Monday, July 08, 2013

Coincidental miracles..

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.
-- David Hume

So I read that the Catholic tribe are going to declare that their ex-leader John Paul II has become a supernatural being; their claim is that even though he's long dead some part of his conciousness still exists and is able to communicate with living people and exert invisible forces at the cellular level within the bodies of certain cherry picked individuals (also Catholic) to cure them of illnesses that are seemingly incurable; all this from a distance of thousands of miles from the crypt in Rome where his corpse lies serenely decomposing.

Statistically of course being cured (or appearing to be cured) of certain diseases like Parkinsons is very rare but statistically improbable events within large populations of things (7 billion human beings in this case) happen all the time; the medical establishment even measure and document them. The good philosopher David Hume advised us to ponder this over 200 years ago, he suggested that we consider what is more likely, that a particular individual has an occurrence of a remission from a condition (that many have had before and since) or that a dead body can exert curative forces supernaturally across vast distances?

The balance of probability on this seems pretty clear to me and clearly those Catholics need to get a grip on reality; next they'll be claiming that a Brit can win Wimbledon!

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