Miracles should be treated as corporate spin

EXPECT more assertions of miracles in the lead up to, and aftermath of, the canonisation of Mary MacKillop. Let’s hope we also have some rigorous debunking of this nonsense.

I used to think the Catholic Church should grow up and remove the requirement of two miracles before someone could be made a saint. But on second thoughts the more the whole show is revealed as ridiculous the better.

The early church did not have the requirement. It evolved during the 12th century when the church at the local level was beatifying and cannonising a little too readily.

In the 20th century Pope John Paul II created more saints and blesseds than all the other popes combined. That is still hogging it a bit even allowing for an almost doubling of the population in his 26 years as pope.

So under the Catholic view a lot more miracles have come to light in past 30 years or so, at the very time our scientific understanding of the world is supposed to be getting better. It seems odd but there is at least some explanation.

Pope John Paul II was a media star and the media loves a good miracle. You see, miracles are news. They appear to be out of the ordinary – the very definition of news.

Once you put things through the media lens which magnifies what is thought of as unusual and minimises the commonplace, of course, people’s idea of reality gets warped.

The pity is that so few journalists are versed in the scientific method or have much understanding of statistics or mathematics, so much of the miraculous twaddle is reported, instead of dismissed. And when it is reported it is often done so without much questioning.

The news should not be the asserted miracle, but that people still believe this tripe in the 21st century. Before the Enlightenment, Galileo, Newton and others like them, people had little choice but to take the supernatural explanation for events and phenomena. Now there should be no excuse.

Typically, the 20th and 21st century miracle comprises some desperately ill person suddenly recovering after friends or relatives prayed to the sainthood candidate.

The latest MacKillop claim was from a couple from Penola (where MacKillop set up her order). He recovered from severe heart disease which would usually have killed anyone else.

Usually cancer remission is put forward as a miracle.

According to the Catholic Encylopedia, “The wonder of the miracle is due to the fact that its cause is hidden, and an effect is expected other than what actually takes place.”

Now modern scientific method shows that deviation from the expected outcome for an individual is not miraculous. Far from it. Observation and probability theory tell us that for any given serious disease there will be a Bell curve of survivorship over. Some people will die early, most in the middle and some last a long time to die of something else.

For, say, pancreatic cancer 990 out of 1000 will die within 18 months; 10 will last more than a year. And one in 10,000 might have a spontaneous remission.

It means upon diagnosis a person can expect to be dead within 18 months. But if an individual gets a spontaneous remission, it is not a miracle. And not due to prayer. It is just that that person happens to be lucky enough to be the EXPECTED one in 10,000 who gets spontaneous remission.

Moreover, it is not miraculous that we do not know the reason for the remission. There is a lot about human physiology that we do not know. But we can expect to know more about it in the future.

One thing we do know is that as we understand more about medical science we are not going to find that prayer is going to be a critical factor in survival rates. What about the other 9999 people? Presumably many of their relatives prayed to MacKillop or some other sainthood candidate – but to no avail.

The catastrophic failure of prayer is shown by the fact that virtually everyone’s survival has been prayed for at some stage in their life, yet everybody dies.

And in any event, these people are presumably praying to the same all-powerful god gave the object of their prayers the cancer in the first place.

Similarly in Chile. People are giving thanks to god for sparing the miners – presumably the same “all-powerful” god who caused the mine to collapse in the first place.

But it was the skillful team than bored the tunnels got them out, not god.

The role of the media is crucial if we are to avoid the evils of engendering false hope, creating delusion and fatalism and of more importance, undermining the scientific method.

Journalists should be careful not to join the hype, but report treat the so-called miracles in the same way they would report and analyse spin from any large corporation, political party or pressure group.

But I don’t hold out a great deal of hope.

The letters columns and other places may well have frequent complaints about falling standards of literacy, particularly about word use, grammar and spelling. But at least it is usually deciperable and usually not misleading. And in any event are sometimes merely cases of language evolving.

Of greater concern are errors of logic and misinterpretation of figures. The principles of basic logic and statistics do not evolve. They are immutable. And if a journalist does not understand Bell curves and probability, of course, he or she will present the pancreatic cancer survivor as a miracle rather than as an occupant of the tail end of a Bell curve where at least a few people must inevitably occupy.

But miracle cures and emotive prayers are more newsworthy than Bell curves or applying simple tests of logic and science to what is reported.

The Adelaide Advertiser quoted the wife of the “miraculous” heart-attack survivor as saying: “Considering we live in Penola, it’s got to have something to do with Mary MacKillop.”

No. Her husband’s survival was do to the competence of his medical team and the fact that, in any given year, you would ordinarily expect one or two survivors of major heart attacks which would otherwise kill most people.

It had nothing at all to do with a long-dead nun who happened to set up a religious order in the town.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 15 October 2010.