Theology by the Slice: "Medical Miracles"

On Wednesday the group heard a talk from Fr. William Stempsey, S.J., M.D., and Professor of Philosophy at the College.  As the string of titles following Father’s name implies, he is quite the decorated scholar – he holds advanced degrees in Philosophy, Theology, and Medicine and has been published extensively.  The topic of the talk he delivered was “Medical Miracles,” which brought together both his experience as a medical doctor and his knowledge of philosophy.

Father began by examining what in fact the word ‘miracle’ implies in contemporary society.  It is no surprise that the word is loved by advertisers, who have conceived of everything from ‘Fast Miracles’ to ‘Miracles of the Foot’ to ‘Miracle for African Hair’ to the ubiquitous ‘Miracle Whip’.  Putting aside these rather banal examples, miracles have also been invoked in more serious contexts by hospitals and charities searching for ‘miracle cures’ or ‘miracle drugs,’ among them the Children’s Miracle Network.  One might even consider the burgeoning field of technology as a veritable miracle, with the discovery of everything from organ transplants to Penicillin and Aspirin being summarily hailed as a ‘miracle of modern medicine.’  

Yet despite the largely secularized connotation which the word usually evokes, it is inevitably connected to some spiritual or supernatural reality – birth and even Life can be considered miracles in and of themselves.  So how are we to understand what a miracle is?  Father began by presenting the three criteria by which Richard Swinburne, a noted British philosopher of religion, qualifies an event as a miracle.  First the event must be of an extraordinary kind.  Second it must be brought about by a god of some sort.  Finally as has been alluded to above, the miracle must evoke a certain religious significance.  As is immediately evident, Swinburne’s criteria already begin to disqualify many of the secular miracles which contemporary society holds up, whether deliberately or not, as miracles in their own right. 

Father developed this conception of a miracle by presenting the varying opinions of three foundational thinkers on the issue:  St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and David Hume, an 18^th-century Scottish empiricist philosopher.  Augustine thought of miracles not as a contradiction of the natural order, but as the activation of some hidden element which had up to that point been unintelligible to human observation.  Aquinas saw things slightly differently, conceiving of miracles as outside of the natural order, though not contrary to it – in short, God alters the powers of nature so as to bring about new powers which are part of the natural order.  The third thinker which Father presented, Hume, has a position altogether different from the two saints.  He saw miracles as necessarily violating the natural order.  Although open to the possibility of their existence, he had ultimately decided that there has never been a sufficient number of educated, trustworthy observers of a miraculous experience to prove its existence.

Having presented these varying views on miracles, Father introduced us to an actual example of miraculous experience to use it as a sort of test case.  The case in question is the rather recent ‘Brockton Case’, which involved the miraculous healing of Benedicta McCarthy who, after having accidentally ingested 19 times the lethal dose of Tylenol, ended up defying death with a remarkable full recovery.  Benedicta’s family attributed the cure to the intercession of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, better known as Edith Stein, a German Jewish-convert nun who was executed because of her ethnicity during World War II.  The case was summarily submitted to the Vatican and ended up being officially attributed to Edith Stein, who was then canonized in 1998. 

This leads us to some interesting questions:  How do medical cures work?  Can doctors even prove that an event is miraculous with an imperfect understanding of the natural world?  How can we actually prove that a saint’s intercession is responsible for the cure?  Father concluded that we inevitably cannot prove this:  to say that we can entails a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument – since Y follows X, Y must have been caused by X.  He also drew in the work of philosophers such as C. S. Peirce and process theorist A. N. Whitehead to allow the possibility that the universe may not be made up of set laws, but rather include a degree of chance.  In the end Father argued for a canonization process based more on the life and spirituality of a person rather than his success as a heavenly intercessor.

The Catholic Church recognizes saints as persons who have attained eternal salvation in Heaven.  A candidate for sainthood is officially canonized after an expert and the local bishop conduct an extensive investigation into his life as well as after the saint’s Heavenly intercession can be attributed to a miraculous event.  The attestation of a panel of medical doctors that a miracle event is inexplicable proves that the candidate is indeed in Heaven, his prayers having been heard by God.  The current practice of the Church requires two miracles for subsequent canonization.

We sincerely thank Fr. Stempsey for all his time and effort in putting together this presentation.