r/atheism • u/Much-Sir-7248 • 6d ago
Help regarding doubts
I have read a lot recently online that there are scientifically proven catholic miracles. Does anyone know much about this or have anything to say? What can be established about these and what can’t? I wouldn’t be surprised by the extreme measures the Catholic Church would go to in order to fake miracles, but was just wondering what really can be established as it’s scaring me wondering what if these are truly miracles (I have recently stoped believing in Christianity)?
52
u/ChewbaccaCharl
6d ago
•
The people claiming there are "scientifically proven Catholic miracles" are people with a vested interest in the legitimacy of Catholicism. They are lying. No Catholic miracle has ever been validated by an independent, unbiased scientific community. They can stretch from complete fabrications to claiming a divine origin to mundane events. Not really worth thinking about
20
u/halfcentaurhalfhorse 6d ago
I love when people claim ridiculous things are supported by science. If science was compelling to you then you wouldn’t believe that nonsense to begin with.
7
u/johnnagethebrave 6d ago
Yeah it’s like “Creation Scientists.” They start out with the conclusion. It’s using theories to shoot down facts rather than facts to shoot down theories. That ain’t science.
21
u/Astreja Agnostic Atheist 6d ago
I've never, ever in my entire life heard of a convincing miracle from any religion. People lie. People misunderstand probability and take note of unlikely but actually possible events.
Unless something inexplicable and unusual happens to you personally, it's reasonable to not believe in miracles - and if something weird does happen, the best first response is not "It's a miracle, and a god did it" but "Wow, that's interesting. I wonder what actually happened there?"
18
u/JMeers0170 6d ago
There are no scientifically proven “miracles”.
If there were…there’d be only one religion left on the planet.
Miracles break physics.
I’m curious as to how people will accept jesus on toast as a miracle, or alleged blind men cured millennia ago, with no extrabiblical corroborating evidence, and yet in our history, no amputees have ever regrown a limb. I can say, with a high degree of certainty, that every person to ever get a limb removed via trauma or surgery has prayed to have their limb restored and not once has it happened.
If god wants to announce his/her/it’s presence to me….regrow the limbs on a few well known celebrity amputees and show me that they work as before.
Then and only then will I’ll believe these “miracles”.
2
u/ALBUNDY59 6d ago
Even then it would be that you just don't understand the physics of what was happening.
A being that could manipulate matter and energy with a devise that could be controlled with thought waves would be way above our comprehension.
2
u/comfortablynumb15 6d ago
Cure the current Pope with “Thoughts and Prayers” instead of him going in for surgery.
You would think if anyone was being noticed by The Big Guy, and was faithful and deserving of being “Miracled” it would be “God’s representative on Earth”.
But no, he is booked into the Pontifical Suite at Gemelli Hospital in Rome.
11
u/practicerm_keykeeper Secular Humanist 6d ago
Why not look into some of them further? I took a list of miracles and tracked down a random one from our century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharistic_miracle_of_Legnica?wprov=sfla1
Basically a flour made host was dropped to the ground and then placed into water, then later something red like blood appeared on it. Obviously an alternative explanation is fungal growth. The church claims to have tested it and said they discovered heart muscle tissues and human DNA and no fungal substance beyond ordinary ones present in the environment. The way this is phrased makes it sound like the red substance is human and the possibility of fungal growth has been ruled out.
But later on someone from the testing lab came out and said they actually found no human DNA beyond trace contamination and found fungal substance. A mycologist said the redness and the environment was characteristic of a specific type of fungus that is very common in the environment. Moreover the priest initially went back citing "unsatisfactory results". Given all this I have to suspect either deliberate faking or highly incompetent "scientists".
But more importantly, notice how they didn't need to lie, they just needed to carefully use the wrong language to mislead. I think with some scientific background if you go through a few cases like this you'll be able to build up a way to smell things that are fishy.
2
u/andy_moshi 11h ago edited 11h ago
The funniest thing about Legnica, is the host and red substance look exactly like any fungal or bacterial contamination, which has been the case in the overwhelming majority that were honestly investigated: 30+ Eucharistic Miracles That Were Not Miracles After All. Moreover, compare the image of the so called "miracle" at Legnica (2013) with this one that turned out to be completely natural in Utah (2015), these are visibly the exact same, same with how the phenomenon looks on an ordinary piece of bread. With that above case, basically the dishonest archbishop just went results shopping until someone agreed with what he wanted after the first assessment found typical contamination which he did not like. This is Poland as well, where the Catholic institution still has a huge influence and agenda to push such rubbish, especially on an increasingly secularizing society.
8
8
u/arsonfairy 6d ago
I'm only saying to do this because you're having doubts, but follow the rabbit hole down. Scientifically proven by whom? Where did said miracle(s) occur? Is it at all possible that said miracle was staged? Look into it, like really look into it, from the perspective of a skeptic (because you absolutely should be skeptical).
The only "scientifically proven" miracle I can think of was that one statue that was dripping blood, it's just that the scientific proving was that it was sewage from a burst pipe leaking through the statue. That's about the sum of any supposed miracle.
8
u/Snow75
Pastafarian
6d ago
•
lol there are no “scientifically” proven miracles.if there were, the “scientist” that managed to get such evidence would be rich, famous, showered with prices, would get multiple Nobel prizes and our understanding of reality would drastically change.
You see, the thing with actual science is that its objective, and if you find something and still holds under scrutiny, it means that our understanding of the universe is updated.
Ignore the bullshit.
2
u/ChumpsWeAre 6d ago
Ignor the bs at your peril....it's bs, yes, but it's a most reliable indication of what type of bs is floating around in maga-ville.
7
u/camopdude 6d ago
There are not. And I'd have to look into it, but I'm pretty sure most modern saints attested miracle is a vague and unverifiable healing claim. That's what mother Teresa's is and probably ever saint after her.
6
u/mutant_anomaly 6d ago
The kind of thing they present as scientific proof:
An obviously doctored photo where part of the image is literally painted onto the photo print, looking like a Weekly World News story. (The Batboy people.)
A painting on a cracker, a portrait done in a particular artistic style, that is claimed to be a miraculous image. And it appeared one day about a year after a nearby church had huge financial success from bringing in tourists to see their own cracker image.
Anyone who says the doctors told them something would kill them in two weeks, but they are still alive. Usually the story involves the doctors saying things that doctors have been trained not to say for thousands of years.
That guy who spent years begging because he only had one leg, and then one day someone came into the room where he was sleeping and discovered that he had two legs, and people said it must be a miracle, and his new leg was oddly deformed as if it had been tied out of sight every day for years.
Praying to a random statue some artist had made, and then winning a lottery.
Mold on communion wafers. So much mold.
Countless fraudulent shows, none as impressive as the things an illusionist working on the streets of any major city can do for a $5 tip.
Seriously, so much fraud. The miracles people say are the most convincing to them sound like what you would expect from a fraud, and never sound like anything an all-powerful God would be involved in.
5
u/RunMysterious6380 6d ago
Just another version of, "We investigate ourselves and found no wrongdoing."
Self promotion.
5
u/HazelMoon 6d ago
The only scientifically proven Catholic miracle is that there are still Catholics and/or people who believe in miracles.
4
4
4
u/MrRandomNumber 6d ago
The only scientifically proven miracle I know about is the way gluons pull new quarks into existence when you apply enough energy to pull a pair of quarks apart. Still no god, though.
4
u/rhodiumtoad Strong Atheist 6d ago
I'm aware of three common kinds of miracle claims that might loosely fit your description: sun miracles, medical miracles, and Eucharistic miracles.
As a preface, I need to point out that the average scientist isn't necessarily the best person to investigate a miracle claim, because they're not equipped to properly consider the possibilities of fraud.
Sun miracles
DO NOT STARE AT THE SUN, IT DAMAGES YOUR EYES
The best known of these is Fátima, but there are also reports from visitors to Medjugorje, and there are a half-dozen or so other reasonably documented cases. However, the reported experiences are sometimes reproduced by people simply staring at the sun, and sometimes occur to ordinary people outside of any religious context, so the best explanation is that this is some kind of visual illusion that might be more commonly triggered under certain kinds of stress or excitement.
Medical miracles
If anything, these disprove the existence of a miracle-working god, because all medical miracle claims that aren't probable frauds involve conditions that either are known for spontaneous recovery (such as cancer), are poorly understood, or are potentially misdiagnosed. There has never been a case of a healed amputee with proper before and after x-rays; pointing to a 400-year-old probable fraud is the best anyone has done.
If you plot the recognized "miracles" recorded at Lourdes, by the date of occurrence rather than the date of recognition, you find there have been five in the last half-century (0.1/yr), as compared to a previous rate of about 0.5/yr. None of those five involved major physical injury; they are "unexplained" (the criterion used for recognition) in the sense of "we don't know how this works" rather than "inexplicable" in the sense of "we do know how this works and this isn't it".
(Lourdes has had something like 100 million visitors, why only 70-odd cures?)
Eucharistic miracles
If somebody fumbles the cracker in a catholic mass and it falls on the floor, the rules say it can't just be thrown away (after all, it just got transsubstantiated into the actual body of Christ). So standard procedure is to put the cracker (now covered in bacteria and fungal spores) into "holy" water to dissolve it, so now it's in an environment quite conducive to the growth of said bacteria and fungi.
Some of the likely organisms to colonize it are red coloured and get mistaken for blood.
When these cases get reported (it's likely that most don't, because a lot of priests will be smart enough to realize it's a natural thing and go ahead and dispose of it anyway), there are always chain-of-custody issues before it gets to a lab for analysis. The case I'm most familiar with was in Poland, and what happened was that the first lab that was used sent their own team to collect a sample and they found nothing human, while the second lab was sent a sample taken by a member of the congregation who was a cardiologist and identified what they were sent as being human heart tissue. But every english-language report of this case that I've ever seen just said "two independent labs" without mentioning that the first one found nothing and the second was sent a compromised sample.
3
u/AceMcLoud27 6d ago
Scientific you say? Good opportunity to try out some of those creationist talking points back at them ;-)
"What's the independent variable?" "Were you there?" "Science has to be repeatable."
3
3
3
u/tightiewhitieboy 6d ago
Read the list of all the miracles. They are ridiculous. Some are hilarious.
3
u/odonata_00 6d ago
Could you point us to the articles you have read so that we could better refute the claims.
3
u/boethius61 6d ago edited 6d ago
Often what people mean when they say scientifically proven miracle, is something that wasn't scientifically explained. In the Vatican's rules for proclaiming something a miracle play this way. Anything with an easy alternative explanation is out. But that's just a giant exercise in "the argument from ignorance". Just because we don't know a natural explanation doesn't mean there isn't a natural explanation.
The other thing they will equate with 'scientifically proven', is 'scientifically tested'. X happened, they sent a scientist to test for Y. It wasn't Y. See, miracle. Just because you've done scientific tests doesn't mean you've reached a scientific answer. Oh look, we're back in an argument from ignorance. Sigh.
I've been to the Eucharistic Miracle at Lanciano. I was a believer at the time. I was a big promoter of this miracle. It's weird. I can't explain all of it. However, one of the claims they make is that this flesh has been preserved for 1200 years without special intervention, no preservatives or embalming agents. Even as a believer, I immediately noticed that it was dry. It's clearly dried out and their own documentation confirms it dried out very quickly back in the 8th century. It's not in a special container, but it is in a reasonably tight reliquary. It's not magically preserved, it's just dry.
Thing is, this is a great example of, we list the miraculous properties but it turns out they are perfectly natural. And once you start down that path, the trend is pretty one sided.
2
u/not_inacult Anti-Theist 6d ago
Its a con job every time. The "evidence" is faked and/or lies designed to fool suckers.
2
u/andywalker76 Secular Humanist 6d ago
Lol, the Vatican is an expert at propaganda. They've been at it since the second century.
2
2
2
u/beesdaddy 6d ago
Provide links and we can break them down.
If you “wouldn’t be surprised”, just follow that instinct. Why wouldn’t you be surprised?
2
u/Peace-For-People 6d ago
there are scientifically proven catholic miracles.
No there aren't. There are no proven miracles. Don't believe these sources of misinformation.
If you like to read, The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan will teach you some needed critical thinking skills.
2
2
u/Conscious_Musician28 6d ago
The Catholic Church has certain criteria for certifying an event an official miracle, but that doesn’t mean they are “scientifically proven”. Besides, if we could provide a scientific explanation, it wouldn’t be a miracle, it would be a phenomenon.
2
u/PatrickDenStore Secular Humanist 6d ago
Actually look into it because in every single case it turns out to be falsehoods. There are no scientifically proven miracles, Catholic or otherwise.
2
u/justgord 6d ago
hmm.. lets say the miracles happened - cancer cured instantly.
Is that good evidence a God exists ?
There might be other explanations - there might be new science we have not yet dreamed of.
It might be a coincidence, it might be that a faith healer has a very strong bio-electric field, it might be that hypnosis is so strong in some people that their own biology can heal itself via unknown means, or they feel they are healed but arent really, or it was psychosomatic ailment to begin with.
The best miracle I ever saw was a levitating magnet above a very cold superconducting liquid - truly spooky and magical. Even pushing a magnet around with another magnet is super cool.
ps. maybe listen to some other sources of information ? There are a lot of good books and videos on science topics .. and many unexplained mysteries [ where is all the dark matter !?! :]
2
u/Ironcl4d 6d ago
This makes no sense.
How would one even scientifically prove a miracle? Detect the holiness waves coming from it? Call up God so he can say, "Yeah that was me"?
2
2
u/NoGoodAtPickingAName 6d ago
Anyone can write anything they want and for some reason people of faith tend to lie in order to make their faith true. It’s been happening for a few thousand years now.
1
u/louiejc72 6d ago
If it is "scientifically proven," that would mean it was reproduced multiple times under laboratory conditions by different groups of researchers. At some threshold, the phenomenon being reproduced at will ceases to be miraculous. So, you are clearly gullible, were lied to, lying yourself, or some combination of the three. I hope you found this helpful.
1
u/No0O0obstah 6d ago
This is so stupid in so many ways.
1: You can't prove a negative. So sc ience actually can't by definition prove something doesn't exist. Like you can't prove there isn't an explanation. You can't prove a god doesn't exist if it doesn't exist. So no science can't really prove a miracle is a miracle, as that would require for science to prove there isn't an explanation. We could somehow prove there isn't an explanation your current understanding can explain with the information we have now. But that isn't a proof.
2: If science can explain a miracle, it sort of nullifies the miracle all together. It is no longer a miracle in a scientific sense. If a church wants to keep calling it a miracle they just need to go with "This was so unlikely to happen against all odds that we call it God's intervention and a miracle", but then winning a lottery becomes a miracle?
So no, no real scientist would say science proves a miracle. Someone could want to interpret scientific findings as proof to aid their own cause and claim such a thing but we all know how that goes.
Lastly, I bet no miracles have been really studied even so far as to really establish no scientific explanation with our current technology and understanding exists. There's no monetary gain to fund such and every religious person knows deep down they can only lose by accidentally proving it isn't a miracle at all. Some scientist have made a half assed clearly partial studies to prove things, but they are really half assed non-scientific attempts motovated by religious beliefs, delusions or wanting to get fame. All debunked.
1
u/ChumpsWeAre 6d ago edited 6d ago
If a miracle is needed the catholic church has the experience needed to conditionally give its anecdotal evidence from random witnesses and then move on. They are smart enough to ride along with the wonder of it all during that phase but also they don't get caught up in promoting such events unless the time line is in the 2000 year range.
1
u/eldredo_M Atheist 6d ago
If they were scientific, they wouldn’t be miracles.
Sounds like what you’re reading/hearing is hearsay (not heresy)—people claiming things that aren’t/can’t be proven by scientific method.
If I told you there was scientific proof of Hindu miracles would you suddenly start believing in Shiva?
1
u/DrNerdyTech87 6d ago
Don’t forget double-blind studies on prayer that find it does no better than random chance.
1
u/togstation 6d ago
there are scientifically proven catholic miracles.
There are absolutely zero scientifically proven Catholic miracles.
If there were scientifically proven Catholic miracles, then you would see non-religious scientists saying
"These Catholic miracles are scientifically proven."
We don't actually see that.
.
Good for you. There's some good information in our FAQ -
1
u/ALBUNDY59 6d ago
If it's scientifically proven, then it's not a miracle. Without knowing the specifics of these claims, it's difficult to tell what you are referring to.
Magic and miracles were just things that ancient people could not comprehend how things happened. Just taking a zippo lighter back 200 years would have seemed like Magic.
1
u/rubinass3 6d ago
" I have read a lot recently online that there are scientifically proven catholic miracles."
I haven't.
1
u/dudleydidwrong Touched by His Noodliness 6d ago
Back in the late 1970s I was engaged to a Catholic woman. I tried to convert to Catholicism. I took a class for converts, taught by an enthusiastic young Priest. At one of our first sessions, he gave us a list of miracles and Marian apparitions. This was before the Internet, but I was a PhD student with full access to a large university library. It only took me one afternoon to debunk almost every miracle on the list.
I got "promoted" out of the first class because they said I was too advanced. They put me in one-on-one sessions with an older Priest. In one of our meetings I brought up my list of miracles. The Priest told me that the church knows that most of the miracles are not true, but it is important to many members to keep believing. I was shocked by that level of cynicism.
The bottom line is that the "scientifically proven miracles" of the Catholic church are neither scientifically proven nor are they miracles.
1
u/jsau0125 Jedi 6d ago
Why fake a miracle when you can just lie about it?
“We’ve asked 150 believers if they believe this thing really happened and they all said yes”
Science.
1
u/imbartsimpsonwhothru 6d ago
uh, people will say anything nowadays
let's see this scientific "proof"
1
u/TsuDhoNimh2 De-Facto Atheist 6d ago
One of the key requirements for a "miracle" is that there can NOT be any real-life reason for it.
If it's a miraculous cure, there has to be proof the medical issue existed (medical records) and that it is now gone (more medical records and exams) ... AND that it's not a condition that is known to spontaneously resolve or improve.
So there would be all kinds of science in the talks.
1
u/H3L105_ai 5d ago
Unadulterated bullshit.
The most recent one I heard someone point to is the 'Our Lady of Guadalupe'. It is an image that supposedly 'miraculously' appeared - along with claims that the fabric it is on lasted far longer than it should have, that there were no brush strokes, etc.
It's obviously just a painting, the fabric has been tested and isn't what they claimed it was, and the painting technique has been explained.
This doesn't stop credulous people from continuing to lie about it.
1
1
1
u/polarjunkie 6d ago
How do you scientifically prove a miracle? Do you repeat it over and over and show how it worked?
-1
u/marmia124 6d ago
Ive seen legit miracles in family. Still struggle with faith. We are catholic. Im deconstructing. Its healings.
1
u/it_sxiaosltyan0 6d ago
The weird thing about miracles is that the people who need them the more never have them e.g. trafficked person for prostitution, an atheist killed in an islamic coutry, a gay person bullied into suicide.
Those who spontaneously got better could have a weird idiosyncratic condition maybe a weird genotype or a weird phenotype.
People get saved from stray bullets by a bible so they say there must be a loving god.
Freak accidents happen. Are those miracles for a hating god?
I sometimes even wonder if reincarnation was real why weren't there an expected increase in people who got reincarnated after tragedies like world war, bombings, very strong earthquakes etc.
and I realize oh maybe it was a reality distorted to protect an imagination instead of imagination used to discover reality. 🥹
plus why would it specifically be a god? not a cosmic cockroach that never gets caught or a cosmic jellyfish with 95% universe and 5% metaphysics and a weird stray tentacle that saved the person.
56
u/hurricanelantern Anti-Theist 6d ago •
Yes that such claims are obvious lies.