Evidence for Believing

[Inqwizitor]

I'm trying to reply to the thread but can't see my posts...

As for showing you more stories of miracles, what's the point? There are many miracles that have church approval and you can Google them.

There is no "proof" of divine intervention, but incidents like Marion Carroll's healing are evidence to support the belief that physical nature is not absolutely uniform. I'm aware of Hume's approach to miracles, but it's an unnecessary commitment to uniformity. You don't have to abandon methodological empiricism to accept that nature may be open to agency that is not part of the same, material causal chain.

It's still very weak evidence because it's not been established that the healing was because of a miracle rather than spontaneous healing for which we have potential physiological explanations. And we do need to set up something like an experiment (or similar) to establish whether miracles can happen (by observing that miracle healings significantly more frequently occur right after praying to God as opposed to not, for example ... even though we would still need to go beyond that as well to make sure). If miracles only happen very selectively, then we can't say we have conclusive evidence.

And I know you're Catholic, but many of us don't take "church approval" seriously around here. It means nothing to us.

If it was a testable, verifiable phenomenon that spontaneous remission occurred significantly more frequently during or as a result of prayer, we should look at some powerful psychosomatic (natural) cause, like perhaps another order of magnitude in the placebo effect. If something is observably repeatable within the order of empirical phenomena such that you can form an inductive conclusion from predictable data, that makes it less likely to be a miracle, not more likely.