Msg Base:  AREA 3  - ASK FATHER (AMDG)
  Msg No: 5.  Sun  7-12-92  9:35  (NO KILL)
    From: Father Mateo
      To: Mark Haydon
 Subject: Scientific investigation of mi

³ I am confused regarding the use of science to validate a miracle. Can
³ something be validated by determining that there is no adequate
³ explanation given current understanding of the problem. This seems to be
³ proof by the absence of proof.
³
 
Dear Mark,
 
You yourself have just performed a miracle inexplicable by natural
causes: you have made Father Mateo into Monsignor Mateo.  I shall go
right to be fitted for my purple cassock.  Thanks!
 
 Kenneth Woodward, religion editor of Newsweek magazine, has written a
book entitled "Making Saints" (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1990. ISBN 0-671-64246-4). You would enjoy reading his pages 76,
194-201, 205, 208-9.
 
There you will find a report of a lively discussion going on in Rome
among theologians and medical specialists about your question and
related issues.
 
Mark, I am not a scientist, nor yet a theologian. But I think
problems arise from too abstract a consideration of healings.  I
think a Christian should first of all begin with the record of the
miracles of Jesus, whether these are healings (as in the case of
Peter's mother-in-law) or other interventions in nature (the
multiplication of loaves, Peter's walking on water, the raising of
Lazarus dead four days, et al.)
 
Then the promise of Christ that the mission of the Church
would always be accompanied by miracles (Mark 16:17-18), which is to
be expected because the Church is Christ's continuing presence in the
world.
 
The examination of actual cases of healing is also illuminating. We
should not begin our study with principles and syllogisms, but with
facts. For example, here's a face utterly ravaged by lupus, oozing
pus and blood. That's in the evening. Prayer and blessing  happen.
Next morning, the patient shows no sign of disease, none. The doctors
watching the case are asked "Natural? or naturally inexplicable?"
 
Doctors are never asked, "Is this cure a miracle?" Miracles are
interventions of God's power and God's power is not a datum of
medical science. But if the doctors say "Naturally inexplicable,"
then the Church may choose to accept the cure as a miracle, and as an
evidence of the holiness of the Saint to whom the patient or her
friends have prayed.
 
I see no problem about "proof by absence of proof".  This is the
"argument from silence" in a medical context. And it is a perfectly
valid argument. Let us say archeologists, digging down and down as
they do, find in some Greek site remains of Egyptian pottery at the
level of 6th to 4th century B.C. Then at a lower level 9th to 7th
century B.C., they find no such pottery.  But they begin to find it
again in the the level 11th and 10th centuries B.C. One concludes
that there WAS Egyptian-Greek trade in the centuries when pottery was
found, but no such trade where the pottery is absent.  You can use
the argument from silence, then,  perhaps to date other occurrences of
the same period in Greece and Egypt that interest you.
 
(By the way, this is an armchair discussion here from something I
remember from college.  I've probably got the centuries wrong, and
maybe the pottery was found somewhere else, but I hope you get the
idea.)
 
God bless you, and thank you for using our service.
 
                                Sincerely in Christ,
 
                                        Father Mateo