to detect them, so it does make sense that these sorts of miracles start to get more prominent in modernity, but that shouldn't stop blind people from seeing or cripples from walking again.

In essence, it seems like all the cool cases of miracle healing have by now mostly ceased and their documentation amounts to basically hearsay, and nowadays, even though we now have good experts observing them and reliable documentation, all we get is much more mundane stuff like a cancer going into highly unexpected remission. That is still remarkable, true, but it's not something that is so outside of the realm of expected outcomes as growing an eye back is. Medicine isn't physics and there are still billions upon billions being poured into grinding away at various diseases to gain a better mechanical understanding of them, we have no equivalent of Maxwell's equations or Newtonian gravity in medicine that would allows us to confidently predict spontaneous changes in extremely complicated micro-biological processes.

it's an alternative provenance of miracle healing that is straightforwardly contradictory to the Christian tradition.

Actually, early Christian apologists explicitly acknowledged pagan miracles. Interestingly, there is also some evidence that these miracles (in the world of the first century church) ceased, as Christian apologists reference this.

They explicitly claim conscious dialogue with both gods in their full pagan, wider-Greek-pantheon persona,

It's heavily implied in the Old Testament that the pagan gods are either the guardian angels of their entire nation or demons. It really isn't all that hard for me to accept.

Why would this change occur? Isn't it extremely suspicious that right as reliable documentation and photography come around, the diseases amenable to miracle cures shift from bombastic stuff like curing blindness and resurrection to much more murky things which, while treatable and sometimes curable with modern medicine, aren't exhaustively understood in their full breadth to this day?

You are misunderstanding. I can still point to plenty of proposed healings of blindness that are recent. The point Dr. Duffin is making is that as diagnostic criteria became more objective and instrumentalized, the more those aspects were required. Cures of illnesses that were not diagnosed with those criteria before the cure were thrown out.

Also, re:resurrection, did you see her section on how resurrection miracles turned into heart miracles due to advances in scientific understanding of death?