The argument from miracles in Catholicism

Catholicism has institutionalized the argument from miracles more thoroughly than any other religion. Canonization now requires two miracles (except for martyrs, who need one): the Congregation for the Causes of Saints investigates each candidate, typically a medically documented healing, with testimony from physicians and the patient reviewed over years. The Marian shrines — Lourdes, Fátima, Guadalupe — have similar evaluation protocols, with the Medical Bureau at Lourdes examining thousands of reported cures and officially recognizing roughly seventy.

The apologetic payoff is that Catholicism can point to a continuing stream of documented, institutionally vetted miracles rather than resting the case on first-century events. Defenders from Stanley Jaki to more recent writers at First Things and New Advent argue that the sheer volume and quality of evidence — signed medical records, multiple witnesses, no plausible natural explanation — outstrips what skeptics typically acknowledge. Craig Keener's Miracles (2011) compiled hundreds of contemporary cases, heavily weighted to Catholic contexts, to argue that Hume's argument against miracles rests on a question-begging empirical claim.

Critics answer on several levels. James Randi and Joe Nickell have investigated specific claims (the Shroud of Turin, Fátima, Padre Pio) and consistently found natural explanations or evidentiary gaps. Statistically, the small percentage of reported cases that the Church accepts is still hundreds of thousands of times lower than the population's spontaneous-remission rate, which is the base rate critics say must be met. And the principled objection remains: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the epistemic standard medical miracles are held to (eliminate known natural explanations) is not symmetric with the one required to confirm supernatural ones.