Miracles...

stevejazzx

daithifleming wrote: »

This video may interest you, the first minute or so in particular:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnj7PlqmJ5o&feature=related

wonderful..hats off and multiple lols...:)

toiletduck

robindch wrote: »

Er, was that Pio's glove, available from hardline catholic sources in Dublin somewhere?

No idea, but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Between that, holy water from various "holy" spots across the world and more I've seen more than enough of this rubbish. She's on the road to normality now, thanks to medicine. Surprisingly!

My brother met this a few years back, when he woke up from a dangerous tumor-op some to find a female relative waving some of Pio's winter-wear over him. But it did have an effect -- he went berserk, and the glove was put away hurriedly. We knew that he'd recovered from the op at that point, so it wasn't all bad.

Zombrex

kelly1 wrote: »

You seem to be side-stepping the main point I'm making. Unexplained medical impossibilities do happen. You're not going to deny this are you?

Certainly not, though possibly your choice of the word "impossibility" is flawed.

If it is unexplained then we can't say it was impossible. Impossible as far as our current understanding would be more accurate. But then our current understanding is always flawed.

kelly1 wrote: »

Can you offer any kind of explanation other than to say it's just another think that science doesn't yet understand?

That is exactly what I would say.

Why do theists feel this need to attempt to explain with pseudo-science what we don't understand. I don't know what happened. You don't know what happed.

Why then can I say "I don't know" where as you have to said "I bet it was Pio's mittens!" That explanation raises more questions than it answers.

Tar.Aldarion

My mittens keep tigers away in some circumstances. One miracle down.

Popinjay

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

My mittens keep tigers away in some circumstances. One miracle down.

And how much would you charge for a pair of these miracle socks? I've been looking for something to keep the tigers at bay.

On a more serious note, this is a similar way that I would see most 'miracles' being determined as such.

Tar hasn't been attacked by tigers since he started wearing these mittens. Is it because of the mittens or because of some other set of circumstances such as the lack of any large tiger population in his vicinity?

A gambler may have a bad run of luck until he scrathes his head in a particular way. Once he does this, he gets a good hand of cards. Is this because of how he scratched his head?

Human beings naturally see patterns where there are none because for most of our history, this helped us survive. When this pattern recognition misfires, we see coincidences where there really are none. Like mittens curing our cancer or praying to St. Anthony helping us find something.

Derren Brown has a great piece about this in his book 'Tricks of the Mind'. Well worth a read.





Disclaimer: This post is not affiliated with Derren Brown in any way. Actual enjoyment of any book recommended is not guaranteed.

Dades

kelly1 wrote: »

It's God's prerogative who He wants to heal and when.

Isn't that the same as saying the way God heals makes no sense to you?

Sangre

kelly1 wrote: »

You seem to be side-stepping the main point I'm making. Unexplained medical impossibilities do happen. You're not going to deny this are you? Biologically/scientifically speaking, these occurrances are impossible.

If they happened then they're not exactly impossible are they?

Rather they are impossible under our current understanding of science.

afino

Let me say first off that I don't have a medical background. However, a couple of years ago my son aged 3 developed a kidney tumour. When he was in hosptial several relatives arrived in with scraps of relics from some old holy joe...much to my chagrin I might add. :mad:

Well, a miraculous thing happened. His kidney tumour just vanished overnight. Of course he did have chemotherapy and an operation! But even so, those same relatives waxed lyrical about how God saved him and the relics "did the trick". Oh how I wanted to slap them upside-the-head...

On another note, I do remember an interesing chat with one of the oncology doctors. He said that some cancers and tumours are so curable that even a dose of steroid can regress them. I think he mentioned some leukemias but it was years ago and I can't remember the details. Bottom line, some cancers are worse than others and some can be easily reversed.

niceonetom

afino wrote: »

Well, a miraculous thing happened. His kidney tumour just vanished overnight. Of course he did have chemotherapy and an operation! But even so, those same relatives waxed lyrical about how God saved him and the relics "did the trick". Oh how I wanted to slap them upside-the-head...

i'm glad your son had a good outcome. doctors are yer only man when it comes to such matters.

isn't it strange how god gets all the credit when things go well, but if things go the other way, well that's the failures of modern science's fault isn't it.

shouldn't god be given the credit for inventing cancer too? and then giving it to people? presumably all those children in oncology wards don't have enough "faith" to be spared.

but hey, that's his prerogative right OP?

PDN

niceonetom wrote: »

isn't it strange how god gets all the credit when things go well, but if things go the other way, well that's the failures of modern science's fault isn't it.

Of course many people do the opposite as well. When sick people get better they say, "Isn't it wonderful how nature works?" Then if the sick person dies they demand why God allowed their granny to die.

niceonetom

PDN wrote: »

Of course many people do the opposite as well. When sick people get better they say, "Isn't it wonderful how nature works?" Then if the sick person dies they demand why God allowed their granny to die.

yep, so pick a team.

say you find a painful lump in your, um, scrotum. you give it a week. it's definitely growing. now, if you had to make a choice between a) going to the doctor, getting the best medical opinions and treatment in the biz etc or b) praying and relying on your faith in god to save. you, in this little thought experiment, are not allowed to do both. doctor + no prayer OR god + no medicine.

so, as a man of faith, which do you choose? do you have faith in your faith?

Zillah

Noel, don't you feel silly using the word "impossibilities" for things that you are asserting have occured?

stevejazzx

randomness and chance..a chaotic universe.

Not one miracle ever proven, no film footage of a miracle taking place. Noone or thing able to produce any consistent miracle rate. All miracles can be explained. Cancer tumours can simply regress overnight, it's rare but it happens...

Ekancone

Its complete ****ing nonsense. Im astonished that any educated person in the modern world could believe any of this crap.

eoin5

Even if miracles (as in god curing an incurable sickness) were real they would be pretty rare otherwise you cant really call them miracles. There would be more people who put off important surgery because they believe their faith will save them miraculously and then they die for some nonsense reason like "it was their time to go, god works in mysterious ways" etc. Are miracles even a good thing if they are real? Would they make par for the course? Not even close!

Also even if they are real there would still be con-artists milking off the placebo effect and the desperatly ill and the people who want to confirm their belief by seeing a miracle and for many more reasons beyond that.

Face it, miracles would be bad!

kelly1

daithifleming wrote: »

This video may interest you, the first minute or so in particular:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnj7PlqmJ5o&feature=related

Bloody Hell, that guy is some motor mouth! He must have made a few thousand points. Much of what he says is true but it's also riddled with misunderstandings and errors. It's virtually impossible to reply to.

kelly1

Wicknight wrote: »

Certainly not, though possibly your choice of the word "impossibility" is flawed.

Of course! From what I've seen, everything "theists" believe is seriously flawed according to your stratospheric level of intelligence.

Wicknight wrote: »

Why then can I say "I don't know" where as you have to said "I bet it was Pio's mittens!" That explanation raises more questions than it answers.

My guess is that there's a very strong statistical link between cures and prayer.

kelly1

afino wrote: »

On another note, I do remember an interesing chat with one of the oncology doctors. He said that some cancers and tumours are so curable that even a dose of steroid can regress them. I think he mentioned some leukemias but it was years ago and I can't remember the details. Bottom line, some cancers are worse than others and some can be easily reversed.

It easy to find exceptions. There are many miracles recorded in cases where the doctors gave up hope and told the patient they had 3 months to live. At that point the treatment is probably over and it's down to pain management.

kelly1

Zillah wrote: »

Noel, don't you feel silly using the word "impossibilities" for things that you are asserting have occured?

I did use double quotes around impossibilites in at least one post. The point is that according to known scientific phenomena, these events are "impossible". I thought this would be fairly obvious to most people. Are you just trying to show your superiority?

Dave!

Kelly why can't you say "I don't know how this person recovered"? Why is it automatically god (and specifically Yahweh) that has cured it? Couldn't it just as easily (I would suggest significantly more probably, but for the sake of argument...) be an as yet unexplained by science occurance?

The only facts you have in these situations are that (i) the person was dying, (ii) usual medical practice was not working, (iii) ...., (iv) they made a full recovery.

Why do you fill in that gap with "god worked his magic"? Pretty presumptuous of you.

kelly1

stevejazzx wrote: »

Not one miracle ever proven, no film footage of a miracle taking place. Noone or thing able to produce any consistent miracle rate. All miracles can be explained. Cancer tumours can simply regress overnight, it's rare but it happens...

For someone who relies on reason and science, this is a perplexing statement. There are plenty of doctors records, xrays etc showing unexplainable healings. How can you say that all miracles can be explained??

daithifleming wrote: »

Its complete ****ing nonsense. Im astonished that any educated person in the modern world could believe any of this crap.

Only last night I spoke to a person who was cured instantly of some neck/spine condition (can't remember the medical name, fibro-something) at a prayer service having been in and out of hospitals for months.

eoin5 wrote: »

There would be more people who put off important surgery because they believe their faith will save them miraculously and then they die for some nonsense reason like "it was their time to go, god works in mysterious ways" etc.

That's a silly approach. It's jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and saying it's OK God will save me. God gives us surgeons.

kelly1

DaveMcG wrote: »

Kelly why can't you say "I don't know how this person recovered"? Why is it automatically god (and specifically Yahweh) that has cured it? Couldn't it just as easily (I would suggest significantly more probably, but for the sake of argument...) be an as yet unexplained by science occurance?

The only facts you have in these situations are that (i) the person was dying, (ii) usual medical practice was not working, (iii) ...., (iv) they made a full recovery.

Why do you fill in that gap with "god worked his magic"? Pretty presumptuous of you.

Simply because the healing followed some act of faith in God or some prayer of petition. I haven't heard of "miracles" occuring where there was no act of faith involved. Maybe I haven't been looking hard enough!

eoin5

kelly1 wrote: »

My guess is that there's a very strong statistical link between cures and prayer.

I've no doubts that there is. Faith is an extremely powerful morale boost, especially when things are looking bad. I wouldnt deny those who can use it as such but when it gets in the way of proper treatment its a travesty. The children denied transfusions because of the parents faith really doesnt seem to have much of an upside.

eoin5

kelly1 wrote: »

That's a silly approach. It's jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and saying it's OK God will save me. God gives us surgeons.

It happens very often that people will abandon proper care for their faith based methods. I would say there are more people dieing taking this silly approach than there are actual miracle cures.

robindch

kelly1 wrote: »

My guess is that there's a very strong statistical link between cures and prayer.

Well, I'm happy that you're thinking in the right direction -- making a prediction, then testing it to see if the prediction is accurate. And such a study has indeed been carried out (you must have missed my previous postings on the topic).

Over the last few years, a well-funded, well-executed (randomized, double-blind) study was carried out by the Templeton Foundation in the USA to determine if praying for people recovering from heart operations helped or hindered their recovery. The Templeton Foundation provides millions of dollars each year to various religious causes as part of its mission "to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life’s biggest questions."

The study was intended to evaluate if being prayed for or not, or knowing that you were being prayed for, had any effect on patient outcomes after heart bypass operations. The study tracked the outcomes of 1800 patients in six good hospitals in the USA between January 1998 and November 2000. Prayers were said by varying groups of christians for between thirty seconds and four hours, between one and four times per day.

The results were quite unambiguous. To quote the report's two principal conclusions:

First, intercessory prayer itself had no effect on whether complications occurred after CABG. Second, patients who were certain that intercessors would pray for them had a higher rate of complications than patients who were uncertain but did receive intercessory prayer.

You can read the full paper directly from the Templeton Foundation's website here:

http://www.templeton.org/pdfs/press_releases/060407STEP_paper.pdf

In fact, that second conclusion is rather important and should have been highlighted more than it was. Namely, while prayer itself has no effect one way or the other, it seems that telling people that you're praying for them causes a statistically significant level of complications to arise.

From this, it seems reasonable to conclude that if you're praying for somebody who's sick, then don't tell them you are. For some psychological reason (several suggest themselves), it causes problems.

I hope that this answers your question.

2Scoops

robindch wrote: »

You can read the full paper directly from the Templeton Foundation's website here:

http://www.templeton.org/pdfs/press_releases/060407STEP_paper.pdf

The most notable thing about this study, to me at least, is that it was supported by the Templeton Foundation. If it was conducted by non-Christian institute, it would be all too easy for the religiously-minded to dismiss the results.

Zillah

kelly1 wrote: »

I did use double quotes around impossibilites in at least one post. The point is that according to known scientific phenomena, these events are "impossible". I thought this would be fairly obvious to most people. Are you just trying to show your superiority?

You see, science says nothing about what is possible or impossible. Science tries to explain things, and science tries to provide models why which we can achieve and learn more.

If science hits a situation where there is not currently not enough information to reach a conclusion then we say "Inconclusive, we don't know what happened here". With that in mind I don't see how anyone can feel anything but ridiculous when they do present an "explanation". There isn't enough evidence to reach a conclusion, so if you do present a conclusion then you're inventing one.

kelly1 wrote: »

Simply because the healing followed some act of faith in God or some prayer of petition. I haven't heard of "miracles" occuring where there was no act of faith involved. Maybe I haven't been looking hard enough!

You really haven't been looking hard enough. People get better unexpectedly every day. Its only called a miracle when some fool wants his supernatural beliefs validated.

Pompey Magnus

There was a tonado in America 8 days ago, it crossed four states, killed 54 people and left hundreds injured,

"It's a miracle of the Lord more people weren't injured," according to a Baptist Professor in a Tennessee University.

Thank ya Jesus for only saving all but 54 of us and leaving a few hundred more of us with horrible injuries. PRAISE THA LORD.

Littlewood's law

"A miracle is defined as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million; during the hours in which a human is awake and alert, a human will experience one thing per second (for instance, seeing the computer screen, the keyboard, the mouse, the article, etc.); additionally, a human is alert for about eight hours per day; and as a result, a human will, in 35 days, have experienced, under these suppositions, 1,008,000 things. Accepting this definition of a miracle, one can be expected to observe one miraculous occurrence within the passing of every 35 consecutive days -- and therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace."

Zombrex

kelly1 wrote: »

Of course! From what I've seen, everything "theists" believe is seriously flawed according to your stratospheric level of intelligence.

It didn't realise the word impossible was a belief of yours :rolleyes:

Anyway...

Its flawed for two reasons

Firstly, as Zillah points out, if it happened then it wasn't impossible.

Secondly it is not possible (impossible, ha! ) for humans to accurately say something in nature is actually impossible, only that it is not possible based on our current understanding of nature, which as I already said, is always flawed

So I wouldn't be saying that something is impossible to begin with, only that it is very unlikely. Therefore something "impossible" happening demonstrates only our own ignorance in understanding the natural world. It certainly doesn't demonstrate God exists.

kelly1 wrote: »

My guess is that there's a very strong statistical link between cures and prayer.

There isn't actually, at least none that has been found so far, and in the last 10 years there has been a lot of money poured into research into this area.

Christians who support the idea of prayer as a method of healing, and apologists from other religions, explain this by saying that God does not want to be tested, and therefore when ever a study like this is actually carried out God ignores it, because he isn't there to prove he heals people. Which is fine and all but you still end up with a situation that looks exactly the same as if prayer does nothing.

But again you have to be careful about what conclusions you draw even if a link was found. Even if the actions of praying was demonstrated to have some benefit the follow on conclusion that the prayer is actually going to a god who in turn is fixing health problems doesn't hold up. The simple act of hoping something good will happen could be causing a benefit, irrespective of what that hope entails (god fixing you for example)

Kelly1 you seem to be some very easily lead to a conclusion that you wish to be true. A bit more scepticism and rationality on your part is probably called for.

seamus

Wicknight wrote: »

The simple act of hoping something good will happen could be causing a benefit, irrespective of what that hope entails (god fixing you for example)

Also known as the "placebo effect". To the best of my knowledge, there have been studies carried out to attempt to link a person's temperament/outlook on life with their ability to heal from operations - similar to the prayer one.

I don't have links at the moment, but from what I remember, there was some distinct benefit for people who were kept in good spirits or who had a positive outlook on things -v- those who were prone to depression or skepticism.

Whether this can be linked with prayer or not is another question. If someone is praying for you, would this put you in a better mood, or does it indicate to you that you're in some serious ****?
Do those who pray have a more skeptical outlook on life - feeling that they need help and support to get through things?