Category: Catholicism

Douthat again—in The New Yorker

February 27, 2025 • 10:30 am

I swear, NYT columnist Ross Douthat must have a huge publicity machine, because his latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is appearing everywhere, usually as excerpts.  The point of the book is to assert that religion’s decline in America is slowing, and that readers having a “God-shaped hole,” denoting a lack of religious meaning in their lives, should not just become religious, but become Christian. (Douthat thinks that Catholicism is the “right” religion, and of course he happens to be Catholic).

And by “believe,” Douthat doesn’t just mean adhering to a watered-down form of Christianity that sees the New Testament as a series of metaphors. No, he really believes the tenets of his faith, including the miracles of Jesus, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and the existence of Satan and the afterlife. (See my posts on this delusional book here.) It is a sign of the times that this book, which calls for people to embrace claims that are palpably ridiculous and totally unevidenced—unless you take the New Testament literally, which you can’t because it’s wrong and self-contradictory—is getting not only wide press, but approbation.  Even the New Yorker summary and review of the book, which you can read by clicking below (the screenshot links to the archived version here) is pretty mild in its criticism. Author Rothman is a nonbeliever, and gives good responses to Douthat’s “evidence” for God, but at the end says the he “respects [Douthat’s effort to persuade.”  What does that mean? He respects Douthat’s efforts to proselytize people with a divisive and harmful faith, and to believe stuff without evidence? Well, the New Yorker has always been a bit soft on faith (despite the fact that most of its writers are atheists), because some of their rich and educated readers have “belief in belief”.

Rothman’s summary of the book (his words are indented):

“Believe” is different: in it, Douthat proselytizes. His intended readers aren’t dyed-in-the-wool skeptics of the Richard Dawkins variety, who find religion intellectually absurd. His main goal is to reach people who are curious about faith, or who are “spiritual” but not religious. (According to some surveys, as many as a third of Americans see themselves this way.) If you’re in this camp, you might have a general sense of the mystical ineffability of existence, or believe that there’s more to it than science can describe. You might be agnostic, or even an atheist, while also feeling that religion’s rituals, rhythms, and attitudes can enrich life and connect you to others; that its practices draw our attention to what really matters. At the same time, you might not be able to accept the idea that Jesus actually rose again on the third day.

But Douthat needs to persuade the audience that yes, Jesus rose like a loaf of bread, and more:

Douthat argues that you should be religious because religion, as traditionally conceived, is true; in fact, it’s not just true but commonsensical, despite the rise of science. His most surprising, and perhaps reckless, assertion is that scientific progress has actually increased the chances that “religious perspectives are closer to the truth than purely secular worldviews.”

From what I’ve read here and elsewhere, Douthat has two main arguments for religion. The Argument from Increasing God of the Gaps, and the Argument from Personal Experience.

In “Believe,” Douthat rebels against these attempts to adjust the scale of God; he resists both the minimizing God-of-the-gaps approach and the maximizing abstraction proposed by thinkers like Armstrong and Tillich. First of all, he maintains that the gaps are actually widening: from a survey of speculative ideas in physics, neuroscience, and biology, he draws the conclusion that a “convergence of different forms of evidence” actively points toward the existence of a traditional God. Second, he argues that, even in our supposedly secular world, it’s still eminently reasonable to believe in a supernatural God who reaches down to Earth and affects our lives. David Hume, the eighteenth-century philosopher known for his pursuit of empiricism, predicted that, as the world grew more rational and scientific, people would stop having supernatural experiences, which he thought more common among “ignorant and barbarous nations.” Douthat points out that this hasn’t happened. [JAC: No data are given, however, about any decrease over time.] About a third of Americans “claim to have experienced or witnessed a miraculous healing,” he notes, and regular people continue to have mystical experiences of various kinds. (A 2023 survey conducted by Pew Research found that nearly four in ten respondents believed that the dead can communicate with the living.) Religious experience is a “brute fact,” Douthat writes, shared among billions of people, and its “mysteries constantly cry out for interpretation” just as they always have.

Miraculous healing? Talk to me when an amputee regrows a leg, or someone without eyes regains the ability to see. Why can’t God cure ailments that medicine is impotent to cure?

I’ve discussed some of the God of the Gaps arguments made by Douthat, the two most prominent being the “fine-tuning” argument (the physical parameters of the universe were cleverly adjusted to allow our existence) and the consciousness of humans, which Douthat says cannot be explained by science.  Rothman is good at refuting both in brief responses, and I’ll let you read what he wrote. Plus remember that animals like dogs, cats, squirrels, and other primates also appear to be conscious (of course we can’t prove that), but are these other creatures made in God’s image, too?  Rothman makes a good point here:

Throughout “Believe,” the implication is that work at the frontiers of science has increased the amount of mystery in the world by uncovering impenetrable unknowns. But this is misleading. Science has vastly expanded our understanding of how things work, reducing mystery; along the way, it has inevitably shifted the landscape of our ignorance, sometimes drastically. This new landscape can feel unfamiliar; strangeness comes with the territory. But just because we don’t understand something, it doesn’t mean that we face the ultimately mysterious; we’re probably still dealing with the ordinary, earthly unknown. And if science really does hit a hard limit in certain areas, or if it discovers questions that our minds are simply unequipped to answer—what would that show? Only that we don’t know everything. The likely possibility that omnipotence is beyond us in no way suggests that our intuitive religious revelations are correct. If anything, it suggests the opposite.

That of course is the usual argument against “The Argument for God from Ignorance”: throughout history, one baffling phenomenon after another imputed to God has later been found out to be purely naturalistic (lightning, disease, epilepsy, eclipses, and so on).

The single argument by Douthat that Rothman finds somewhat persuasive is that lots of people have had religious or spiritual experiences. Why are they so common unless they’re showing us the presence of a supernatural being?

At any rate, the version of me that exists today found Douthat’s case for faith unpersuasive. But I still enjoyed “Believe,” and found myself challenged by it. Douthat is right to call attention to the “brute fact” of religious experience, which apparently remains pervasive in a supposedly secular age. In 2006, an editorial in Slate argued that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism indicated a kind of mental weakness on his part—his apparent belief in its more outlandish tenets, Jacob Weisberg wrote, revealed in Romney “a basic failure to think for himself or see the world as it is.” But if lots of people have experiences of the supernatural, then can belief in it really be understood, tout court, as proof of their fundamental irrationality? What about the award-winning journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who, in her book “Living with a Wild God,” described a “furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once”? In her classic “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” she certainly saw the world as it was.

Well, many of us atheists, including me, have had spiritual experiences, though not religious ones.  I remember sleeping out in Death Valley, looking up at the fantastic display of stars unsullied by nearby human lights, and feeling drawn out of myself, a tiny speck in a huge universe. (But of course that raises the question about why there are so many celestial bodies without humans?) And I won’t get into the visions I had when I was on psychedelic drugs in college.

We are emotional beings, with emotions surely partly a result of evolution, and once the meme of religion has spread, it’s easy to ascribe intense emotions to religious experience. We are also ridden with delusions: after my cat died, I used to see it out of the corner of my eye.  I’m sorry, but if Jesus/God is so anxious for us to believe in Him/Them (he surely doesn’t want all those nonbelievers to fry forever, as Douthat thinks), why doesn’t he simply appear in a way that cannot be written off as a delusion? (We do have cameras and videotape now.) Carl Sagan himself asked this question years ago.

Further, the religious experiences had by members of different faiths correspond to the different tenets of those faiths. Muslims have dreams and visions of Muhammad, and of course Muhammad himself produced the Qur’an after having a vision of the angel Gabriel, who dictated the book to the illiterate merchant.  So if visions of God tell us that God is real, which God who is envisioned is the real one?  I’m sorry, but I don’t find experiences or visions of God/Jesus convincing given that, if he wished, Jesus could make himself available in an irrefutable way to all of humanity, and presto!, we’d all be Catholics! (He also said that he’d return within the lifetime of those who witnessed his Crucifixion. Did he come back? No dice.)

No, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any respect for the deluded, especially when they insist, as does Douthat, they they have hit on the “true” religion. (Muslims, of course, believe that Islam is the final and true religion.)  Where is Mencken when we need him? The best way to go after someone like Douthat is not with intellectual analysis and respect, as does Rothman, but with all-out satire and mockery.

Still, given the constraints of the New Yorker, Rothman’s review is about as good as it can be.

h/t: Barry

Douthat’s still flogging his book; tells us what he really believe in as a pious Catholic

February 21, 2025 • 9:30 am

Papa’s got a brand new book, with Papa being NYT columnist Ross Douthat and his new book being Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.  Douthat makes the familiar argument that it’s more rational to be religious than atheistic or agnostic, and pushes his own Catholicism as the “right” religion.  It’s bad enough that a NYT columnist is deluded in this way, but it’s worse when he proselytizes his faith all over the Internet, trying desperately to make people embrace Catholicism.

Excerpts of this book are everywhere, a form of self-plagiarism and self-aggrandizement that is especially prominent in the deeply pious. I’ve criticized Douthat and his book excerpts several times, but of course folks sufficiently desperate to find “the meaning of life” in religion—to fill their God-shaped hole—will make the book a best seller.  The excerpt for today was published in the Catholic journal The Lamp, (characterized by the newspaper The Catholic Spirit “the Catholic version of The New Yorker”), and you can read it for free by clicking on the headline. Here Douthat reveals the extent of his delusion: the things he thinks about Catholic dogma that are actually true.

An excerpt (it’s longer but I can’t bear to reproduce more than this). Bolding is mine:

But isn’t all this talking around an essential question, which is whether I think the tradition I’ve ended up practicing is actually true? Not just true enough, not just pointing toward God, not just generally accurate in its description of the nature of God or the cosmos, but also true in its most important claims about reality? After all, Catholics don’t just stand up on Sundays and proclaim their belief in monotheism, a diversity of supernatural beings, sacramental grace, and the goodness of creation. We profess belief in “one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages,” who came to earth and “by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,” who died on the cross in Roman Palestine and “rose again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,” who will eventually “come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” And that is just the creedal condensation of a long list of specific claims about the way to salvation, the requirements of the moral law, the authority of the bishops and the pope—enough to fill a thick bound catechism, at the very least.

When I say the Nicene Creed, I mean it. I am open to hidden complexities and unexpected syntheses, but in the end I think that God has acted in history through Jesus of Nazareth in a way that differs from every other tradition and experience and revelation, and the Gospels should therefore exert a kind of general interpretative control over how we read all the other religious data. I think the New Testament is just clearly different from other religious texts in a way that stands out and demands attention, that the figure of Jesus likewise stands out among religious founders, that together the sources and the story and the Nazarene Himself all seem God-touched to a degree unmatched by any of their rivals. So where there is uncertainty, tension, a wager to be made, I make my bet on Jesus.

I’d put up $500 against the truths of the Nicene Creed, but of course Douthat has never written a single sentence I’ve seen telling us what would make him reject Catholicm. (In contrast, I laid out in Faith Versus Fact the kind of things that would make me provisionally accept the truths of Christianity.)

Okay, it’s time to look at the Nicene Creed, also discussed in my book.  Douthat’s claim that when he says it, he really means it is shared by many Catholics. That puts paid to the arguments of Sophisticated Theologians® that the Creed is either metaphorical or some soothing words to effect a bonding experience. Nope, that’s not why it was written. It was written so Christians could verbally profess the things they actually believe.

There are several versions of the Creed.  This one I took from the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, titled “What We Believe”. I was going to put in bold all the empirical things that Douthat accepts, but I would have had to put the whole thing in bold:

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.

I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come. Amen.

As you see, Douthat has dined on the whole hog from snout to tail: Jesus was the son of God (and himself God), was born of a virgin, was crucified as a way to save humanity, but then came back to life again and shortly thereafter ascended to Heaven.  He will return some day, although we’ve been waiting 2,000 years. That apparently doesn’t bother Douthat despite Jesus’s disproven claim that he would return while some of his contemporaries were still alive. And on that blessed day of Rapture, Jesus will judge everyone, sending them either up, down, or in the waiting room of Purgatory.

Douthat also accepts the Holy Spirit, whatever that is, and, of course, the forgiveness of sin and eternal afterlife.

This is what Douthat thinks is really true, and what he wants you to believe (see his book).  If he were the only person who professed this stuff, he’d be taken as a lunatic (see C. S. Lewis), but because the delusion is so widespread, it’s considered respectable.  But how can such a man not only be allowed to write for the NYT, but to actually publish this palaver in the newspaper?

Coming: the Good News about Xenu.

h/t: Barry

The NYT touts miracles again

September 17, 2023 • 9:15 am

The NYT headline below is in line with the paper’s recurrent penchant for touting religion while at least admitting that some people doubt God’s existence. In general, though, if you read the headline, your first thought—if you’re not a diehard skeptic—is “yes, it’s a miracle!” (See the word counts at bottom.)

The miracle is a familiar one: a religious person is dug up after some time and their bodies are found to have been incorrupted—that is, they didn’t rot, shrivel, degenerate, or decay. Catholics often consider this a miracle, and the Vatican has a whole policy of inspection for incorruptibility, which can be seen as a miracle helping qualify the Incorrupted Person as a saint.

A famous example of this is Bernadette Soubirous (1844-1879), or Saint Bernadette of Lourdes. This case, once touted as showing miraculous incorruptibility, now shows the weakness of judging someone as “not decayed.” Although Soubirous was designated a saint based on other miracles, when exhumed 30 years after death, her body was declared to be in perfect condition. Catholicpiligrims.com reports on three exhumations of Bernadette, the last in 1925. The inspecting doctor said this:

“What struck me during this examination, of course, was the state of perfect preservation of the skeleton, the fibrous tissues of the muscles (still supple and firm), of the ligaments, and of the skin, and above all the totally unexpected state of the liver after 46 years. One would have thought that this organ, which is basically soft and inclined to crumble, would have decomposed very rapidly or would have hardened to a chalky consistency. Yet, when it was cut it was soft and almost normal in consistency. I pointed this out to those present, remarking that this did not seem to be a natural phenomenon.”

Remarkable! Except if you look even at Wikipedia, you see that not only are the visible parts of Bernadette’s body (on view in the town of Nevers) covered with wax, but there’s also this note with the photo below (my emphasis):

The body of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes with wax face and hand coverings, declared to appear incorrupt by a committee in 1909 (subsequent exhumations indicated corruption). (January 7, 1844 – April 16, 1879).

Atlas Obscura is even more skeptical:

As part of the canonization process, her body was exhumed three separate times, in 1909, 1919, and finally in 1925, when she was moved to the crystal casket. Her body was pronounced by the church as officially “incorrupt,” but it seems the qualifications for that term may have been somewhat lax. In the words of the attending doctor in 1919: “The body is practically mummified, covered with patches of mildew and quite a notable layer of salts, which appear to be calcium salts… The skin has disappeared in some places, but it is still present on most parts of the body.”

After a few ribs were removed to be sent to Rome as relics, it was decided that the “blackish color” of her face might be off-putting to pilgrims, and so a “light wax mask” was in order. Her new face and hands were designed by Pierre Imans, a designer of fashion mannequins in Paris.

Yep, she was not incorruptible. She was rotting away.

Now it’s possible that Bernadette rotted somewhat more slowly than a normal body (perhaps due to special physical features of the body, casket, or soil; see below), but I can’t rule out with absolute certainty that God did it. (As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, science can’t be 100% certain about anything). But if God did it, why didn’t he just preserve her in perpetuity, with no need for wax or remaking of faces and hands? God can do that, you know, for He can do anything! Here we have another vexing question for Sophisticated Theologians™: why does God act so erratically with respect to the bodies of saints?

But on to the NYT, which reports on another “incorruptible” nun, whose face also has been be covered with a wax mask. There’s a racial dimension to this one, too, for as far as I know, this is the first incorruptible nun who was black. The NYT plays that up, of course, but I find the science of more interest.

Click on the screenshot below, and I also found the piece archived here.

An excerpt:

In life, Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster was known to her fellow nuns for her devotional poetry, her sense of humor and her fierce piety. “I’m Sister Wil-hel-mina,” she was known to say. “I’ve a hell of a will and I mean it!” A biography published by her order after her death at age 95 in 2019 described her as the little nun “who persevered in faith.”

In death, Sister Wilhelmina has become something much larger to some: a potential saint, a pilgrimage attraction, a miracle.

The transformation started this spring at the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus, run by the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of the Apostles, a small but growing conservative order whose headquarters are nestled in the rolling hills north of Kansas City. Four years after burying Sister Wilhelmina, the order’s founder, in a simple wood coffin in a corner of the property, the sisters decided to move her body into a customary place of honor inside their church.

My emphasis below in what seems to be a bit of fudging:

When they opened the coffin, expecting to find bones that could be easily cleaned and placed in a new box, they instead found what looked and even felt remarkably like Sister Wilhelmina herself. Her face was recognizable, even after years in a damp coffin, and the sisters said that her beloved habit was “immaculate.”

For the Benedictines of Mary, this immediately signaled that Sister Wilhelmina may be an “incorruptible,” a term the Catholic Church uses to describe people whose bodies — or parts of their bodies — did not decompose after death. Believers in the phenomenon say there have been more than 100 examples worldwide, mostly in Europe.

Michael O’Neill, who hosts a national radio show called “The Miracle Hunter” on the Catholic station EWTN, said that the case of Sister Wilhelmina, who was Black, was especially distinctive. “There’s never been an African American incorruptible; in fact there’s never been an American of any sort who’s an incorruptible,” he said. “So this is big news.”

Incorrupted, but after a paltry four years. But was she really that well preserved?

Here’s a photo of the body *(uncredited) from The Pillar, a Catholic publication:

Note that only her face and hands are visible (well, it would be salacious to show other parts), but The Pillar adds this:

In the case of Sister Wilhelmina, it is not clear how much of her body may be incorrupt. Photos circulating online seem to show a life-like face that has resisted decomposition, while skin on the nun’s hands appears leathery and dehydrated, but not rotting.

. . .The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints has norms on the examination process, which emphasize the respect due to the human body, he said. But there are no specific norms governing an investigation into whether a body is incorrupt.

In the recent Missouri case, Sister Wilhelmina’s canonization cause has not been opened, making the veneration of her mortal remains — and the prospect of an investigation — somewhat unusual.

The Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph released a May 22 statement, which noted the need “to protect the integrity of the mortal remains of Sister Wilhelmina to allow for a thorough investigation.”

But when asked by The Pillar about what the investigation will entail — and who is responsible for it — a spokesperson for the diocese was not able to give a clear sense of the next steps.

Angelus, another Catholic publication, says this:

Cleaned and protected with wax, Sister Wilhelmina’s remains are now on display for veneration at the monastery. Following a May 29 rosary procession, the body will be encased in glass at the altar shrine, the religious community stated, adding that once devotion to Sister Wilhelmina has become “well established,” her cause for canonization “may be introduced.”

Another Catholic site shows her face (below), saying it’s covered with a “light transparent face mask”. If that’s true (and why any wax?), it is a remarkable case of preservation:

The NYT doesn’t say anything about a wax coating, or Sister Wilhelmina’s rotting hands. But they do manage to throw in one doubter toward the end, even though they dismiss science in the very next sentence. Bolding below is mine:

Inside the abbey walls, few openly question what they see before their eyes. To experts in forensic science, there are other potential explanations.

“It’s impossible to make many conclusions at all,” said Marcella Sorg, a forensic anthropologist and research professor at the University of Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. One of several explanations is the phenomenon of dry mummification, which can take place naturally if the body’s soft tissues stay dry enough. Factors include the person’s body fat, their diet in the days before death and the dryness of the wood used for the coffin.

For others, science is hardly the point.

Madeline Whitt, a clerk at the Hy-Klas grocery store in Gower, shrugged when asked if Sister Wilhelmina’s preservation was a miracle. “Even if it’s not,” she said, “if it brings more people to come and question things, then it is.”

Ms. Whitt, 17, has visited the abbey three times to see Sister Wilhelmina.

She attends a nondenominational Protestant church and said she had not ever seen a nun before her visits to the abbey. It was a “culture shock,” she said. But in a quiet, small town, it was also something to do.

In a 1,672-word piece. then, the NYT devotes 96 words, or 5.7%, to just one alternative naturalistic explanation. And there are others: after all, parts of Sister Wilhelmina are starting to degenerate, and for some unexplained reason they put wax on her body. If they are really looking for a miracle, leave off the wax!

And THEN they have the temerity to say that “science is hardly the point.” In fact, it is the entire point. Either there’s a naturalistic explanation for the incorruptibility of this nun’s body, or there’s not, and it’s supernatural. (I’m betting on the former.) And that distinction is precisely what Madelin Whitt meant when suggesting that people should see the body and “question things.”

Better yet, read up on forensic anthropology.  An Internet search for naturalistic explanations yields very little, even in the Wikipedia article. I’m sure there are explanations out there, though, and I suggest that readers look for them. In the meantime, although the NYT has mercifully ditched its weekly lucubrations on Jesus from Pastor Tish Harrison Warren, it continues to be very soft on religion. After all, the paper wouldn’t want to anger its “believing-in-belief” readers by acting like that nasty old skepic James Randi. Such doubt wins you no plaudits in religious America.

And I still want to know why God can’t make a saint’s body incorruptible without the use of wax.

h/t: Mike

Nancy Pelosi had Catholics exorcise her house after her husband was attacked

January 30, 2023 • 12:45 pm

I still think Nancy Pelosi was a terrific speaker and politically very astute, but when I hear things like this, it throws me into cognitive dissonance. Below is a headline and a short article from Business Insider, which drew from Mo Dowd’s piece in the NYT that I highlighted the other day.

What it says:

Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had Catholic priests perform an exorcism of her house after her husband was attacked by an assailant looking for her in October, her daughter told The New York Times.

“I think that weighed really heavy on her soul. I think she felt really guilty. I think that really broke her,” their daughter Alexandra Pelosi told the paper.

“Over Thanksgiving, she had priests coming, trying to have an exorcism of the house and having prayer services,”  said Alexandra Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi has spoken openly about her Catholic faith.

Paul Pelosi was hospitalized with a skull fracture after being attacked at the couple’s San Francisco home with a hammer.

And verification from the NYT, from Dowd’s profile. I can’t believe I read that so fast I missed this bit:

Alexandra, always the id to her mother’s superego, was more blunt: “I think that weighed really heavy on her soul. I think she felt really guilty. I think that really broke her. Over Thanksgiving, she had priests coming, trying to have an exorcism of the house and having prayer services.”

What am I supposed to think now? Not only is Pelosi Catholic and pious, which means she has unsubstantiated and delusional beliefs about religion, but she also seems to believe in either Satan or demons!

Well, so long as someone does a good job in Congress for the Democrats, I suppose I can let this slide, but it still freaks me out.

h/t: Fred

60 Minutes goes to Lourdes to investigate medical miracles

December 21, 2022 • 11:15 am

Everybody knows about Lourdes, the town in southern France where Bernadette Soubirous (now a saint) said she had eighteen visions of the Virgin Mary beginning in 1858. The Grotto in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes has become a place of worldwide pilgrimage for Catholics (and, I suppose, other Christians) seeking relief from ailments and afflictions. The facility gets over three million visitors a year and as Wikipedia notes,

Yearly from March to October the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes is a place of mass pilgrimage from Europe and other parts of the world. The spring water from the grotto is believed by some Catholics to possess healing properties.

An estimated 200 million people have visited the shrine since 1860, and the Roman Catholic Church has officially recognized 69 healings considered miraculous. Cures are examined using Church criteria for authenticity and authentic miracle healing with no physical or psychological basis other than the healing power of the water.

Tours from all over the world are organized to visit the Sanctuary. Connected with this pilgrimage is often the consumption of or bathing in the Lourdes water which wells out of the Grotto.

Of course nobody has, as a reader notes below, been cured of lost eyes or limbs, and I’d prefer a panel of skeptical doctors as opposed to “Church criteria”. Well, so be it.

I was told in an email from a reader one of my favorite shows, CBS’s “60 Minutes”, did a segment on Lourdes and its cures. Here’s the email I got from a reader:

Please ignore this email if you have commented on the 60 Minutes segment on Lourdes, I thought you might say something since I believe you watch 60 Minutes.  This Sunday’s show has a segment on Lourdes, emphasizing how medical experts for the church extensively research every claim of a miracle and find very few that are “medically unexplainable” and therefore a bond fide miracle.  Correspondent Bill Whitaker is amazed, and fails to ask the tough questions.  For example, he never asks about a control group of sick people that don’t go to Lourdes for a cure.  Do they have a greater or less number of unexplained cures or recoveries?  He doesn’t ask about amputees, does anybody get their limbs back or is that considered impossible for even God?

Here’s the 13½-minute segment that was broadcast. Listen for yourself.

Here are the seven criteria given by the head of the Lourdes Office of Medical Observations for a miracle cure: “Diagnosis of a severe disease with a severe prognosis, person cured suddenly and completely, with no recurrence, and there must be no possible explanation for the cure.” Apparently 1 out of 100 claims of cures qualifies as a “miracle” according to the head medical examiner.

The highlight of the show is a nun (curiously named “Sister Bernadette”) who was diagnosed with cauda equina, an acute medical condition often caused by a herniated disc. She was completely better three days after visiting Lourdes and having heard the voice of either God or Mary within her. The committee of “skeptical” doctors who investigated her case apparently took eight years to decide that her condition was “medically unexplained.”  She thus became the “Seventieth Miracle of Lourdes.”

I asked my own doctor, Alex Lickerman—a crack diagnostician—about this, and he watched the whole segment. He said that cauda equina syndrome is a sudden condition that needs immediate medical intervention (it usually causes urinary retention and can lead to permanent paralysis if not recognized and surgically corrected), and he couldn’t understand how the Sister could have had cauda equina syndrome for half her life. He offered two other explanations, neither of which (nor the initial cauda equina syndrome diagnosis) could be diagnosed before her visit to Lourdes without a careful examination of the clinical symptoms, and, critically, an MRI. These alternatives are chronic low back pain and spinal stenosis, which can also be chronic and cause the symptoms experienced by Sister Bernadette.

I quote Alex:

Based on what she said, I couldn’t begin to figure out what she really had. It wasn’t cauda equina syndrome, though, I tell you that.

The lead doctor said, “We’re looking for a diagnosis.” The reporting didn’t support a diagnosis of anything other than chronic low back pain. He said they “repeated twice her imagery.” I’d want to see those images. That’s crucial. I’m highly, highly skeptical.

Of course I don’t buy this as a miracle either, for, absent evidence for a supernatural being, a naturalistic explanation has higher priors. Further, if Mary or God wanted to, they could regrow missing limbs or eyes, yet that has never happened. Why is it that diseases that we know never show spontaneous remission are also the ones that divine intervention can’t cure?

But I leave the readers to examine this segment and Sister Bernadette’s case, and to comment below.

Quote of the Day: A Catholic notes the benefits of Roe v. Wade while still opposing the decision

May 10, 2022 • 10:00 am

In today’s NYT you can find the op-ed below (click on screenshot to read), a defense of overturning Roe v. Wade written by Matthew Walther. As you can see by the subtitle, Walther is editor of the bimonthly Catholic literary journal Lamp. 

I suppose you could say that it’s to Walther’s credit that he admits that there could be bad socioeconomic consequences of overturning this bit of “settled law,” but in the end it’s clear that he thinks those consequences, good or bad, are irrelevant. As he says in his last sentence, “What is right is very rarely what is convenient.” For he sees the shelving of Roe v. Wade as equivalent to “the joyful fact of hundreds of thousands of additional babies being born.”

In fact, although he mentions that there may be some economic downsides of Roe v. Wade, in the main he seems to agree with this:

It is not possible to conceive of our present way of life — the decline of heavy and textile manufacturing and the rise of the service economy, financialization, the collapse of traditional familial and other social structures, the subsuming of virtually every facet of our existence into digital technologies — in the absence of the estimated 63 million abortions that have been performed in America since 1973.

and this:

[In the last twenty years], countless economists and social scientists have argued the opposite: that legal abortion is not only compatible with but also necessary for sustained economic growth. Among other things, reduced access to abortion is correlated with lower rates of labor force participation, reduced wages and increased job turnover.

If the actions of major corporations in states such as Texas, which recently banned abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, are any indication, America’s business establishment agrees. The boards of corporations like Citigroup, with a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, have announced that they will subsidize travel for employees who seek out-of-state abortions.

Opponents of abortion should consider the possibility that these corporations are correct in their apparent assumption that abortion contributes to the maximization of shareholder value. Are we prepared to accept the converse proposition, to invite a reduction in shareholder value by banning abortion?

So here we have a Catholic saying that the economic consequences of banning abortion could well have been good, but he doesn’t care because abortion is a fundamental wrong—it’s murder.

I don’t care that much about socioeconomic consequences, either, but for the opposite reason: I see abortion in the main as a societal and personal good, preventing the state from interfering from a woman’s ability to control her own body. The difference between Walther and me is that I don’t see a fetus as equivalent to a sentient human being, and would probably extend Roe v. Wade further than even the its present limits (first and perhaps second trimester).

And this difference comes from Walther’s Catholicism. Where, I ask, is the evidence (beyond that asserted by religious authorities) that abortion is identical to murder, even in its very early stages? There is clearly a developmental continuum in a fetus, with an abrupt break when the baby is born, and so drawing a line for when a fetus becomes equivalent to a person with rights, including freedom from “murder”, is purely arbitrary. Many Catholics, though, draw the line at a rationally insupportable stage: fertilization.  A “person” is not created at fertilization: we have a zygote that now will go on to continue development. That zygote is an undifferentiated ball of cells without mentation or the ability to feel pain. And there’s no evidence it has a soul or anything differentiating it from the embryos of any number of vertebrate species.

But I digress: read the article:

Here Walther asserts the equivalence of abortion with murder, which outweighs any possible negative societal consequences (my bolding).

The scope of the problem is far broader than economics. Research over the years has suggested that an America without abortion would mean more single mothers and more births to teenage mothers, increased strain on Medicaid and other welfare programs, higher crime rates, a less dynamic and flexible work force, an uptick in carbon emissions, lower student test scores and goodness knows what else. If you sincerely believe, as I do, that every abortion means the deliberate killing of an innocent human being, is there some hypothetical threshold for negative growth, carbon dioxide levels or work force participation rates beyond which the protection of that life would be too burdensome?

For me, the answer is no.

. . . .I believe that those who oppose abortion should not discount the possibility that its proscription will have consequences that some of us would otherwise regret. To insist, as opponents of abortion often have, that the economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt cannot be right about the correlation between Roe and the reduced incidence of crime two decades later strikes me as a tacit concession that if they were right, our position on abortion might have to be altered.

So far, so good. At least he admits there’s a downside to prohibiting abortion, though he sees abortion as an act whose downside can never be large enough to warrant allowing it. But then he puts on his Tish Harrison Warren suit and says, “Well, let’s justify banning abortion by being ever so much nicer to the unwanted children who are born, and by creating an atmosphere in which they could thrive.” If only it were that easy! And even if it were, I would still say that abortion is a choice best left to the pregnant woman.

Walther continues:

For the same reason, opponents of abortion should commit ourselves to the most generous and humane provisions for mothers and children (paid family leave, generous child benefits, direct income subsidies for stay-at-home mothers, single-payer health care) without being Pollyannaish. No matter what we do, in a post-Roe world many children who would not otherwise have been born will live lives of utter misery, and many of our fellow Americans will be indifferent to their plight. If we wish to dispel the noxious argument that only happy lives are worth saving, we will have to be honest about the limits of social policy and private charity in regulating the turbid ebb and flow of human suffering.

The last sentence puzzles me.  A life that can be either “happy” or “unhappy” does not begin until a child is born. Yes, you can say that a fetus has a “life”, but it is not a noxious argument to say that one of the major benefits of abortion is that it prevents unhappy lives from coming into being. 

Here’s what I can live with: 60% of Americans are satisfied with keeping the Roe v. Wade prescriptions in place. I would go further, but this “settled” law seems to me a good compromise, though largely a compromise with religious people who wish to force their beliefs on the rest of us. The compromise is necessary, in religious America, to hold our Republic together, and it’s done a pretty good job in the last fifty years.

Could there be a downside of allowing abortion that’s so harmful that I would favor abolishing the practice? I can’t imagine one. There’s no chance it will drive the population to zero, and any economic consequences seem to me not harmful but helpful.  But in the end I see it as the right of a woman to determine what to do with her own body, and, like the First Amendment, that’s not something to be monkeyed with.

A Vatican astronomer writes to me

December 14, 2020 • 1:30 pm

I was just in the middle of writing about something more interesting than religion when a new email, highlighted here, arrived. And so I stopped writing to take care of this latest “flea”, as Richard Dawkins calls his captious critics. I’ll get back to the other stuff tomorrow.

Presumably because my Conversation essay on the incompatibility of science and religion was reprinted this morning on Yahoo! News, I have been getting a fair number of emails today from offended believers who reject my thesis that science and religion are incompatible. In that essay, but especially in my book Faith Versus Fact, I contend that while that both science and religion make claims about what’s true in the Universe (religion of course does other things besides assert facts), only science has a way of testing those claims.

To me this is the heart of the incompatibility, and its existence seems indisputable to me. There are a gazillion religions, all making different factual claims about the world and its history, and there’s no way to resolve them. That’s why so many religions remain on the planet, many of them hating those who adhere to other faiths. In contrast, there’s only one science (though the guy below disagrees), and Hindu scientists aren’t at odds with Muslim scientists or atheist scientists about the tenets of physics and chemistry.

If you’re a Catholic, like the writer of the email below, your theology and morality must to some degree rest on acceptance of certain central factual claims of the Church: the existence of a divine Jesus as the son/alter ego of a divine God, Jesus’s Resurrection, which expiates us of sin, and so on. If those facts be wrong, on what is your faith grounded? After all, as Scriptures say (1 Corinthians 15:12-14, King James Version):

Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen. And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

So if Jesus didn’t come back to life—this of course assumes that Jesus not only existed, but was divine, claims supported by no evidence outside scripture—your Christian faith is useless. All three Abrahamic religions, like many other faiths, make factual claims that undergird their whole system of worship and morality.

Jesuits, of course, are more liberal than other Catholics, and perhaps more willing to interpret Scripture as metaphorical, but I’m willing to bet that this Catholic, a Jesuit, who’s Vice Director of the Vatican Observatory (I squelch my urge to make a Catholic pun) adheres to the myths about Jesus that undergird his faith. (He is, after all, a member of the Society of Jesus!) Presumably Fr. Mueller goes to Mass at least once a week and noms the wafer and quaffs the wine, accepting that some kind of physical but undetectable transformation occurs during that process. Presumably he goes to confession, thinking that if he tells his sins to another priest, God will expiate them. Well, I don’t know Fr. Mueller’s own beliefs save that he’s co-authored a book about why religion and science are compatible, and no, I haven’t read it, as it came out several years after my own. In fact, according to Fr. Mueller, I haven’t read anything substantive about the relationship between science and religion.

It’s the smarmy faux-niceness pervading this email—its sugary passive-aggressiveness—that made me decide to post it, which I don’t often do. Mueller’s note even ends with an invitation to visit the Vatican Observatory.

But it’s not just that tone that angered me. More galling was Mueller’s accusation that I haven’t read widely about the relationship between science and faith (he’s employing the Courtier’s Reply here), which is of course untrue. Apparently Fr. Mueller isn’t aware that I wrote an entire book on my thesis (with pages and pages of references), a book that of course he hasn’t read, since he’s responding only to my short article. Ergo, Fr. Mueller is even more guilty of the Courtier’s accusation.  Had he read my book—and it’s just one book, not the dozens he’d foist on me—he’d know that I already dealt with the first three points of his critique, including giving a very careful exposition of what I mean by “incompatibility” between science and religion.

Hiding yet another brickbat in his bouquet, Fr. Mueller assures me that he’s concerned to uphold my university’s standards of inquiry, as he himself has two degrees at the University of Chicago. Yes, I’m apparently guilty of shoddy scholarship. Even if that were true, though, at least I’m not guilty of believing in fairy tales.

I had drafted a reply to Mueller about the “standards of inquiry” that undergird his own beliefs, but of course I don’t know for sure what his beliefs are. But one thing is true: we know a lot more about our solar system than we know about the Catholic God or His purported sidekicks: Jesus and the Holy Ghost.

I decided not to provide Fr. Mueller with a list of all the reading I did about theology and its relationship to science, extending from Augustine and Aquinas down to Haught (does Mueller know I debated Catholic theologian Haught, who then tried to censor the video of our debate because he didn’t come off very well?), to Alvin Plantinga, Karen Armstrong, Ronald Numbers, the BioLogos Crew including Francis Collins, Ken Miller, David Bentley Hart, Richard Swinburne, John Polkinghorne, and many others—yes, the whole schmegegge of accommodationism.

I missed Rabbi Sacks’s book, but I did read the Dalai Lama’s. And I’m here to tell you that none of these people wrote anything that undermines my thesis about incompatibility. They really couldn’t, for they have factual beliefs based not on empiricism but on faith, Scripture, and wish-thinking, methods guaranteed to pull you into the rabbit hole of confirmation bias. At some point, one realizes that after reading 315 books on science and religion, you’re not going to find a new, world-shaking thesis in book #316.

I guess this will constitute my reply to Fr. Mueller, and I’ll call his attention to this post. But if you wish to chime in, please do so below. Remember, he’s trying hard to be nice (at least, that’s how it looks), so don’t bruise the man. Still, I find this kind of letter to be far more annoying that emails from straight-up creationists who say I’m going to hell and don’t claim that I’m their “colleague.”

Here you go:

Dear Mr. Coyne,

I recently read your article “Yes there is a war between science and religion” on the web site “The Conversation”.  If I may respond:

First: There is indeed a conflict between (on one hand) theism co-joined with a literal interpretation of scripture and (on the other hand) science co-joined with philosophical materialism. If you had limited yourself to that narrow domain, your claims would be true, if unremarkable. However:

  • “Religion” is not reducible to theism co-joined with a literal interpretation of scripture. That represents only a small part of world-wide religion — most notably, noisy Christian fundamentalists in the USA and sometimes-violent Islamic fundamentalists elsewhere.
  • “Science” does not necessarily include philosophical materialism. It is only in the English-speaking world that the notion is widespread that science entails philosophical materialism; in the rest of the world, that is decidedly a minority position.

Second: In modern scholarship, it is commonly understood that it is not possible to speak meaningfully about the relationship between science and religion. There are many sciences, and there are many religions. Serious and meaningful discussion is possible only in reference to particular sciences and particular religions.

Third: If you’re going to take Daniel Dennett (a “God-denier”) as your guide in defining religion, then shouldn’t you take take a science-denier, or an evolution-denier, or a climate-change denier as your guide in defining science? To express the point more soberly: Shouldn’t the conceptions of “religion” which you engage be intrinsic to religion (i.e. furnished from within religious traditions) rather than extrinsic (i.e. imposed on religion from without)?

Finally, I am surprised that you would make such sweeping claims about science-faith without showing evidence of having entered more deeply into the vast scholarly literature in that area. It doesn’t seem possible that you would be innocent of serious engagement with such scholarship, but if so a suitable first step could be John Haught’s God and the New Atheism. A fuller and more nuanced entree could be Jonathan Sacks’ The Great Partnership. For historically sensitive exploration of the peculiarly American conflict between biblical fundamentalism and scientific materialism, there’s the excellent scholarly work of Ronald Numbers — for example, The Creationists (2006) and The Warfare Between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die (2018).

I write this message to you not only as a University of Chicago alumnus who is concerned to uphold the University’s standards of inquiry, but also in the spirit of the words of Pope John Paul II in a 1988 letter to George Coyne, who was then the director of the Vatican astronomical observatory: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.”*

Thank you for your kind attention. If you should find yourself at Rome and you would like to visit the Vatican astronomical observatory at Castel Gandolfo, please feel free to contact me.

Collegially yours,

Paul Mueller

     MS Physics, 1996, University of Chicago
     PhD Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, 2006, University of Chicago
——————————————–
  Paul Mueller
  Vice Director
  Vatican Observatory

____________

* JAC note: No, religion can’t.