I think the answer to the question depends on what we mean by “reality” and “consistent”
Sometimes I love chocolate, and sometimes I hate it. In that sense, I am not consistent even within myself.
Ed
I think that most of those questions about Alexandrina da Costa could be settled by reading the excerpt from her autobiography (or better yet, reading the entire thing.) For instance:
The main point being that (1) she doesn’t appear to have the personality of a person who would spend her last 12 years running an elaborate fraud, and (2) she hated the results of the fast, including the tests, the skepticism, and the publicity. The explanation of cheating logically fails, because why would she do it? She didn’t attempt to profit from her experiences in any way.
As for the credentials of the researchers, Dr. Marques is described as “rofessor of medical science, Pernambuco; qualified university lecturer of the faculty of medicine, Recife ; professor of the branch of nutrition of the School of Social Service, Pernambuco; president of the Society of Gastroenterology and Nutrition, Pernambuco”. That’s about as good an authority as you’d be likely to find in Portugal at that time. If he didn’t write a more thorough documentation of the case, it’s probably because medical standards in 1940’s Portugal were different from modern-day America.
I agree that given the time and place, the evidence is not sufficient to absolutely, positively certain what happened in that case, but there are other instances more recent and even better documented. Rita Klaus, the woman who was healed of MS overnight, is still alive and kicking, in Florida the last time I heard. Evidence about her condition before the healing, the remarkable speed of the healing, and the elimination of irreversible damage is quite thorough because she was treated by at least six different doctors, all of whom testified that her case defied medical explanation.
That’s just one example of many. Dr. Caryle Hirshberg has investigated the case of Rita Klaus and numerous other cases of the same type, and written several books on the subject. In addition to providing the documentation, she also talks about the difficulty of getting researchers to take these cases seriously. She describes meetings in which she presented documentation includes photos, x-rays, numerous lab reports, videos, and any other sort of evidence that one could ask for, yet researchers still insisted that the cases must be frauds or that the original diagnosis was simply wrong.
Medical journals are mainly interested in cases where you a phenomenon can be replicated. Academic careers rise or fall based mainly on publications, so that gives researchers a strong motivation to ignore isolated cases such as Rita Klaus. Obviously if there were singular cases of a person experiencing a unique healing, the prejudice of the research community would work to ensure that such a case wouldn’t get into a journal. The entire system is set up so that mainly recurring phenomenon get documented. If unique phenomenon did actual occur, they could easily be missed.
Yet even beyond that, there are phenomena which can be replicated that fly in the face of materialism. For instance, some Buddhist Monks in Tibet have a well-documented ability to survive in conditions of extreme cold, with very little food and water. Such circumstances would cause hypothermia in any ordinary person. (A doctor named Herbert Benson, from Harvard Medical School, has documented this.) Nevertheless, such things are mentioned very little in mainstream medical texts because they just don’t mesh well with the worldview of the authorities.
As a last note, I’d agree with your statement that most medical doctors don’t know very much about the scientific research process. What they do know is a great deal about the human body, what it can do, and what it can’t do.
A couple of weeks ago, I asked the same thing about the rules mof Major League Baseball, and I was handed my ass seven ways until Sunday for even deigning suggest that an analysis was possible let alone what it would find.
And you want to know about all of Reality? 
An autobiography is hardly a good source for something like this. In junior high we were assigned to report on both an autobiography and biography of some figure. I chose J. Paul Getty. Let’s just say he didn’t seem to be the pussycat his autobiography led me to believe he was.
The doctor started out skeptically (or so it is claimed - I’ve seen creationists and writers of religious tracts say the same thing) but was he skeptical in the way the Church is looking at miracles during the canonization process or was he truly skeptical. Was he a believer? That’s very likely in 1940s Portugal.
There have been many examples of bleeding Jesus statues or crying Virgins which have proven to be fraudulent. The motive for these was not monetary. Believers in anything sometimes stretch the truth. Did it happen in this case? More likely than violation of the law of conservation of energy.
BTW “miraculous” remissions don’t violate any laws and are a lot more believable. The body can do all sorts of cool stuff. For instance expensive sugar pills given as medicine work better than cheap sugar pills. To convince me that it was supernatural would require some experiments - ones on the power of prayer haven’t worked out very well. And a conclusion that the original diagnosis is wrong is hardly startling. Doctors screw up diagnoses all the time. I think I’ve seen a paper on how doctors sometimes come up with a quick diagnosis and then ignore evidence against it and overvalue evidence for it. It’s not surprising. I’ve been involved in diagnosis efforts for microprocessor failures, and it is hard, and we can prod all we want and often have multiple instances of the failure.
Perhaps this doctor didn’t have an analytical turn of mind. (In my field the presidents of learned societies are the best politicians, not necessarily the best engineers.) He can’t be blamed for living in a time when the tools weren’t available. It’s a shame they messed up an opportunity to prove something supernatural was occurring.
BTW, a carefully studied single case is not ignored, since all things start with one case. Consider how a single set of bones of our ancestors gets studied and published. But there has to be some real analysis. In 12 years, no one did a blood test? No one did a urine or stool sample?
Actually I believe it is pretty inconsistent, Look at a event people witnessed, independently they have different stories, only after group think has set in do the stories align, which is a function of people with authority to enforce their point of view on another.
I believe these inconsistencies of our reality are evident and pointed out in the gospels. 4 different accounting of the life of Jesus told in absolute truth as the Word of God, yet they appear to differ objectively, but it is exactly what each person saw in their own reality. Somehow these different groups of reality interact. Other aspects of scripture I believe also point to this.
‘forcing’ of one person’s view of reality onto others happens every day in a slightly different way which is more observable, and is evident in people seeming liking things they haven’t before because a person with authority likes them, we see this is fads and stars endorsing products. Unfortunately this starts at such a young age that many people just live in the reality designed by others and never really have a sense if they like something or not.
I think this conversation is going round in circles. Most of what you’re asking could be answered by reading the information that’s there. Both medical reports about the fast say that da Costa took no nutrition. If she was being fed by IV, they would not say that. The first one that I quoted also mentions a blood test. The segments from her autobiography are clear enough about the religious direction of the doctors and nurses involved in the tests. She doesn’t say what religion the doctors and nurses actually were, but they were openly hostile to da Costa and her miraculous claims. (Besides which, the insinuation that Catholics have some sort of bias towards accepting supernatural claims won’t fly with anyone who’s investigated these cases. The Catholic hierarchy actually reacts negatively whenever one of their flock claims to be performing miracles, having visions, levitating, or otherwise violating the laws of nature.)
In any case, I somehow missed the part in my science textbooks where the validity of observations depends on the religion of the observer.
What’s clear is that no matter what evidence exists, it will never be enough. If da Costa successfully fasted for 12 years, that’s not enough because she must be cheating. If she was monitored, that’s not good enough because it was done by doctors rather than academics. If it was done by an academic, then that academic just wasn’t good enough. etc… Obviously any evidence that exists will have some loophole that will permit a determined skeptic to continue doubting. However, one does not reach sound conclusions by deciding right away what must be true and then clinging to whatever remote possibilities are necessary to maintain that belief. One must be willing to consider all the evidence and change one’s mind on occasion.
No one doubts that some miracles are fakes or that some medical cases are misdiagnosed. However, there’s a sizable jump between some being fakes and mistakes and all being fakes and mistakes. If we’re confronted with a case where the evidence for authenticity is strong, we owe it to ourselves to lay aside our prejudices and consider the actual facts. Read about da Cost’a fast. Read about Klaus’ healing from MS. Don’t just keep repeating that other cases have been frauds; that’s irrelevant to these particular cases. Ask yourself whether there is any real, positive, definite reason to believe that either of these cases is a fraud.
Was she monitored for 12 years, or 39 days? There’s a bit of a difference.
She fasted for 12 years, and during that time she was watched continuously for a stretch of 39 days. Nobody that I know have questioned that she fasted for 12 years and backed it up with facts. One could, I suppose, refuse to accept the portion of the fast where she wasn’t monitored, but there is no reason to do so.
Besides which, refusing to trust anyone other than doctors and professors is a straightforward appeal to elitism. No particularly difficult skill or analytical turn of mind is needed to determine whether a person is eating or not. With regard to something like that, the only difference between professionals and other observers is social status. High academic rank and professional degrees were pretty much limited to males, whites, the wealthy, and the urban, and it was probably even more so then than now. Moreover, it has certainly not escaped anyone’s notice that those who claim visions or miracles tend to be female, poor, and otherwise low down the social ladder. Hence there’s an obvious motive for the authorities to be hostile to da Costa’s claim and to others of the sort. If a poor, handicapped, female rape victim could do something that no rich, white man could do, it would be an inherent challenge to the power structure in that society.
We could refuse to accept that her mere unvarnished word is more likely to be correct than the known laws of physics - which is equivalent in this case to only trusting that she’s not snacking if we know somebody’s watching.
It the same sort of thinking that keeps a person from sending their credit card numbers to nigerian scammers. It may not work out in all cases but it’s well-known to be a reasonable approach.
Impressive nonsense. The reason to trust doctors and professors more than the average layman is the known fact that humans are terrible reporters of facts, and the perhaps optomistic hope that doctors and professors are perhaps more likely than the average human to know how to make objective observations, and to make fewer unjustified leaps in judgement based on incomplete and misinterpreted data.
If you have to try to turn this into an eletist vs. underclass thing in order to discredit the scientific observation, than that suggests to me that you know you are on too tenuous of ground to strenghten your case with mere facts.