The Problems of Examining Claims

Examining most claims can be an involved process, a fact not obvious to many who have never had to carry out such an operation. We need rules and standards that are based upon various qualities of the claims, which can vary in three important ways:1. complexity of the phenomenon2. size of the data base available3. strength and validity of the evidence. Let us treat each of these in turn. Concerning the complexity of the phenomenon we are examining: If we are testing the simple claim that 6 plus 4 always equals 10, we can demand that it always prove true. Any exception to this single requirement would, in this case, inarguably prove a miracle. However, this is obviously a claim of a very low order of complexity. Moving up the scale all the way to the phenomenon of a medical recovery, we begin to deal with an entirely different sort of entity. Medical recoveries are exceedingly complex matters, still imperfectly understood. A certain small percentage of “inexplicable” recoveries must be expected, and medical scientists are faced with them from time to time. These are referred to as “spontaneous remissions,” and are found—in various proportions—in many diseases. That brings us to the second quality of a claim, the amount of data available for examination. The larger the data base, the better the chance of a good investigation and the greater the strength of the conclusions that may be arrived at. But selecting a small number of “inexplicable” examples of any data base and proving a miracle by them is not an acceptable process. More important, going back to point No. 1, the higher the order of complexity of the examples examined in any investigation, the less valid is the process of “data selecting.” In medical recoveries, again, the order of complexity is very high, and therefore the data base must be suitably large and not “selected.” Third, the integrity of any investigation depends upon the qualifications of the witnesses. At the very least, they should be both unbiased and expert. In claims of medical miracles, the “recovered” people themselves are often the poorest witnesses simply because they have ample reason to want to believe they are healed, and they usually cannot judge their own conditions. Just “feeling better” may have nothing to do with recovery. Relief of symptoms is not a cure of the disease. In spite of all these caveats, I have been willing to accept just one case of a miracle cure so that I might say in this book that at least on one occasion a miracle has occurred. In order to be included here, that cure would have to have these qualities:(1) The disease must be not normally self-terminating. (2) The recovery must be complete. (3) The recovery must take place in the absence of any medical treatment that might normally be expected to affect the disease. (4) There must be adequate medical opinion that the disease was present before the application of whatever means were used to bring about the miracle. (5) There must be adequate medical opinion that the disease is not present after the application of whatever means were used to bring about the miracle.

I do not have the medical expertise to judge the claimed cures at Lourdes. And, because I am mainly concerned in this book with the examination of faith-healers rather than healing, I will refer readers to extensive studies already done on the Lourdes phenomena, which are listed in the bibliography. Also, I have found it more productive to investigate ongoing events, because the individuals and the claims are accessible and can be reduced to easily understood packets of data that a reader can examine and consider without extended expertise. There are two relatively recent claims that can be examined—with difficulty—and I will discuss them briefly here.