Hemant on Miracles - Answered

5 Reasons why Your Miracles aren't Really Miraculous
The Atheist Voice | added = "Ajoutée le 20 mai 2014"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRGnV6yWlGs

1:46 OK, your meeting the girl was probably a miracle.

Some of your stuff is a boon to Christians, since on the one hand it is very detailed supposed deunking, and therefore good material for an Apologist like me to use, and on the other hand you are, usually, polite.

Some of the dialogues I have had with atheist have probably earned the blog where I reflect them a media ban in Russia, due to profanity, and that profanity is not from me.

Hemant, thanks for not being like that. Now I'll politely hear why you don't think this meeting was a miracle, perhaps because you aren't dating her any more?

2:23 True, your meeting the girl was not a Lourdes class miracle.

It could not be officially used as one more instance of Our Lady in Lourdes Apparition being confirmed by healing miracles afterwards.

2:38 "something else would have happened"

R i g h t ... (starting to feel less polite) ... there are two options, either that something else would have been a big deal or it wouldn't.

If it hadn't, you would be doing some medical stuff which might be less fun than blogging, for instance.

If it had, you would still be fairly ungrateful to providence in this comment.

3:23 Your quitting med school is a good argument against the wizeacres ...

3:36 Medical records are always involved in an officially recognised Lourdes miracle.

Do you know what more is?

The healing has to be:

• unexplicable by known medical facts
• sudden
• unreversed.

3:46 A cancer going into remission is not recognised as a Lourdes miracle. A cancer totally disappearing and not coming back (not sure if they wait 1 year or a time appropriate for disease - so maybe longer for cancer - or to death from other causes) is.

Not sure if they had many cancer miracles at Lourdes, but before antibiotics there was one or two miracles involving sudden healing of ... had to check, tubercular peritonitis.

Here Tolkien writes on one case he heard about in Church:

And the most moving story of the little boy with tubercular peritonitis who had not been healed, and was taken sadly away in the train by his parents, practically dying with two nurses attending him. As the train moved away it passed within the sight of the Grotto. The little boy sat up. "I want to go and talk to the little girl" - in the same train there was a girl who had been healed. And he got up and played with the little girl; and then he came back, and he said "I'm hungry now". And they gave him cake and two bowls of chocolate and enormous potted meat sandwiches, and he ate them! (This was in 1927). So Our Lord told them to give the little daughter of Jairus something to eat. So plain and matter of fact: for so miracles are.

from his letter 89
Letters, pp 99 - 100

Note, I went to a page - wikipedian or other - on recognised Lourdes miracles, and the boy is not there, since he was healed on the train and not in Lourdes. But a girl who could be that girl is.

I keep the quote with reference on a bibliography page with Tolkien related links and stuff:

Βιβλιογράφικα/Bibliographica : J R R Tolkien related
http://vivlijohrafika.blogspot.com/2008/11/j-r-r-tolkien-related.html

4:58 "let me tell you what God told me the other day"

You don't hear Catholics use that phrase much either.

It has sth to do with Pentecostals and Charismatics not having a certain shyness in culture most other people do have.

"You never hear them talk about miracles that happened to them."

In US that may be because you don't have a sufficient high concentration of Muslims making smaller pilgrimages to shrines or Hindoos going to that particular contributary to Ganges with a temple known for ... etc.

5:02 "at least in America"

You know, you might have some low component of Amerindians among your acquaintances too.

5:40 Yes, there are proven miracles in Lourdes.

Proven cases - at least one girl with peritonitis before antibiotics were available to cure that - where remission is irreversible, sudden and unexplainable.

Since lack of appetite has to do also with peritoneal tissue lacking, this involves a sudden restoration of tissue, as well.

Oh, you might perhaps say "as it was in France, they must have been eating green cheese" (same or similar fungus as for penicilline production, both versions of bread mold - but it tastes much better in cheese than in bread).

OK, go and check how a typical Lourdes menu was c. 100 years ago, and if there was lots of blue cheese available ...

5:48 Lourdes doctors are perhaps not so interested in James Randi's offer?

They are the guys who regularly do the medical examination before a miracle is officially recognised.

5:57 There were two miracles for "Wojtyla".

One of them was not irreversible in healing, that was the French nun.

One of them was not sudden, but took some weeks, even if the healing was lots faster than any known procedure could have made.

I am more impressed by the one healing miracle of Roncalli (Antipope John XXIII), which I had been unaware of since the final "canonisation" used his "Vatican II Council" as miracle number 2.

And you know, your meating that girl seems better qualified as, if not strictly miracle, at least act of God, than Vatican II. So, I was surprised that anything remotely close to a real healing miracle - and the Italian sister seems to have had a real one - even happened in connection to him.

6:04 The natural explanations are probably waiting right there to be figured out ... uh ... naturalism of the gaps?

6:22 God's performing miracles on special occasions is not equivalent of making them a normal pharmaceutic shop.

In other words, you forget that, God working miracles is NOT the kind of explanation which can be "tested by controlled experiments."

So, no. And God's not making them a pharmaceutic shop is also not equivalent of His never making them.

Still at 6:22 "all of our loved ones would never die".

Do you have any idea how annoying it would be if no one ever died? Just because you love someone doesn't mean there isn't someone sitting by a river and happily surprised if seeing his corpse float by (probably a reference to Ganges burials, right?)

Death and diseases are part of God's general punishment for sin.

And not just for personal sins we commit now, also for being children of Adam, who sinned.

It's not as selective of what one calls a miracle as when they really occur.

Getting rid of tubercular peritonitis without antibiotics is much more selective as an occurrence than calling such a thing a miracle. But of course, you can check if it was very likely the girl and the boy (who was cured later) had been eating lots of blue cheese, when they could get something down.

6:57 Why should I, as a Catholic, believe Douglas Hagler?

Especially as, as a Catholic, I do not need to deny miracles occur among non-Catholics.

Like sometimes God prefers leaving some in a false religion over them becoming atheists, which would be the result if no miracles happened.

7:11 "Because they didn't happen to him"

Yeah, right, if this Italian priest cannot bilocate to hear confessions among stranded Italians, like Padre Pio did (the event was verified on both sides, a mystic Italian priest appearing in Chicago, answering to his description on same occasion when he said he had bilocated, and hearing a confession in Italian while no other priest was available), it's because he's a bad priest?

No, and if you don't have stigma, it is not because you are a bad priest either.

Miracles come for God's very selective pruposes, and that selection is diverse from selection to be saved and go to Heaven.

His comment is as inane as if he had said "I don't believe in Fort Sumter, I never saw a war start" or "I don't believe in the Versailles Peace Treaty, I never saw a war end".

Credits for this argument to C. S. Lewis, the book called "Miracles". Can't recall the page.

7:40 You know, Douglas Hagler actually has Protestant tradition since Reformation going for him.

This means, as a Protestant, he is supposed to have a bias against miracles.

The usual consensus among Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists etc is "miracles ceased to happen when the last Apostle died". On their view, they might start again shortly before Harmageddon, unless Apocalypse 11 is just speaking about the Reformation (two witnesses identified as Old and New Testament rather than as for instance Henoch and Elijah returning from whereever God kept them since He took them up).

So, Douglas Hagler is really not a very impressing thing to bring up with a Catholic.