The more serious response is that the church certainly does believe in miracles and does nothing to discourage that belief. However, the church also recognizes the human impetus to declare all sorts of thing miraculous when they are nothing of the sort. Therefore, the church hierarchy has a tradition of putting barriers in the way of people who are proclaiming miracles. If an event or a phenomenon gets accepted as a miracle, it has to be outside normal experience and it cannot be the work of either an overly credulous person or a charlatan.
Science, particularly medicine, probably has been cutting into miracles for 200 years and will continue to do so. Eventually, the only things that will be accepted as miracles will be odd events for which we have no explanation. (Such events are likely to continue to occur forever; whether they are miracles or simply unique phenomena will be the point of contention forever.)
If an event or a phenomenon gets accepted as a miracle, it has to be the work of either overly credulous people or a charlatan. Yes, the church is more politically savvy than it once was (or rather, the politics have changed enough that they have to appear more choosy about the miracles they’ll accept). But that doesn’t actually equate to some sort of rigorous skepticism, just a CYA rejection of the more obvious fakes.
This reminds me of a Simpsons episode…
And how is what Sanal Edamaruku did threatening?
Are you saying that there are never any spontaneous remissions of cancer? That no person has experienced a medical recovery against all the knowledge of every physician who treated him or her?
You are free to chalk up all such events as “unknown” and believers are free to chalk up such events as “miraculous.” Portraying every person who puts forth a belief in miracles as “credulous” simply indicates your perspective on the topic (which is fine) without actually adding any information about the event.
Spontaneous? You mean the work done by our bodys’ own defense and repair systems that goes on continuously and often without our notice? Macrophages, lymphocytes, leukocytes, and all the components of our immune system which serve to restore and repair our living cells and destroy, filter, and excrete damaged tissue and dead viruses, bacteria?
The actors and agents at play are microscopic, but hardly “spontaneous”.
“Mechanisms proposed for spontaneous regression of human cancer include: immune mediation, tumor inhibition by growth factors and/or cytokines, induction of differentiation, hormonal mediation, elimination of a carcinogen, tumor necrosis and/or angiogenesis inhibition, psychologic factors, apoptosis and epigenetic mechanisms.” from the National Institute of Health
From Dartmouth Medicine: “More than one in five invasive cancers detected in the study by mammography vanished without ever being treated.”
A more digestibleDiscover Magazine article: “A subtype of T lymphocyte, known as a natural killer (NK) cell, patrols the body, attacking and killing viruses and cancer cells.”
There is no need to credit Divine Intervention, Prayer, or any other woo for our body’s ability to detect and destroy rogue cells and infections.
Why anyone ever bothers to argue about Catholicism to Catholics is beyond me. If demonstrably batshit things like virgin birth, resurrection, transubstantiation or covering up for pedophiles won’t make them leave, there’s no getting through to them using reason.
And you can document that every single surprising remission was the result of these factors?
And you can provide the exact reason why they occur in some cases and not in others? (If one in five occurrences heal themselves, why not five in five? And if a second event in five occurs, do you have the exact reason?)
I have made no claim that we have a need to attribute such events to divine intervention. I have not even made a claim that calling people who do attribute such events to divine intervention “credulous” is wrong. I merely pointed out that calling them credulous indicates one’s position in a discussion without actually bringing more facts to the discussion.
I am unaware of any way to demonstrate that transubstantiation is not happening – it’s a claim that is unfalsifiable.
I’m unaware of any way to prove I’m not eating the soul of my dead grandfather every time I have a burrito - just because it’s unfalsifiable doesn’t make it any less crazy.
In many cases the exact reason is very clear; just as it is when cuts heal themselves, colds and flus resolve, bruises fade, etc. It’s not surprising, and hasn’t been mysterious for years. Our bodies’ healing and restorative functions are powerful and complex, but the evidence as to how these mechanisms work is accessible.
How often do we seek to prove that the claimants were even afflicted? Do we ask them to produce medical records and other evidence they were actually suffering from the affliction they proclaim has been miraculously healed?
Anyone who buys claims of the miraculous without demanding, examining, and vetting evidence is indeed: credulous.
And the church makes no claim against this. Claims for miracles are different. They are made when something occurs that is extremely rare or even a singular event.
In the case of miracles recognized by the Catholic Church, all of them are vetted. Medical records are, in fact, demanded. In the case of miracles claimed as supporting evidence for sainthood, the church even has an official position to seek those records and put them forth as evidence that no miracle occurred. That is where the term “devil’s advocate” arose, from the Latin Advocatus Diaboli, the nickname given to the Promoter of the Faith in the canonization process, whose job it is to ensure that no evidence arguing against canonization is ignored.
You may certainly argue that the church gets it wrong, but an accusation that claimants for miracles are accepted at their word is silly and demonstrably false.
Obviously, there are many people who attribute to divine intervention events in their lives that are more easily attributed to coincidence or other causes. They may well be labeled credulous.
It may very well happen that we eventually learn enough about medical science that we can eliminate every claim of a miracle. It certainly has not happened, yet. So claims of credulousness directed at official claims by the church represent a viewpoint of the speaker and do not represent any additional information in this discussion.
If you believe (as you seem to) that miracles absolutely cannot and do not ever happen, then you have no reason to investigate or seek to disprove or debunk any particular purported miracle: you just say, a priori, “It can’t happen.”
It’s only if you accept the possibility of miracles in general, as the Catholic Church does, that there’s a reason for skepticism, as opposed to outright dismissal, toward any particular purported miracle.
Well, as the OP said:
In other words, haters gotta hate, y’all.
If the Church had done as the OP said, it still would not have changed the OP’s mind about the Catholic Church as they would have merely find something else to confirm their bias.
I’m an atheist who thinks the RCC is an ossified bureaucracy half-stuck in the middle ages, so I’m not particularly keen on defending them, but I don’t see why they have to crack down on every lay group that goes off the reservation everywhere on the globe. If people want to be butthurt about this, so be it. I guess we can all manufacture a bunch of outrage if we really want to.
Well, I think that if there is not much outrage then we can expect the RCC to **not **do the right thing.
I mean, if in this case there was one skeptic not getting his or her way on making a church drop a dubious miracle then I would think like you, that this would just amount to someone being butt-hurt.
Not so in this case, we should not forget that the livelihood and well-being of a guy that bothered to tell it like it is, is being threatened. And it is clear that then others will be less willing to fight against ignorance.
Interesting how Notre Dame glorified the death of Manti Te’o’s fake girlfriend and did everything possible to cover up the story of the real raped Lizzy Seeberg and her real death as well as the rape of another coed. Apparently SOP in Catholic institutions.
http://outkickthecoverage.com/manti-teos-fake-dead-girlfriend-breaks-the-internet.php
At Notre Dame, a fake tragedy gets more tears than a real one
The way I understand it the CC still requires two miracles in order for someone to become a saint, with the second one done posthumously. And I think 99% of such miracles are health claims, of which many will attest to being a huge gray area, unless someone wants to take a dead rotted body that stunk to their high heaven, and bring it back to life, like good ole biblical times. Now these folks knew what people had in mind on what should be considered a real miracle!
How to become a saint. From this site:
And according to that link, if you can’t get a miracle working on your behalf, you can still be beatified by dying for your religious cause. Damn, did Muslims got the same memo?