Miracles

This is the transcript of my 2 minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Thursday 22nd July 2010:

Good morning. In 2001 a man from Massachusetts in the United States called Jack Sullivan knelt and prayed, asking for the nineteenth century English priest and Cardinal John Henry Newman, who died in 1890, to intercede to help the crippling spinal condition that he was suffering from. Sullivan subsequently made a recovery and medical experts convened by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which is the Vatican body responsible for investigating miracles, concluded that his recovery resulted from prayer. Now John Henry Newman is going to be made a saint by the Pope during his visit to the UK in September and Sullivan’s story is being cited as the requisite miracle. Sullivan said his own doctor could offer no medical explanation and said "Something very special has happened to me from a very special person. This thing is real, it's reality." Well, I’m a humanist and a sceptic which means that I agree with the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who taught that a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence and wrote that “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish”. In other words, what is more likely, that the ghost of a man who has been dead for over a hundred years was listening to the prayer and was somehow able to affect the medical problems Sullivan was suffering from, or that Sullivan underwent a spontaneous remission as a result of the healing mechanisms inherent in the human body. I wouldn’t want to single out Roman Catholics for their beliefs in miracles, because miracles are a feature of most of the religions of the world, for example, in 1995 there were claims of statues drinking milk in Hindu temples. In Islam, Sufi literature gives examples of holy men being able to become invisible or produce rain in seasons of drought. I’m sceptical of all claims of the miraculous and all religions equally.