I agreed the CES was probably caused by an untreated herniated disc. Moriau herself reports that her doctor in 1968 missed a protruding disc during a surgery and she was so disgusted she had to find another surgeon.
However, from the article your AI cited (twice) about spontaneous regression of herniated discs (not CES):
Review methods: Articles had to: (1) include patients with lumbar disc herniation treated conservatively; (2) have at least two imaging evaluations of the lumbar spine; and (3) exclude patients with prior lumbar surgery, spinal infections, tumors, spondylolisthesis, or spinal stenosis.
So the cases determining the rate of spontaneous regression are not parallel at all to Moriau’s, who had prior lumbar surgery (and CES definitely seems to qualify as spinal stenosis as well).
Additionally, I looked at the case reports cited in your article of regression. These almost all happened within
the span of a few weeks. The rare ones that are longer are a year or two at most. 40+ year spontaneous regression of an untreated herniated disc falls right off the scale, especially because it seems her doctors knew about it after the botched surgery in 1968.
Maybe I missed something, but a spontaneous herniated disc healing doesn’t seem like it would apply in this case at all. I think the AI might have either mildly hallucinated on you or, at very least, cited studies that aren’t relevant to this case.
From what I’ve gathered (I am even more of a non-doctor than you, so take my word saltily) Untreated CES is like asking, “what if we just left this guy’s nearly amputated leg dangling?” Like, the doctors are going to look at you funny. It’s going to be bad.
This is the kind of feedback I like to hear. It's true that my argument depends on the force and likelihood of this possibility. But I'm just not sure, which is why I welcome any sort of specialist to say more. The problem is that a lot of the doctors specifically state the spontaneity of the recovery, not the recovery itself, which is why I'm inclined to think the recovery, though improbable, is not impossible. But again, I could be wrong. It basically all comes down to that for the non-supernaturalist side, in the same way that the supernaturalist side relies on the quickness of the recovery.
It's also worth mentioning that her condition was progressive and got worse over the years, and so the movement of the disc is plausible, and thus the remission of that movement isn't crazy. But hey, I don't know, I'm not a doctor haha I'm not going to oversell people on the rock solidness of this hypothesis, that's what miracle proponents do, and it's dishonest.
I’m with you on the doctor thing, haha. Thanks for the response. I read portions of her book, and I was interested in 2 things:
1. Her nearly total disinterest in the medical details. She includes them really only when she has to. The comment about her surgeon botching the protruding disc is almost a throwaway comment. The medical details in the book feel pretty genuine to me because of this.
2. Her exhaustion, even exasperation, at the verification process. The massive amount of panels and questioning she had to go through felt like overkill to her. I would love to look at those medical files they have.
The other thing I would say is that there are other points of this case that could have explanatory power. EG: possible theories of her disc going into remission, possible explanations about the morphine influencing her perception of pain, and more. I used Gemini because i don't have a limit on the searches I can do with it, but I when I ask Claude (my preferred AI), things are different/more detailed!
The biggest shortcoming in this case IMO is the lack of publicly available data. I'm really interested in the details of that pain doctor, when she stopped showing up, how much she had at the point of the healing, etc. To say nothing of actual photographic documentation of how things had changed in that July - September period. It just seemed so odd to me that no one took even celebratory picture! That, on top of the SIL going on a planned walk to me just screams revised memories/mistaken timelines. I would like to see what kind of evidence that this date was accurate, how often the SIL visited, etc.
I agree with the point about why timeframe matters. One of the major criteria we need to look at it is whether the disease was progressive and chronic. Was it something that was likely to get better over time? Or is it a disease that has a history of getting worse? In her case, it was clearly the latter. She progressively became more disabled over time ( which is almost inevitable with age), with her pain getting worse, becoming incontinent, cathertirized, etc.
Im not aware of any plausible example in the literature of a severely disabling case of causation equina suddenly resolving at a rapid pace following a history of 40 years of worsening health. In almost every case of diseases like this, they will either be 1) progressive permanent, 2) improve within a short time period, or 3) gradually get more and less disabling as remissions come and go.
Thats why, in my judgement, it's important to assess all of the Lambertini Criteria in conjunction and apply them to each case. I don't think those criteria would apply to any of the counter examples in the literature, so far as Im aware.
I am glad you took the time to write this, though. Nice to see people interacting with the specific cases, and we need more discussion out there
So, here's the thing: it got progressively worse over time, likely because (likely) her disc was progressively moving over time. The nerves weren't dying, they were being compressed. She had the disease for 40 years and it wasn't until the prior 14 that it got really bad. What you're attributing to age, I'm attributing to continued progression. All of the other conditions were second-order to that, so it's not like it's a separate thing. Put another way: if this was a miracle, it wasn't the revival of dead nerves, but the moving of vertebrae in her lower back/cocyx(?). That kind of changes the nature of the miracle and makes it marginally less impressive, but also more likely to be explained via natural explanation (because nerve death is not something you can come back from)
I'm also not aware of examples in the literature, not least of which because I'm not a doctor! Given the likelihood that the causal variable was the herniated disc and that we have no evidence that she experienced nerve death, I don't think the literature to look at is the CE literature (which everything I've seen via internet/AI searching, which admittedly isn't the highest quality, doesn't say it's impossible for people to recover, just uncommon; but I don't have high credence either way) is whether it's likely that a disc in some capacity could remit in this way. There were shortcomings in the studies I cited (which I already conceded would probably not be probative by themselves which is why we need experts). In seems in this way her case could very much be under the third category you list here.
What's more, there are apparently neurological models that I didn't site in this post about unexpected healings, which themselves suggest alternative explanations. I just didn't site them because it was long enough and I thought the possibility of healing wasn't as essential to the miracle as the pace of the recovery (as suggested by public comments). Given what I talked about on the latter, I'm extremely confident that whatever recovery she experienced was not instantaneous, not least which because we don't have much evidence that it was.
So far as I know, all of the evidence we have from her and the people who were around her said it was a rapid recovery (despite her having a slight limp afterwards, she was still functionally cured seemingly overnight). I believe this was the same with her medical history as well, which to my knowledge never indicated significant improvement (quite the opposite) prior to 2008. I dont know of any reason to suppose she had been improving before the Lourdes pilgrimage, nor can I readily dismiss the evidence we do have.
If we accept eyewitness accounts as authoritative then the temple of Aescepilus is full of them. Problem is the Catholic demands miracles as proof not just of divine favor but their specific take on the divine. So any competition is treated with the same skepticism applied here, or written off as demons in the biggest double standard cope.
Your point 7.1 is really why I can get so pugilistic re: miracle claims. Because one can just brush them off with a "well if it provides comfort to people, what's the issue?" And the issue is that the counters are literally >99% of everyone else. Do they then question whether God loves them? If they were good enough? Or devout enough? Or gave enough money to their congregation? The whole set-up is so rife for emotional and financial abuse/manipulation.
One general argument I would have against, is the temporal one. Why did it take so long for her to be healed?
As for the alleged rigor of the Lourdes Medical Bureau? In cases of sainthood in recent years, where the church has a skeptic to play devil's advocate, they've been ignored. This is specifically true with Mother Teresa's alleged first miracle. JPII himself overrode that.
Beyond that, let's quote the bible against believers.
Why aren't these people like the centurion, and expecting healing, whether for themselves or for others, without having to travel anywhere themselves or having to have anyone visit?
Related? The old problem of evil. Why her, not others?
And don't cite Job and Romans on god's alleged inscrutability. You're only increasing god's psychological problem of evil, either not omnipotent enough to make himself scrutable, or not omnibenevolent enough to want to make himself scrutable.
There are lots of strawmen of the evidence and strawmen of the statistics. It’s a known fact that the vast majority of people who come to Lourdes are not even sick.
Also, that critique assumes the wrong epistemology of probabilities and evidence.
Moreover, the Lourdes Medical Bureau rejects a massive number of claims—far beyond the 7,000 formally recorded declarations.The widely cited figure of 7,000+ cases represents only the claims that actually met the rigorous threshold to have an official medical dossier opened for deep, formal tracking. The number of informal or initial claims submitted by pilgrims that are rejected at the very first gate is vastly higher. The reasons are : (1) Lack of Pre-Existing Medical Documentation ;(2) The Influence of Ongoing Medical Treatment; (3) Possible Psychological and Psychosomatic Conditions; (4) Known Trajectories of Natural Remission.
Therefore, one cannot rule out these healings from the armchair, given the fact that we know that lots of miraculous healings do happen at the Lourdes shrines. Conditional on an updated background knowledge about Lourdes, one absolutely cannot rule them out apriori. This is standard Bayesian reasoning.
So, 3 issues about higher order considerations that are important after we update our background knowledge with all of the rigurous evidence of these miracles.
Firstly, the verbal rejections. Medical directors at the shrine have noted that hundreds of pilgrims walk into the bureau every year wanting to report a healing. The vast majority of these individuals are turned away immediately during a brief verbal interview because they do not have a doctor's file with them, their healing was gradual, or they were taking medication. These encounters are never logged into the 7000+-dossier system. These could very well be authentic healings. Lack of medical evidence doesn’t prove otherwise. In fact, the likelihood of them being geniuine are very high —- as I said— after we updated background knowledge.
Second, A massive portion of pilgrims who believe they were healed simply go home and never walk into the Medical Bureau. They feel spiritually or physically renewed, thank God, and return to their normal lives. The Bureau itself notes that a case can only enter the formal record if the pilgrim actively chooses to volunteer for a multi-year, highly invasive scientific investigation—a process many people of people prefer to avoid. So It also presupposes that cured patients come back to Lourdes to report it, and agree to undergo all this research and further examinations.
Third, this is a milder point but very important: Most of the sick people seek comfort and spiritual relief, not necessarily a miracle. Testimonies and studies about this are available online. Many of them claim that the peace and comfort they get from Lourdes is the true miracle.
Those 3 issues make the selection effects much more expected.
—— “De Franciscis studied medicine and pediatrics in Italian Naples, before continuing his education in the United States at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he earned a master's of science in epidemiology in 1985”—— this is what he claims :
“According to de Franciscis, tens of thousands of people have reported being healed since 1883, including nearly 1,500 since his arrival in 2009. "Very few have been followed by a full investigation," he said. "Most of them had undergone medical treatment, about a third of them for cancer, which could explain their recovery. We conduct in-depth investigations into about 30 of the 100 cases we receive on average each year."
In such cases, the process is lengthy and collaborative. "The criteria are very strict," de Franciscis explained. "They were established by Cardinal (Lorenzo) Lambertini, future Pope (Benedict XIV), in 1734, with a view to recognizing miracles in Rome for beatifications or canonizations. They have been updated since then but remain relevant."
Lourdes' outgoing chief doctor explained to OSV News that "the illness must have been the subject of a precise and clear diagnosis, and it must have a severe prognosis. The return to health must be sudden, instantaneous, complete and lasting over time. It cannot be a temporary remission."
"The cured patient must also agree to undergo a whole series of examinations, the results of which we analyze scrupulously," de Franciscis said. "Then, if the cure appears to be genuinely unexplained, I convene a meeting of the members of the bureau, with the person presumed to be healed, and the bureau issues an initial 'certificate of cure.'"
"After that," he added, "I present the cases of healing to the International Medical Committee of Lourdes at its annual meeting."
—- this explains the selection effect.
Therefore, probably there are many more healings. Even naturalists have to concede to this at least to some degree. Otherwise, adding memory distortion; systematic lying; placebo; different types of remissions; etc — adds lots of complexity due to the sheer number of secondary hypotheses.
You try to contradict the empirical conclusion of over 300 specialists from different medical fields without being a specialist yourself. And yes, we have proof that over 300 physicians looked at this case. Bear in mind that many of the specialists at Lourdes are secular people. The Church specifically welcomes secular people to avoid bias issues.
It’s as if you are responding to the Fine-Tuning argument by trying to dismantle the physics behind it as established by the experts rather than addressing the philosophical inference. We all know that is not serious.
The dismissal of testimony in this case, where we have such highly corroborated evidence, is simply irrational.
You should go visit the shrine yourself. The guy responsible there explicitly said on camera that any skeptic is invited to investigate the record if he has irrational doubts about the evidence.
Cauda Equina Syndrome doesn’t go into remission! It’s not other illnesses. Your examples are radically disanalogous and extremely speculative.
From a strictly secular and medical standpoint, there is no documented case report or medical precedent in peer-reviewed literature of a natural, spontaneous remission of such multicomponent chronic syndrome analogous to Sister Bernadette Moriau's case, not to mention the other characteristics of the event.
So you are committed to an unexplainable cosmic coincidence + the fact that it was instantaneous stacks another one; religious experience and synchronicity add another one; total recovery and no relapse add another one.
Saying that her illness could have been psychosomatic commits treason against reason itself and against the intelligence of hundreds of trained professionals. Her illness was organic .
For a healing to pass the Lourdes Medical Bureau/International Medical Committee process as a candidate for a recognized miracle, the disease has to be organic necessarily.
Now I wonder if your naturalism is falsifiable. It also seems that you are not even open to comparing different hypotheses, as one does with all other arguments in natural theology.
——
I quickly searched Ai on some official statistics. Here is something relevant :
“Sick pilgrims make up roughly 6% to 12% of the total number of visitors and pilgrims coming to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes annually. [1] (https://www.lourdes-france.org/en/lourdes-attendance/)According to official attendance statistics provided by the shrine:2023: 370,000 sick pilgrims out of 3.1 million total visitors (~11.9%)]2022: 175,000 sick pilgrims out of 2.7 million total visitors (~6.5%)”
This is probably the silliest comment I’ve read because the “I’m dunking on you” energy is so strong giving how little you actually say. Given how hard I worked on this article, I’m going to be a little mean.
1) I admit in the article (I believe, maybe it got cut) that not everyone who goes to Lourdes is seeking help. 6 percent of 3 million is still 180,000 per year. 7,000 of 180k would not be a good portion, but it’s not even that high! Let's assume they get 180k people seeking healing annually. They only have 7000 supposed miracle cases! That's like 3% for an annual total but it goes radically down when you consider that the number of miracle seekers goes up 180k annually, while the number of confirmed "miracles" remains the same. The rate of miracles goes down to vanishingly small number if you go back a decade, more so a century, and so on.
2) “Therefore, one cannot rule out these healings from the armchair, given the fact that we know that lots of miraculous healings do happen at the Lourdes shrines.” is pretty obvious circular logic. What a silly thing to say
3) Your “issues about higher order considerations that are important after we update our background knowledge with all of the rigurous evidence of these miracles.” are all just silly. Like this is the best you got? That I should believe someone experienced a miracle when not even Lourdes believes they did as they lack proper documentation? Or that I should “trust you bro” that more people get healed, they just don’t go to the agency. Come on. Or also the real miracle is the friends we make along the way?
4) Naturalists don’t have to concede anything, especially non-evidenced question-begging claims.
5) My point of this article, is that for the claim of this specific miracle we do not have corroborated evidence for the pace of the healing other than testimony of two people, one of which is retrospective and undocumented. Read much?
6) Your source here for the remission is, again, “trust me bro.” Notice that pretty much all the public comments from the doctors who evaluated her was not the fact that she recovered, but the pace that she receovered.
7) Coincidences happen all the time and are more probable than miracles.
8) I never said her illness was psychosomatic. Read much?
9) I’m not going about this strictly as a naturalist, but as a regularist. Supernaturalist explanations could make sense, but the explanations are pretty shotty and lack explanatory power. My point of this article was to say that a naturalistic hypothesis was feasible.
I have written an article addressing your post. I invite you to respond to some of the ideas presented. I developed the points further. 6% is unjustified. I think 3% is conservative. I bring some evidence for that.
The source for the remission is not trust me bro; it’s reliable authority, not Gemini. Also Gemini can do a better job than that. Basically, the conditions Moriau had never go into remission, at least there is no evidence of that. A deep dive into the secular remission literature will convince a cold hearted skeptic like you I think. At least on the empirical facts.
I would really like to see some secular parallels. I’m looking for them for months. This healing miracle specifically convinced me of miracles in the first place so I’m interested if anyone can find something that can be even compared with her case.
Her condition was roughly like this: (it can have minor details wrong because it’s generated)
* Lumbosciatic/back pain: 1966–2008 → ~42 years
* Major neurological deficits / pluriradicular impairment: 1987–2008 → ~21 years
* Inability to work because of the condition: 1987–2008 → ~21 years
* Spinal neurostimulator use: 1992–2008 → ~16 years
* Morphine treatment: 1994–2008 → ~14 years
* Sphincter dysfunction: 1998–2008 → ~10 years
* Permanent rigid cervico-lumbar corset: 1999–2008 → ~9 years
* Left equinus foot requiring a splint: 2005–2008 → ~3 years
She also had four spinal surgeries between 1968 and 1975, without clear lasting benefit.
And all of this went away instantaneously when she prayed in a chapel? And nothing relapsed? C’mon.
Most of the secular examples are cancer examples which often relapse. Secular remissions are basically all the time gradual, not instant.
We have undeniable evidence that the story is sound. You can mock Bayes all day, but that is not engaging with the evidence. Updating priors after investigating evidence is sound reasoning.
Again, you're not actually reading the contents of the post, or the causation that goes with the argument. It's hard to engage with you because you basically just don't engage with anything I've said here.
Your entire list here is a long list of nothing, because it all derives from the same malady: CE syndrome. Everything I find says that recovery from CE is uncommon but not impossible. One of the causes of CE is Herniated Lumbar Discs, and those discs can regress back to normal on their own. My citation of the former is peer review, not just gemini (I actually look into the sources gemini cites).
To repeat myself, and it kind of shows that you don't do the reading, I'm explicitly arguing against the case that it was instantaneous. It was definitely not instantaneous to her visiting the chapel, because she reported the healing 4 days later, and as I point out in the article, that entire timeline is suspect because of how little evidence we have for the instantaneousness.
Finally, I never said anything about Bayes in this article. You're arguing against the voices in your head here, very weird behavior. These are very weird comments that don't even get my argument correctly, let alone the actual content of the case, the peer review literature, or the timeline. This is all just very silly. My auto-hiding reply rules keep hiding your posts, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm actually doing you a disservice by replying to because your comments are just so uniformly bad.
A Catholic website calls it chronic sciatica. Easy for a non-miraculous "cure" by regression — and one that might not last. https://www.hdmiami.org/ip.php?pg=Cures
I'm 6-5, or 1.95 meters, and can empirically attest.
==
Otherwise, per a phrase, and per Joe's response to you? This is like "miracles of the gaps," just like a "god of the gaps."
I agreed the CES was probably caused by an untreated herniated disc. Moriau herself reports that her doctor in 1968 missed a protruding disc during a surgery and she was so disgusted she had to find another surgeon.
However, from the article your AI cited (twice) about spontaneous regression of herniated discs (not CES):
Review methods: Articles had to: (1) include patients with lumbar disc herniation treated conservatively; (2) have at least two imaging evaluations of the lumbar spine; and (3) exclude patients with prior lumbar surgery, spinal infections, tumors, spondylolisthesis, or spinal stenosis.
So the cases determining the rate of spontaneous regression are not parallel at all to Moriau’s, who had prior lumbar surgery (and CES definitely seems to qualify as spinal stenosis as well).
Additionally, I looked at the case reports cited in your article of regression. These almost all happened within
the span of a few weeks. The rare ones that are longer are a year or two at most. 40+ year spontaneous regression of an untreated herniated disc falls right off the scale, especially because it seems her doctors knew about it after the botched surgery in 1968.
Maybe I missed something, but a spontaneous herniated disc healing doesn’t seem like it would apply in this case at all. I think the AI might have either mildly hallucinated on you or, at very least, cited studies that aren’t relevant to this case.
From what I’ve gathered (I am even more of a non-doctor than you, so take my word saltily) Untreated CES is like asking, “what if we just left this guy’s nearly amputated leg dangling?” Like, the doctors are going to look at you funny. It’s going to be bad.
This is the kind of feedback I like to hear. It's true that my argument depends on the force and likelihood of this possibility. But I'm just not sure, which is why I welcome any sort of specialist to say more. The problem is that a lot of the doctors specifically state the spontaneity of the recovery, not the recovery itself, which is why I'm inclined to think the recovery, though improbable, is not impossible. But again, I could be wrong. It basically all comes down to that for the non-supernaturalist side, in the same way that the supernaturalist side relies on the quickness of the recovery.
It's also worth mentioning that her condition was progressive and got worse over the years, and so the movement of the disc is plausible, and thus the remission of that movement isn't crazy. But hey, I don't know, I'm not a doctor haha I'm not going to oversell people on the rock solidness of this hypothesis, that's what miracle proponents do, and it's dishonest.
I’m with you on the doctor thing, haha. Thanks for the response. I read portions of her book, and I was interested in 2 things:
1. Her nearly total disinterest in the medical details. She includes them really only when she has to. The comment about her surgeon botching the protruding disc is almost a throwaway comment. The medical details in the book feel pretty genuine to me because of this.
2. Her exhaustion, even exasperation, at the verification process. The massive amount of panels and questioning she had to go through felt like overkill to her. I would love to look at those medical files they have.
The other thing I would say is that there are other points of this case that could have explanatory power. EG: possible theories of her disc going into remission, possible explanations about the morphine influencing her perception of pain, and more. I used Gemini because i don't have a limit on the searches I can do with it, but I when I ask Claude (my preferred AI), things are different/more detailed!
The biggest shortcoming in this case IMO is the lack of publicly available data. I'm really interested in the details of that pain doctor, when she stopped showing up, how much she had at the point of the healing, etc. To say nothing of actual photographic documentation of how things had changed in that July - September period. It just seemed so odd to me that no one took even celebratory picture! That, on top of the SIL going on a planned walk to me just screams revised memories/mistaken timelines. I would like to see what kind of evidence that this date was accurate, how often the SIL visited, etc.
I agree with the point about why timeframe matters. One of the major criteria we need to look at it is whether the disease was progressive and chronic. Was it something that was likely to get better over time? Or is it a disease that has a history of getting worse? In her case, it was clearly the latter. She progressively became more disabled over time ( which is almost inevitable with age), with her pain getting worse, becoming incontinent, cathertirized, etc.
Im not aware of any plausible example in the literature of a severely disabling case of causation equina suddenly resolving at a rapid pace following a history of 40 years of worsening health. In almost every case of diseases like this, they will either be 1) progressive permanent, 2) improve within a short time period, or 3) gradually get more and less disabling as remissions come and go.
Thats why, in my judgement, it's important to assess all of the Lambertini Criteria in conjunction and apply them to each case. I don't think those criteria would apply to any of the counter examples in the literature, so far as Im aware.
I am glad you took the time to write this, though. Nice to see people interacting with the specific cases, and we need more discussion out there
So, here's the thing: it got progressively worse over time, likely because (likely) her disc was progressively moving over time. The nerves weren't dying, they were being compressed. She had the disease for 40 years and it wasn't until the prior 14 that it got really bad. What you're attributing to age, I'm attributing to continued progression. All of the other conditions were second-order to that, so it's not like it's a separate thing. Put another way: if this was a miracle, it wasn't the revival of dead nerves, but the moving of vertebrae in her lower back/cocyx(?). That kind of changes the nature of the miracle and makes it marginally less impressive, but also more likely to be explained via natural explanation (because nerve death is not something you can come back from)
I'm also not aware of examples in the literature, not least of which because I'm not a doctor! Given the likelihood that the causal variable was the herniated disc and that we have no evidence that she experienced nerve death, I don't think the literature to look at is the CE literature (which everything I've seen via internet/AI searching, which admittedly isn't the highest quality, doesn't say it's impossible for people to recover, just uncommon; but I don't have high credence either way) is whether it's likely that a disc in some capacity could remit in this way. There were shortcomings in the studies I cited (which I already conceded would probably not be probative by themselves which is why we need experts). In seems in this way her case could very much be under the third category you list here.
What's more, there are apparently neurological models that I didn't site in this post about unexpected healings, which themselves suggest alternative explanations. I just didn't site them because it was long enough and I thought the possibility of healing wasn't as essential to the miracle as the pace of the recovery (as suggested by public comments). Given what I talked about on the latter, I'm extremely confident that whatever recovery she experienced was not instantaneous, not least which because we don't have much evidence that it was.
So far as I know, all of the evidence we have from her and the people who were around her said it was a rapid recovery (despite her having a slight limp afterwards, she was still functionally cured seemingly overnight). I believe this was the same with her medical history as well, which to my knowledge never indicated significant improvement (quite the opposite) prior to 2008. I dont know of any reason to suppose she had been improving before the Lourdes pilgrimage, nor can I readily dismiss the evidence we do have.
If we accept eyewitness accounts as authoritative then the temple of Aescepilus is full of them. Problem is the Catholic demands miracles as proof not just of divine favor but their specific take on the divine. So any competition is treated with the same skepticism applied here, or written off as demons in the biggest double standard cope.
Your point 7.1 is really why I can get so pugilistic re: miracle claims. Because one can just brush them off with a "well if it provides comfort to people, what's the issue?" And the issue is that the counters are literally >99% of everyone else. Do they then question whether God loves them? If they were good enough? Or devout enough? Or gave enough money to their congregation? The whole set-up is so rife for emotional and financial abuse/manipulation.
Good job.
I hate that I liked this piece. I hate miracle discourse, but Joe is just too good at this...
One general argument I would have against, is the temporal one. Why did it take so long for her to be healed?
As for the alleged rigor of the Lourdes Medical Bureau? In cases of sainthood in recent years, where the church has a skeptic to play devil's advocate, they've been ignored. This is specifically true with Mother Teresa's alleged first miracle. JPII himself overrode that.
Beyond that, let's quote the bible against believers.
Why aren't these people like the centurion, and expecting healing, whether for themselves or for others, without having to travel anywhere themselves or having to have anyone visit?
Related? The old problem of evil. Why her, not others?
And don't cite Job and Romans on god's alleged inscrutability. You're only increasing god's psychological problem of evil, either not omnipotent enough to make himself scrutable, or not omnibenevolent enough to want to make himself scrutable.
After all, wanting-to-be-healed: https://photos.app.goo.gl/AGfu27iFyotULZkA9
And even the parish priest: https://photos.app.goo.gl/hBumzQ8j6YRTHgF38
At Chimayo, the "Lourdes of New Mexico," are walking with canes.
Have fun with that one, Sebastian, too.
This post is hilarious.
There are lots of strawmen of the evidence and strawmen of the statistics. It’s a known fact that the vast majority of people who come to Lourdes are not even sick.
Also, that critique assumes the wrong epistemology of probabilities and evidence.
Moreover, the Lourdes Medical Bureau rejects a massive number of claims—far beyond the 7,000 formally recorded declarations.The widely cited figure of 7,000+ cases represents only the claims that actually met the rigorous threshold to have an official medical dossier opened for deep, formal tracking. The number of informal or initial claims submitted by pilgrims that are rejected at the very first gate is vastly higher. The reasons are : (1) Lack of Pre-Existing Medical Documentation ;(2) The Influence of Ongoing Medical Treatment; (3) Possible Psychological and Psychosomatic Conditions; (4) Known Trajectories of Natural Remission.
Therefore, one cannot rule out these healings from the armchair, given the fact that we know that lots of miraculous healings do happen at the Lourdes shrines. Conditional on an updated background knowledge about Lourdes, one absolutely cannot rule them out apriori. This is standard Bayesian reasoning.
So, 3 issues about higher order considerations that are important after we update our background knowledge with all of the rigurous evidence of these miracles.
Firstly, the verbal rejections. Medical directors at the shrine have noted that hundreds of pilgrims walk into the bureau every year wanting to report a healing. The vast majority of these individuals are turned away immediately during a brief verbal interview because they do not have a doctor's file with them, their healing was gradual, or they were taking medication. These encounters are never logged into the 7000+-dossier system. These could very well be authentic healings. Lack of medical evidence doesn’t prove otherwise. In fact, the likelihood of them being geniuine are very high —- as I said— after we updated background knowledge.
Second, A massive portion of pilgrims who believe they were healed simply go home and never walk into the Medical Bureau. They feel spiritually or physically renewed, thank God, and return to their normal lives. The Bureau itself notes that a case can only enter the formal record if the pilgrim actively chooses to volunteer for a multi-year, highly invasive scientific investigation—a process many people of people prefer to avoid. So It also presupposes that cured patients come back to Lourdes to report it, and agree to undergo all this research and further examinations.
Third, this is a milder point but very important: Most of the sick people seek comfort and spiritual relief, not necessarily a miracle. Testimonies and studies about this are available online. Many of them claim that the peace and comfort they get from Lourdes is the true miracle.
Those 3 issues make the selection effects much more expected.
—— “De Franciscis studied medicine and pediatrics in Italian Naples, before continuing his education in the United States at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he earned a master's of science in epidemiology in 1985”—— this is what he claims :
“According to de Franciscis, tens of thousands of people have reported being healed since 1883, including nearly 1,500 since his arrival in 2009. "Very few have been followed by a full investigation," he said. "Most of them had undergone medical treatment, about a third of them for cancer, which could explain their recovery. We conduct in-depth investigations into about 30 of the 100 cases we receive on average each year."
In such cases, the process is lengthy and collaborative. "The criteria are very strict," de Franciscis explained. "They were established by Cardinal (Lorenzo) Lambertini, future Pope (Benedict XIV), in 1734, with a view to recognizing miracles in Rome for beatifications or canonizations. They have been updated since then but remain relevant."
Lourdes' outgoing chief doctor explained to OSV News that "the illness must have been the subject of a precise and clear diagnosis, and it must have a severe prognosis. The return to health must be sudden, instantaneous, complete and lasting over time. It cannot be a temporary remission."
"The cured patient must also agree to undergo a whole series of examinations, the results of which we analyze scrupulously," de Franciscis said. "Then, if the cure appears to be genuinely unexplained, I convene a meeting of the members of the bureau, with the person presumed to be healed, and the bureau issues an initial 'certificate of cure.'"
"After that," he added, "I present the cases of healing to the International Medical Committee of Lourdes at its annual meeting."
—- this explains the selection effect.
Therefore, probably there are many more healings. Even naturalists have to concede to this at least to some degree. Otherwise, adding memory distortion; systematic lying; placebo; different types of remissions; etc — adds lots of complexity due to the sheer number of secondary hypotheses.
You try to contradict the empirical conclusion of over 300 specialists from different medical fields without being a specialist yourself. And yes, we have proof that over 300 physicians looked at this case. Bear in mind that many of the specialists at Lourdes are secular people. The Church specifically welcomes secular people to avoid bias issues.
It’s as if you are responding to the Fine-Tuning argument by trying to dismantle the physics behind it as established by the experts rather than addressing the philosophical inference. We all know that is not serious.
The dismissal of testimony in this case, where we have such highly corroborated evidence, is simply irrational.
You should go visit the shrine yourself. The guy responsible there explicitly said on camera that any skeptic is invited to investigate the record if he has irrational doubts about the evidence.
Cauda Equina Syndrome doesn’t go into remission! It’s not other illnesses. Your examples are radically disanalogous and extremely speculative.
From a strictly secular and medical standpoint, there is no documented case report or medical precedent in peer-reviewed literature of a natural, spontaneous remission of such multicomponent chronic syndrome analogous to Sister Bernadette Moriau's case, not to mention the other characteristics of the event.
So you are committed to an unexplainable cosmic coincidence + the fact that it was instantaneous stacks another one; religious experience and synchronicity add another one; total recovery and no relapse add another one.
Saying that her illness could have been psychosomatic commits treason against reason itself and against the intelligence of hundreds of trained professionals. Her illness was organic .
For a healing to pass the Lourdes Medical Bureau/International Medical Committee process as a candidate for a recognized miracle, the disease has to be organic necessarily.
Now I wonder if your naturalism is falsifiable. It also seems that you are not even open to comparing different hypotheses, as one does with all other arguments in natural theology.
——
I quickly searched Ai on some official statistics. Here is something relevant :
“Sick pilgrims make up roughly 6% to 12% of the total number of visitors and pilgrims coming to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes annually. [1] (https://www.lourdes-france.org/en/lourdes-attendance/)According to official attendance statistics provided by the shrine:2023: 370,000 sick pilgrims out of 3.1 million total visitors (~11.9%)]2022: 175,000 sick pilgrims out of 2.7 million total visitors (~6.5%)”
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This is probably the silliest comment I’ve read because the “I’m dunking on you” energy is so strong giving how little you actually say. Given how hard I worked on this article, I’m going to be a little mean.
1) I admit in the article (I believe, maybe it got cut) that not everyone who goes to Lourdes is seeking help. 6 percent of 3 million is still 180,000 per year. 7,000 of 180k would not be a good portion, but it’s not even that high! Let's assume they get 180k people seeking healing annually. They only have 7000 supposed miracle cases! That's like 3% for an annual total but it goes radically down when you consider that the number of miracle seekers goes up 180k annually, while the number of confirmed "miracles" remains the same. The rate of miracles goes down to vanishingly small number if you go back a decade, more so a century, and so on.
2) “Therefore, one cannot rule out these healings from the armchair, given the fact that we know that lots of miraculous healings do happen at the Lourdes shrines.” is pretty obvious circular logic. What a silly thing to say
3) Your “issues about higher order considerations that are important after we update our background knowledge with all of the rigurous evidence of these miracles.” are all just silly. Like this is the best you got? That I should believe someone experienced a miracle when not even Lourdes believes they did as they lack proper documentation? Or that I should “trust you bro” that more people get healed, they just don’t go to the agency. Come on. Or also the real miracle is the friends we make along the way?
4) Naturalists don’t have to concede anything, especially non-evidenced question-begging claims.
5) My point of this article, is that for the claim of this specific miracle we do not have corroborated evidence for the pace of the healing other than testimony of two people, one of which is retrospective and undocumented. Read much?
6) Your source here for the remission is, again, “trust me bro.” Notice that pretty much all the public comments from the doctors who evaluated her was not the fact that she recovered, but the pace that she receovered.
7) Coincidences happen all the time and are more probable than miracles.
8) I never said her illness was psychosomatic. Read much?
9) I’m not going about this strictly as a naturalist, but as a regularist. Supernaturalist explanations could make sense, but the explanations are pretty shotty and lack explanatory power. My point of this article was to say that a naturalistic hypothesis was feasible.
I have written an article addressing your post. I invite you to respond to some of the ideas presented. I developed the points further. 6% is unjustified. I think 3% is conservative. I bring some evidence for that.
The source for the remission is not trust me bro; it’s reliable authority, not Gemini. Also Gemini can do a better job than that. Basically, the conditions Moriau had never go into remission, at least there is no evidence of that. A deep dive into the secular remission literature will convince a cold hearted skeptic like you I think. At least on the empirical facts.
I would really like to see some secular parallels. I’m looking for them for months. This healing miracle specifically convinced me of miracles in the first place so I’m interested if anyone can find something that can be even compared with her case.
Her condition was roughly like this: (it can have minor details wrong because it’s generated)
* Lumbosciatic/back pain: 1966–2008 → ~42 years
* Major neurological deficits / pluriradicular impairment: 1987–2008 → ~21 years
* Inability to work because of the condition: 1987–2008 → ~21 years
* Spinal neurostimulator use: 1992–2008 → ~16 years
* Morphine treatment: 1994–2008 → ~14 years
* Sphincter dysfunction: 1998–2008 → ~10 years
* Permanent rigid cervico-lumbar corset: 1999–2008 → ~9 years
* Left equinus foot requiring a splint: 2005–2008 → ~3 years
She also had four spinal surgeries between 1968 and 1975, without clear lasting benefit.
And all of this went away instantaneously when she prayed in a chapel? And nothing relapsed? C’mon.
Most of the secular examples are cancer examples which often relapse. Secular remissions are basically all the time gradual, not instant.
We have undeniable evidence that the story is sound. You can mock Bayes all day, but that is not engaging with the evidence. Updating priors after investigating evidence is sound reasoning.
Again, you're not actually reading the contents of the post, or the causation that goes with the argument. It's hard to engage with you because you basically just don't engage with anything I've said here.
Your entire list here is a long list of nothing, because it all derives from the same malady: CE syndrome. Everything I find says that recovery from CE is uncommon but not impossible. One of the causes of CE is Herniated Lumbar Discs, and those discs can regress back to normal on their own. My citation of the former is peer review, not just gemini (I actually look into the sources gemini cites).
To repeat myself, and it kind of shows that you don't do the reading, I'm explicitly arguing against the case that it was instantaneous. It was definitely not instantaneous to her visiting the chapel, because she reported the healing 4 days later, and as I point out in the article, that entire timeline is suspect because of how little evidence we have for the instantaneousness.
Finally, I never said anything about Bayes in this article. You're arguing against the voices in your head here, very weird behavior. These are very weird comments that don't even get my argument correctly, let alone the actual content of the case, the peer review literature, or the timeline. This is all just very silly. My auto-hiding reply rules keep hiding your posts, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm actually doing you a disservice by replying to because your comments are just so uniformly bad.
A Catholic website calls it chronic sciatica. Easy for a non-miraculous "cure" by regression — and one that might not last. https://www.hdmiami.org/ip.php?pg=Cures
I'm 6-5, or 1.95 meters, and can empirically attest.
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Otherwise, per a phrase, and per Joe's response to you? This is like "miracles of the gaps," just like a "god of the gaps."