So even when, you know it doesn't happen to all of us. Now obviously those numbers, none of us would say that all of those can only be explained as a miracle. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. This is the pattern we see of something that is non-existent, and the healings follow this exact same pattern. Adapted from Editorial Theme html5up.net | @ajlkn, James Fodor compares healing claims to homeopathy -- we have millions claiming an effect, and if we just counted those then we might be convinced that homeopathy was a real treatment. I've read some of the first volume. [3] During Snyder's tenure as the university president, CWRU has overcome a $20 million budget deficit, increased fundraising by nearly $60 million, and increased research dollars by more than $15 million. President Barbara R. Snyder announced today that she will become the next leader of the organization that represents the 63 leading research universities in the U.S., as well as two in Canada. unblinded) studies were better. perhaps a thickening of the intestine would look like a regrowth? After his conversion, Lee worked briefly as a pastor before moving into an apologetics ministry focusing on writing and video productions. Stay up-to-date with current issues, Christian teachings, entertainment news, videos & more. How can I help? But it's a wonderful volume. Western Reserves president has been the greatest professional privilege of my God could choose methods that are not so easily confused with memory biases, measurement errors, and other distortions and it is suspicious that he doesn't operate that way. Likewise, Americans are quite prone to believing in the potential occurrence of miracles. Someone in the chat asked "do all of Keener's cases differ as much from what actually was reported to what was reported by him?" James says, to refuse to put in the controls to avoid the biases we know we have, is a form of dogmatism -- we're looking for the result we already believe and we refuse to put in the methods that would allow us to isolate the different variables. "Barbara Snyder was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic with multiple sclerosis. Share it with a friend. Bladder and stomach control were lost. How is an epistemically responsible thing to do? Earlier in her career, she served as provost of Ohio State University . As you begin your hike, set your sights on a new direction. It is justified to demand better evidence, because we do that for even more modest claims, and we have centuries of data on the failings of human reasoning in inferring causes from effects. Now we move on to a video with Sean McDowell interviewing Craig Keener called Latest Evidence for Modern Miracles. it can be also given as a nice gift to your friends, relatives, boyfriend or girlfriend. Somebody we know, actually there were two people we know, who are witnesses of that one. in social ethics from the University of Southern California, a Th.M. Find your thing. I don't understand how it's possible for both those things to be true. Thus we will more often hear from the healing crowd. The study mentioned by Strobel in the video above, and the one I mention in relation to healings of deafness and blindness and how it compares (very favorably) to hypnosis studies, The following is a section from Strobels book that references some of the gold standard scientific studies that show the effectiveness of prayer, which I briefly mentioned in the podcast. Case Western Reserves She is the former president of Case Western Reserve University. This is pretty silly. And, in fact, one doctor described her as being one of the most hopelessly ill patients he'd ever encountered." So that, I mean that would almost qual, I mean three hours. I mean these were mainstream Evangelical Christians and anyway, some of the critiques, and actually some of the praises from the Christians showed that they hadn't actually read the book either. Sometimes we don't even get healing in this physical body in this life, but when it happens to any of us it's a reminder to all of us of God's plans for us. If you took our remedy, and improved, we want to hear from you. What problems are you interested in? These are two red flags which will need some level of caution in establishing the cause of the condition improving. Chris Gunderson who was born with an incurable disorder called Chronic Pseudo Obstruction Syndrome, which was cured by prayer. Kamil: so he basically said, look the way we do it is that we have, let's say seven different possible explanations, six of them are naturalistic which we can disconfirm using science and then the seventh is the explanation that God did it. By counting these as "hits" and ignoring the deaths of starving children because they are "misses" and don't support their narrative is an indictment of the entire mode of thought. 2021 - All rights reserved. Now you got to go work! Barbara had a very severe case of multiple sclerosis. Meanwhile, her muscles were atrophied. Kamil points out that there is a mismatch between the magnitude of the claim and the attention they pay to documenting it. That we all will be ultimately healed if we have trust in Jesus because we'll be with him forever. Is it possible she was misdiagnosed -- it wasn't MS, so looking for an MS recovery may be misdirected? This last part is the reason we set up replication, controls, and other processes to minimize the effects of the limitations. Now, Strobel, whose personal story was told through the Pure Flix feature film, book anddocumentarytitled The Case for Christ, has released The Case for Miracles, a new investigative book that relies on facts, interviews, and studies to further explore spiritual matters. And of course, accounts from the west, it was easier to get the medical documentation so there were strengths with a lot of these. It is pretty clear that not much can be said confidently. Snyder ended up in hospice care with a no-resuscitation order; she was nearly blind, her hands and body were curled and she had a tube in her throat to help her breath as well as a tube in her stomach to ensure proper nourishment. And her hands had been curled up so much that every few months they had to uncurl her hands to get the dead skin out. Even the supplementary information doesn't rule this out, where they have some reports in the 16 years but don't say they've been attempting oral feedings. Also, while we have been generally optimistic that these miracle claims are not the result of deliberate fraud, one does have to consider that as a real possibility and find ways to rule it out. Personally I like looking into the details of miracle claims because they spotlight the scientific process, when it is misused or when people try to use the authority of science but don't want to go through the admittedly hard work to earn it. "One day, one of her friends called WMBI, which is the radio station in Chicago run by the Moody Bible Institute, and said, 'Pray for Barbara. It makes it very hard to investigate these claims because you have to spend so much time trying to work out what is actually established. The response we get is to say "Well what you have to do is you have to compare explanations and see which one's the best" and it's like "Right! The analogy breaks down here because of a difference of information (we have some context for prayer but none in the analogy) and it seems out of place. I mean I can explain theologically the already not yet of the Kingdom why it doesn't happen to everybody, but why this one and not that one? A lot of these things were published in Asia. Could you imagine a similar claim written about, say, a homeopathic remedy for cancer? #media. Craig Keener: Yes. Craig Keener: Yes. Knowledge falls on a continuum. What is more striking, especially for people who don't like Pentecostals or Charismatics, what's more striking is that the survey also in those 10 countries dealt with Christians who didn't consider themselves Pentecostal or Charismatic. In response, Snyder said, "I am proud to be president of Case Western Reserve and intend to continue in this role for many years to come. Case Western Reserves Board of Trustees And then some months later war came to her hometown in [inaudible] and she had to flee again. Since these diseases are genetic, it makes it a lot less likely that she had this condition. And that was, that was really hard. Barbara Snyder was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic with multiple sclerosis. James points out that God seems to choose not to use all his abilities -- he could heal amputees, even while someone is in an MRI, but chooses note to. I was talking with Antoinette Malumbay with my wife translating for me 'cause my wife knew the story only second hand herself. The fact that the best theists can come up with are so readily handled should be a caution to anyone trusting their claims. Craig Keener: Greg Spencer is a case of this. What about single cases? 2) A child dies from after a doctor concluded that this would be the outcome of the disease. It is also correct to say that it depends on the prior probability of the claim, but it also depends on other desiderata of Jaynes, especially the ones dealing with consistency. The situation was pretty hopeless until something quite shocking happened. Barbara Snyder is another one that's not in the book. And Coco [inaudible] prayed and Terese started breathing again and the next day she was fine. Here PhD is in history. Exactly when this point is depends on considerations around prior probability. But she, but it happened. The latter has more eyewitness testimony than we have for Barbara Snyder. And he said because these precious people that never had a chance to be exposed to God's extravagant love, He works in extravagant ways to let them know. In my discussion with Jonathan McLatchie on the Still Unbelievable podcast, I said that there hasnt been a verified miracle claim even since Humes essay on miracles. Thank you for being with us. patient on hospice healed by Jesus. When his wife prayed, having been told that he was gone, the heart monitor "sprang back to life" and then the doctors were able to revive him. It's not just saying that the evidence provided is lacking, but there is missing evidence that would be expected on the truth of the claim -- making it an argument against the claim. Back home it happens. Some initial thoughts Time stamp 4:47 James is right that the evidence on a lot of these cases is really really bad. These are both testable, yet there seems to be little effort by theists to improve the studies, they seem to rather prefer falling back on case studies. There was no medical help available in the village so she strapped the child to her back and ran to a nearby village where family friend [inaudible] was doing ministry. But you in the west, you have this wonderful medical technology. or perhaps it resolved in 2 years, and they never checked for a long time, only checking right after the prayer 16 years later. Millions of unique designs by independent artists. The emotional language in the paper is a little unusual for a medical journal, and seems a bit sensationalist. We know that the healing was observed after the prayer, but we don't know if it caused it because we can't rule out an earlier recovery that went unnoticed. for her new role. Scott Rae: When we meet the Lord face to face. administrators, including President Snyder herself. I hear the theist complaining about how hard it is to test miracles and I find the objection lame. That is their foretaste of God's future promise to us when there's going to be no more sorrow, there's gonna be no more pain. We know better now, and we often know what the minimum amount of data is to justify a particular claim. So where there's cutting edge Evangelism, God does more dramatic things. Is it possible she was misdiagnosed -- it wasn't MS, so looking for an MS recovery may be misdirected? "This was an instantaneous healing of all of her symptoms and all of her illness to the point where 31 years later she's completely healthy," Strobel said. These two cases are some of the best they have, and they are only modestly interesting, and have plausible mundane explanations. 2023 Robert L. White All Rights Reserved. Scott Rae: Yeah, see that's the big miracle that's coming. Finally, this gripe about a naturalistic bias is completely misguided. Even her muscles were unatrophied. He became a Christian in 1981 shortly after he decided to investigate Jesus . What happens if you don't have randomized-controlled studies in medicine? The AAUs members include such Do extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? I'm just wondering, is it possible to do it the other way around? The trick is you have to dig a lot to get the actual facts of the matter, they don't typically present these to you like "here's the facts, and this is why we think it is a miracle" it's "the guy's intestine regrew" but that's not an established fact at all that's their interpretation of a certain set of facts. In particular, it includes an interview with Barbara Snyder, who was instantaneously healed from advanced multiple sclerosis, as also attested by her two physicians. This highlights many of the problems I've been talking about and we get to see it in real-time. And sometimes there's also a catch-22 because after so many years the medical documentation has been discarded. The treatment involves active physical intervention with the subject. Patients in the prayer group had less congestive heart failure, fewer cardiac arrests, fewer episodes of pneumonia, were less often intubated and ventilated, and needed less diuretic and antibiotic therapy. Here's my comment. I want this post to be the place where I put as many of the specific miracle claims, the actual evidence presented, and some of the responses. It also highlights the need for detailed timelines to establish what the effect really is, before trying to grasp at causes. So the first part of the answer is sort of true but trivial and also not what they've been doing but then the second part contradicts that by saying "just assume that it's true anyway and start praying for people." I made a number of these errors in the episode, and I think it is because 1) the scientific papers (rightly) don't use names and 2) when the stories are told they don't cite their sources well and 3) I'm terrible with names. Craig Keener: Yeah. And so he's already saying in his ministry the Kingdom is being expressed. also understands AAU and the broader university and scientific communities She's on her deathbed," Strobel explained. placebo, memory contamination, fraud, spontaneous remission, etc) that will confound the effect so scientists have set up steps (e.g. Craig Keener: Well everybody has a love story. You don't mix, say, corrected and uncorrected measurements in a timeline unless you provide both at every time point you have. 2023 Blaze Media LLC. God is going to wipe away every tear from our eyes. Synder's miraculous healing, which unfolded more than 30 years ago, was apparently so shocking that even her doctors have written about her seemingly impossible medical turnaround. She mentions a head injury from her accident not a spinal cord injury and never mentions that she was irreversibly paralyzed below the waist. An immediate thought is how many times was he prayed over and nothing happened? 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