Roland

On an earlier thread, dr. lazer blast provided what he claims is scientific and historical evidence for post-biblical miracles. One he cites is the famous "dancing sun" miracle at Fatima in the early 20th Century:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun

The second is one known as the Miracle of Lanciano:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharistic_miracle

Has either of them been successfully debunked or is the scientific evidence for them actually sound? And how can we ever really know if the people involved are being honest or simply trying to pull the wool over our eyes? (Remember the James ossuary).

Diogenes the Cynic

This thread will be better served in S&S.

DtC, Moderator, BC&H

mdejess

Yes, I for one really want to get to the facts.

And I get the impression that the people in CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal -- something like that, unless they have changed their business name) do not seem to be genuinely keen to investigate the phenomena.


Aside from these folks there seem to be no other people who seem to have trained and well-equipped researchers.

Now I am going to say something that will get the goat of some people here:

Debunkers from the camps of confirmed skeptics are very good at detecting scams and frauds and pseudoscience shows, but they are very silent about such phenomena which they cannot dig into inside out and upside down to uncover any trickery.

Mdejess

Diogenes the Cynic

There's nothing to investigate. Fatima was mass hysteria. A bunch of idiots said they saw the sun dance around, but in point of fact, it didn't actually "dance around." It is eminently verifiable that the sun did not dance around because the earth is still intact (which it would not be if it had been shaken violently in such a manner), and nobody else saw it outside of a few hysterical peasants all hepped up on religious fanatacism. Their say so does not equal evidence. The sun did not actually move, no matter what they think they saw.

As to the Lanciano relic, it's hard to find any information on this othere than religious websites, but from what I can see, it appears that it might actually be some preserved human heart tissue. So what? What's so amazing about that? The claim is that it was transubstantiated from bread? Ok, prove it. Prove it used to be bread. Showing me an object and claiming it used to be a different object does not amaze me. If I show you a chocolate chip cookie and tell you it used to be a frog, are you going to be more impressed if you can verify that what I gave you was an actual chocolate chip cookie? All the breathless claims about the Lanciano relics being actually human are completely meaningless. Who cares if they're human? Prove they used to be something else.
Any claim which cannot be examined cannot be examined. I'm not sure why you find that remarkable. It doesn't change the fact that no miraculous claim which can be examined has ever withstood the laugh test.

mdejess

Of course there are phenomena which are observed but cannot be examined because man's resources for the present in science and technology are not adequate to examine them.

But those phenomena occurred objectively; the problem then in the impossibility of examining through digging into a phenomenum inside out and upside down is interpreting it as to render it of mundane everyday contingency, like mass hallucination.

In the case of people who believe in miracles, that is also an interpretation; for people who don't, at most they could admit if they care that the phenomena were unusual, exceptional, extraordinary.

The laugh test is also an interpretation approach.



Mdejess

judge

I don't know if this is a miracle, http://iidb.infidels.org/vbb/showthr...77#post5272477
Not real explaination how this could happen. :huh:

Was there something wrong with the research?

Keith&Co.

I'm not sure if i am understanding this statement.

You're criticizing debunkers for not debunking apparent miracles they were not able to overhaul and find the 'bunk' in. WHich actually seems like the right way to respond to something you haven't been able to investigate.

Then, you seem to be saying that it's not the silence you're criticizing, it's the fact that they have a bias to interpret 'objectively occuring phenomena' as being of mundane origin? Is that about right?

First, i'd agree that if something happens, it happens. It may even be said to have happened objectively, although that seems redundant. Objectivity is removing bias and opinion. An actually occurring event seems the opposite of subjective, thus objective.
THe problem comes in getting an objective evaluation of that event. If the people that witness a 'miracle' are either biased towards or biased away from interpreting that miracle as a non-mundane event, then there isn't much in the way of objective evidence to evaluate, no matter what really happened.

However, if a group or our culture or our society has witnessed, filmed, investigated and recorded a number of strange events, and none has actually provided objective evidence of aliens, of the supernatural, of unicorns or of lesbian Republicans, then would it really be an objectionable 'bias' for investigators to refrain from attributing something to a classification that hasn't been shown to really exist?

I mean, should we really call something the work of aliens before we know that there are aliens? WOuldn't it be preferable to find the aliens first, then suss out their characteristics, THEN evaluate the posited alien workings to see if they match what we know about them?
Such as, if most crop circles go clockwise, but the Drazi have a religous phobia about clockwise motion in non-fruit-bearing vegetation, then we could more easily dismiss claims that the Drazi were in a certain field, knocking down the wheat, on a given night.

beero1000

what research? if you follow the links you get to a You Can Know The Future TOO kook website with the quote, but no references. (and a link to the Bereitschaftspotential wiki page.) after an extensive google search, I have yet to find anything about it from any respectable source. I suspect that its made up.

dr lazer blast

did you read the whole article?

Please read the whole article teams of scientists have been investigating this miracle since the 1600

Diogenes the Cynic

The article is simply incorrect and whiny. It tries to argue by nothing but baseless assertion that mass hysteria, etc. should be ruled out, but nothing rules out mass hysteria, mass hallucination, suggestion, simple lying or (most probably) a combination of all those factors. What we know for sure is that the sun didn't move. The phenomenon exists only of people claiming they saw something. We can definitively prove that what they claimed to have seen didn't happen, therefore all that needs to be explained is why they said it, and for that there is no shortage of explanations. The article claims a lack of "any known scientific causative factor." A "causative factor" for WHAT? There certainly are scientific explanations for why people would laim they saw the sun move, or even believe it. None of those explanations have been disproven and all are preferable to magic. Even the "miraculous" explanation amounts to nothing more than a claim that God made people hallucinate.

No, they've been investigating (allegedly) a particular set of relics which may be comprised of human heat tissue. There is nothing miraculous about somebody saving human heart tissue and fake relics were extremely common in the medievel period. The alleged "miracle" is that these particular relics wre magically transformed from bread into flesh, and for that there isn't the slightest evidence, nor is any investigation possible. All the examonation of the relics themselves is completely irrelevant. prove they used to be bread. That's the relevant claim.

By the way, the comparison to the Shroud of Turin is ridiculous, given that the Shroud is a proven fake.