Now you got to go work! it can be also given as a nice gift to your friends, relatives, boyfriend or girlfriend. She deteriorated over a period of many years, several operations, many hospitalizations," Strobel explained. But anyway, all healing is temporary because sooner or later we're gonna die unless the Lord comes back before then. Scott Rae: When we meet the Lord face to face. What problems are you interested in? This is incredibly compelling stuff. Plus these were not from people who burned child witches or anything like that. It's part of the lowering of the standards of evidence. So her initial eyesight is 7/200, quite poor. such profound challenges across so many fronts, I felt an obligation to answer The conventional wisdom that we hear kind of over and over again is that the prevalence of miraculous activity, is much more the developing world than it is in the west. But in this case, he had to have the medical documentation be he'd been on disability. I don't think "I don't know" should be your default position unless that's really where you fall and so what I encourage people to do is read all sides, make an inference to the best explanation and go "this is what i think is most likely the case". it's hard to trust someone who says things like this, when we know that the measurement afterward was 20/100 -- far from perfect. Couldn't the medical records have been earlier?) Pharmaceutical companies don't complain about these steps, they just do the work. I'm your host, Scott Rae, Dean of Faculty and Professor of Christian Ethics at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. Why not? So if I'm dealing with historic, historiographic questions, historical reliability questions, I needed to deal with the issue of whether these kinds of things could happen. Barbaras impact on this university has been so broad and deep that we will not understand the full extent of her legacy for years and perhaps decades to come, Wyant said. One can have compelling evidence even when a case could be rendered stronger with even more evidence. I mean I tried to get accounts from all sorts of different cultures. He has served in a variety of teaching and leadership roles, including a term as president of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2015. The opportunity to serve as Case I mean I can explain theologically the already not yet of the Kingdom why it doesn't happen to everybody, but why this one and not that one? Now that also put me through some struggles because we were already close friends at that point. Dr. Craig Keener holds the F.M. [3] Before Snyder became president of CWRU in July 2007, she was formerly the executive vice president and provost of Ohio State University. What is being missed here is it shouldn't matter what the skeptic says -- the evidence should be strong enough to convince the skeptic. It's amazing that this kind of study convinces anyone -- it violates pretty much every rule of good medicine with its multiple selection biases, lack of blinding, and lack of controls. I don't understand how it's possible for both those things to be true. This one is obviously ludicrous, but I think undermines the theists claims quite a lot. Elijah: they can verify that before and afterwards and i'm not sure it's rational to call those uh uh just coincidences like you're assuming some type of causality there um and i i think if you even allow for the possibility of something like the christian god to exist then um you've got to take seriously that it could be his action and then make an inference to the best explanation and where i think the voice of science comes in the best is in eliminating hypotheses not necessarily proving that's his voice and so you can go back and go well there's seven different hypotheses science can help us before eliminating some and then we've got two or three and we've got to critically think and go what do i think's most likely the case and i think that's the human situation and we make that call all the time we make it in court. Barbara Rook "Babs" Snyder is an American academic and president of the Association of American Universities. I mean Grant still prayed for healing all his life. I mean it's only a fraction of what's out there, but there was a Pew Forum Study done in, I think, 2006 of Pentecostals and Charismatics in 10 countries that concluded Well if you look at the percentages of Pentecostals and Charismatics who claimed to have witnessed divine healing and then the hard numbers of those in those countries, it comes out to somewhere around 200 million people in those 10 countries alone, who claim to have witnessed are experienced divine healing. "So, we know that at least 450 Christians began praying for her, because they wrote letters saying, 'We're praying for you.'". Then a decade or so later, a replication study by Dr. William S. Harris and colleagues was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Were the results similar? This was a gold standard study of the effects of intercessory prayer on almost a thousand consecutively admitted coronary patients. Scott Rae: Yeah. So she basically pulls the tube out of her throat, says, Go find my parents [and] jumps out of bed.. And even after CPR is stopped, there is an observed phenomenon of spontaneous recovery of heart activity after as much as 15 minutes, and his recovered after 10 minutes. Thank you so much for having me. I, sometimes I'll joke it's obvious looking at me that healing doesn't always happen. View the profiles of people named Barbara Snyder. We know better now, and we often know what the minimum amount of data is to justify a particular claim. Well, yeah but could we be a bit more specific? READ ALSO: Columbine Survivor's Powerful Lessons After Facing Terror. I went over her solutions when she did , Skepticism and Dubious Medical Procedures. There may be a difference between the way they look at things now vs the way they looked at it at the time of the event -- which is perfectly explainable under naturalism. episode says, if i'm not mistaken the one that Herbert Benson conducted was that when they were trying to recruit people they were having trouble getting certain participants that all the protestant participants were from the unity school of christianity which actually doesn't believe in miracles and so you know they had a limit it's not the ideal way to conduct a prayer study, if there's a pattern like nine times out of ten where this happens it's in the context of prayer that that should say something again we we need a whole lot of a whole lot of cases to be able to to examine that. We also can't rule out that he was prayed for many many times in 16 years, and only at this particular time for some other reason he recovered. Even for much more modest claims than the ones made in the above discussions, randomized-controlled studies are the gold standard. So even when, you know it doesn't happen to all of us. Her feet and fingers were suddenly straight and normal again. I use some basic principles. The theists seem unwilling to do the work and want a pass anyway. aliens, homeopathy). The timeline of the events from the paper is. Well she couldn't walk. Scott Rae: Okay. But at a time when higher education itself faces He died of stomach cancer at a, I think what was he? President Barbara R. Snyder announced today that she will become the next leader of the organization that represents the 63 leading research universities in the U.S., as well as two in Canada. Craig thanks so much for being with us. So they investigated him for fraud. Note that the STEP study mentioned below is, Let me start by saying that there have been gold standard studies before and after STEP that reached the opposite conclusion: that the group receiving prayer had better outcomes, she said. And I talked with two of her doctors from the time and they both testified, "Yes, this is, there's no medical explanation for this." Certainly months in the case of severe atrophy over the course of years. However, after analyzing several miracles Strobel is convinced they are. She did it. It is justified to demand better evidence, because we do that for even more modest claims, and we have centuries of data on the failings of human reasoning in inferring causes from effects. It's been shown that there is a high survival rate for patients with their heart rhythm responds to shocks. And again, the group that received prayer had better outcomes than the control group. (p. 127). Craig Keener: Yes. Synder's miraculous healing, which unfolded more than 30 years ago, was apparently so shocking that even her doctors have written about her seemingly impossible medical turnaround. After a quick intro, the episode plays in full. Keener: what is specific about that data that suggests it isn't just a fluke you know one of those one in a million things that just happens sometimes yeah anomalies occur so it's important to look for an accumulation of anomalies so you don't just have what could be a coincidence. She wanted to be with her family even though there was a war going on. Elijah: I think this: the fact that there are fake miracles does not preclude the fact that there can be real miracles. You just wonder how legitimate are these miracle claims in the 21st century? Strobel said. For more information about our use of cookies, our collection, use, and disclosure of personal information generally, and any rights you may have to access, delete, or opt out of the sale of your personal information, please view our Privacy Policy. Barbara Snyder arrived at a achievements during Snyders tenure include: Association of American Universities (AAU), Maltz Center donors, performers celebrate Phase II, School of Medicine graduate program information tabling event, Summer study abroad with CWRU faculty information session, New study reveals ketamine could be effective treatment for cocaine-use disorders, Get to know members of the National Pan-Hellenic Council at CWRU: Week 3, Begun with a $1 billion goal, it ultimately raised. I just was trying to write a footnote for my Acts Commentary because one of the arguments against the reliability of Acts, you know, one fifth of Acts or one third of Mark roughly, deal with miracles. You've done tremendous work on it that is a huge benefit to the Kingdom, not only with your technical biblical scholarship, but with this incredible stuff you've done on miracles. Just to have the words "inference to the best explanation" that legitimizes the inference that you're making rather than actually being able to use inference to the best explanation. James is right that the evidence on a lot of these cases is really really bad. Further, the world is complex and any given effect can have many different possible causes, especially if we are talking about biological systems. The latter has more eyewitness testimony than we have for Barbara Snyder. Subsequent medical records document repeated substantial improvement. James rightly points out that the most these people ever seem to provide is: The timeline definitely matters, especially if you're claiming a causal relationship. And they said, "Macular degeneration doesn't undegenerate." Read Barbara's Blog for blog posts and speeches from the Presidenton prominent and emerging issues facing research universities and the broader higher education community. Prior to that, she served as president of Case Western Reserve University from 2007 to 2020, where she encouraged interdisciplinary excellence, catalyzed institutional collaboration, and reinvigorated alumni engagement and fundraising. Do you have a testimony that is medically verified?. False reporting? And of course there's no way to test medically because there was no medic op available. It was from a different Congo so the person who did that doesn't know their geography. Craig Keener: Yeah. We had to cut 45% of it to make it as short as it was, but then again, I'm not known for writing short books. He says, he's going back to these passages about the coming of the [inaudible] and saying, "John, these are signs of the Kingdom right now." Quoting myself here (from this post). "It was really the miracle of the resurrection and the historical evidence for that that ended up bringing me to faith many years ago," Strobel told Pure Flix Insider and "The Billy Hallowell Podcast." The fact that the best theists can come up with are so readily handled should be a caution to anyone trusting their claims. In my discussion with Jonathan McLatchie on the Still Unbelievable podcast, I said that there hasnt been a verified miracle claim even since Humes essay on miracles. "This male voice coming from the corner of the room where nobody was said, 'Get up, my child, and walk,'" Strobel recounted. partnerships that have drawn national acclaim. Craig Keener: Yes. By signing up to the Blaze News newsletter you agree to receive electronic communications from Blaze Media that may sometimes include advertisements or sponsored content. And why aren't there miracle claims of people spontaneously generating electricity? 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