Keener: There's confirmation bias I think that can happen either way. The theists seem unwilling to do the work and want a pass anyway. But she starts dancing around, jumping around. So tell our listeners some of the stories that you uncovered as a result of your research. This was in 1981 that this happened. Further, she also has a twin sister! Certainly, Jesus gave a bright future to Barbara Snyder in 1981. A question also came out that if the scientific standard seems too high for these theists, in which discipline would the standard not be too high? Indianapolis, Indiana. Certainly months in the case of severe atrophy over the course of years. I, sometimes I'll joke it's obvious looking at me that healing doesn't always happen. So miracles aren't meant to be [inaudible] for the world's problems. At over 2 billion Christians, praying many times, if this was a real effect at the 1% level we'd expect millions of documented cases yearly -- certainly a large enough signal to experimentally verify. The analogy doesn't work, and honestly I think this is a miracle talking-point that Elijah is misusing here. This explores some of the rarer causes, but more importantly, the study they reference for the viral cause for the condition had cases that resolved in as long as 2 years (N=11). Can we come to any agreement here? Now obviously those numbers, none of us would say that all of those can only be explained as a miracle. So as you've cataloged these different stories and different accounts, what's been the sort of the breath of the geography that's been involved? A legal scholar, Snyder was the first woman to serve as the Case Western's president. From the Send Proof film they admit that they can't publish Bruce Van Natta case because the accurate measurement of the length of intestine needed to verify the result we don't have the technology yet. Craig Keener: Yeah. What is being missed here is it shouldn't matter what the skeptic says -- the evidence should be strong enough to convince the skeptic. Is it possible to start by eliminating the theistic hypothesis? So things got delayed. First of all, is that true? So for example, if I just say oh well there was spontaneous remission you could say that's implausible given our medical knowledge but it's going to be very hard to establish that that's actually like impossible, to definitively rule it out and so the question of which is a more plausible explanation and not can you rule it out. Just, was it last night I think, we were talking and David Dockery was sharing about Grant Osbourne, a scholar friend of ours who passed away just this past month after an amazing career of scholarship, but when he was young he had asthma. She talked about when here daughter Terese was two years old that she cried out that she had been bitten by a snake and by the time her mother had got to her she found her not breathing. After a quick intro, the episode plays in full. Or even the most dramatic story I found from somebody that I or my wife knows, but this one was particularly mind blowing to me because Antoinette Malumbay was my mother-in-law and Terese is my sister-in-law. So how much evidence really is enough? "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. The dead will be raised." I mean I, at the beginning I was expecting to find some reports of different kinds of healings that had already been collected in the booked. This is where they burn child witches," and stuff like that. Scott Rae: Here, here. This is the pattern we see of something that is non-existent, and the healings follow this exact same pattern. The same thing occurs with UFO claims, homeopathy studies, and psychic abilities. Shermer: well the counterfactual what about the christian families who pray for their loved one who's dying from cancer and they just die nothing happens from the prayer that happens all the time. Try comparing these claims to, say, the difficulty in confirming the Higgs boson, gravity waves, black holes, or the accelerating universe. Scott Rae: Sounds like an amazing story. Finally, this gripe about a naturalistic bias is completely misguided. The primary studies here are Case Studies, which are some of the lowest and least informative types of studies in medicine (see https://guides.library.stonybrook.edu/evidence-based-medicine/levels_of_evidence) with Meta-studies, Systematic reviews, and Randomized Controlled Studies being the most effective forms. Yes, I'll look for these mundane explanations first before jumping to agency, because those are the most common explanations of extraordinary claims. 2021 - All rights reserved. So I got what I could. You've done tremendous work on it that is a huge benefit to the Kingdom, not only with your technical biblical scholarship, but with this incredible stuff you've done on miracles. If miracles are real then these steps -- while possibly inconvenient -- would be easy to demonstrate. Converted to Pelican theme by Brian Blais. She has extensive experience in reinforcing Case Western Reserves He is, let's just say he is one of the most prolific biblical scholars that I'm aware of and is so productive. Somebody we know, actually there were two people we know, who are witnesses of that one. So even when, you know it doesn't happen to all of us. Author and evangelist Lee Strobel was once an atheist who served as the legal affairs editor for the Chicago Tribune before embarking on a quest to try and disprove Christianity an effort that ironically led him to embrace faith. An immediate thought is how many times was he prayed over and nothing happened? Charisma News - Informing believers with news from a Spirit-filled perspective, The Real-Life Miracle That Absolutely Shocked This Atheist-Turned-Evangelist, Jesus performed the miracles described in the Gospels, Atheist-Turned-Apologist Lee Strobel Offers Clear Evidence for the Supernatural, Atheist-Turned-Apologist: I Would Have Smirked That Easter Falls on April Fools' Day, Click here to subscribe to the Charisma News newsletter. episode: Is there medical evidence for miracles? Bad Apologetics Ep 20 - Miracles & even MORE even NEWER Resurrection evidence, Unbelievable? But again, it's a sign. A particular response has now happened twice in an ongoing discussion about extraordinary claims, and I felt I needed to think about it more deeply. We therefore have to design our investigation to reduce these biases and rule out other possible causes. She deteriorated over a period of many years, several operations, many hospitalizations," Strobel explained. 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. That we all will be ultimately healed if we have trust in Jesus because we'll be with him forever. And you just Well that was one of the reasons people argued against their reliability. Here I look into the papers he references in response. God is going to wipe away every tear from our eyes. He encountered scores of healings and other claims of the miraculous along the way, but there was one case in particular that truly blew his mind: the case of Barbara Snyder. This is the reason the specifics matter. Christian epistemologist, software engineer, musician, not necessarily in that order. View the profiles of people named Barbara Snyder. 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. Thank you for being with us. So I asked Antoinette Malumbay, "How long was it that Terese wasn't breathing?" The video of the miracle itself doesn't show much, and seems to show potentially abusive behavior of people lifting her out the chair, and supporting her as she attempts to walk in a far from medically controlled environment. It's a long story. Her feet and fingers were suddenly straight and normal again. Although MS can come in milder forms, Barbara's condition deteriorated quickly. 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. It was assumed that Stargardt's disease was the best fit for her symptoms, but she has no family history for this genetic condition. Share it with a friend. It's the same reason large careful studies aren't done -- they simply don't care enough, and are already believing, so why bother? There isn't anything that could tie the prayer as the causal element, given that she was most likely prayed for often an we're picking out the one case before a claimed recovery. But even with miracles, life expectancy is higher here than in Africa. Above all, Max underscores, "Getting unstuck means getting excited about getting out.". She had to stop and think to kind of calculate, well to get from this village to that village with this mountain and that mountain, she said, "About three hours.". We should celebrate that. ", Scott Rae: Yeah, so you had to, I guess you had to check your own-. To contact us or to submit an article, click here. 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. It still could fit James, Chapter Five or gifts of healings for those of us who believe in that. You can get a free, one-month trialhere. It may not be a dramatic sign or wonder, but it's still an answer to prayer. randomized controlled studies, well considered controls, etc) to avoid these confounders. I don't understand how it's possible for both those things to be true. What problems are you interested in? In principle I believed it, but I was questioning witnesses with kind of a skeptical approach to try to whittle away anything that wasn't necessarily accurate. Some of them, some of the critiques were based on an interview with me that was published in Christianity Today, rather than the book itself. aliens, homeopathy). I had the pleasure of being a guest on the Real Seekers podcast and discussing / debating miracles with Matthew (atheist) and Dale (Christian) last week. We make a mistake in the episode here about corrected vs uncorrected vision measurements. [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. If you thought you were miraculously cured, you'd have it tested every two weeks not waiting two years. Its consultants have assisted with the recruitment of multiple senior CWRU I could just as well say that her brushing her teeth caused the healing, because she was healed in the evening shortly after she brushed her teeth. She graduated from the University of Chicago School of Law, where she served as executive editor of the law review. It was from a different Congo so the person who did that doesn't know their geography. If you complain that the standards are too high, then you don't belong on the playing field and you don't deserve to be taken seriously. He doesn't seem to understand the ways that people can fool themselves. However studies also show about 80% of ER nurses and 64% of ER doctors believe lunar cycles affect patients' mental health, even though the data do not support such an effect. Barbara Snyder is another one that's not in the book. Her blindness, too, had been instantaneously healed. 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