Miracles are undermined and refuted by parapsychology

A miracle is a sign from God. A miracle is something that is not naturally possible. It is a supernatural occurrence. It is paranormal.

If the paranormal is a reality and parapsychology is a true science, then it is clear that we have no reason to regard any miracle as a sign from God, and even less reason to believe it’s a sign that any particular faith is true. To say something is supernatural is to admit that we don’t understand the source or how it can create supernatural effects. We, therefore, do not even know if it is truly supernatural! It could be some natural cause we have no inkling of. So, if something other than God could be the explanation, then we have no reason to believe in miracles.

Lisa J. Schwebel wrote Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping Madonnas to hopefully encourage the Catholic Church to consider parapsychology when it evaluates whether a miracle is real or from God. That the Church ignores parapsychology shows that its conclusions about apparitions and miracles are defective. It has gotten so bad that the only theologian who wanted this to change was Karl Rahner (page 16). He also suggested that the Church must reappraise many of the visions and healings it recognized as authentic, for, in light of modern knowledge, a different conclusion could be drawn about many of them.

The book states that the Catholic Church believes in the existence of psi, telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis, but holds that they are morally neutral (page 27). This is false, for psi is what the fortune-tellers condemned in the Bible were trying to do. The Church must hold that these are gifts from Satan, regardless of how comforting and helpful these gifts are. It is certainly correct to say that more people find comfort in psychic beliefs than in the hierarchy of the Church and its doctrines. The former is what gets the most devotion, and the Church is ignored when it condemns things like Reiki and the development of mediumship. It is good that the book points out that the Church does not consider healings, miracles, and visions to necessarily mean that you are holy if you experience them. They happen to bad people too (page 28). That is why the Church focuses on the virtue of a person being considered for canonization, not on the reported miracles.

The book says that visions caused by telepathy or psi alone should still be considered God’s work if they make the recipients holy. If they don’t, they are your own work or the work of some other influence. Your own powers may be causing them, but since God created those powers, the visions should be considered his work if they help you serve him better in your neighbor. The trouble with this view is that it assumes God exists and is the God of Christianity. If God gives you psi, like all the other gifts he gives you, it can lead you astray, and you can use it to mislead yourself and fool yourself. Most visions take place outside a Catholic context, and they usually involve people who have one-off spiritualist experiences. There is just no way to get light from visions about what is true or false in religious dogma. That would mean the Catholic Church would have no right to use a vision or message to back up its doctrinal ideas.

The book is honest enough to explain that the predictions of the vision of the Virgin Mary at La Salette could have been figured out from what was already happening in the locality, and so their fulfillment was no surprise (page 37). Not all present at Fatima, where Mary supposedly appeared, saw the sun spinning, and witness reports are inconsistent. No authentic photograph exists (page 39). Visionaries who produced a life of Christ from their visions all contradicted one another. The Venerable Mary of Agreda, St. Bridget of Sweden, and Anne Catherine Emmerich all disagreed on how long after Jesus' death Mary died (page 19) and made many false prophecies. Blessed Anna Maria Taigi's false prophecies are among the most notorious (page 19). That people who make false prophecies are considered holy and authoritative is blasphemous in light of Deuteronomy 18, which says that prophets who make false predictions should be slain because they are false saints. The Bible does not have sympathy for those who say they were sincere but erred. The Bible says that if you make a false prophecy, you are an anti-God and should not be allowed to live.

The book points out that St. Margaret Mary's visions of the Sacred Heart contain errors, such as the nun being told by Jesus to tell her sister nuns that she was chosen by God to do penance in their place (page 123).

The book is disturbed by the fact that the Queen of Peace appearing at Medjugorje took the Croatian side in the war in Yugoslavia and sees this as something that cannot be believed (page 128). The National Catholic Reporter reported this warmongering aspect of the so-called Queen of Peace.

The book tells us that at La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima, the initial apparitions were more like some kind of luminous gas that took human shape (page 46). At La Salette, the children decided that the apparition was female only because of the shape of her face and hands. This suggests to me that the detailed tales they soon came up with about the apparition—how they saw her jewelry—were invented after the apparition. It suggests that psi causes the initial vision, which gradually improves so that what you see looks more real.

The book agrees with Karl Rahner that apparitions telling secrets that are not to be revealed until after the fulfillment, such as what happened with Lucia and the apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, do not fit the way God would work (page 105). It is not honest. What would you think of a fortune-teller who made you tell what happened to you recently and then claimed that they knew all about it before you said? Lucia getting a message to destroy communism is ridiculous when she only revealed it after communism had spread (page 106). Why didn’t God want her to reveal it earlier when it might have done some good? Against the observation of apparition rule maker Pope Benedict XIV that excessive penance weakens the faculties (page 115), the Fatima Virgin had the three children doing severe penance, which reduces the likelihood of the visions being real because they could have been hallucinations. So the Fatima lady was against the rules of the Church despite advocating obedience to the Church. But since the Church was right, the lady was not from God.

The Fatima visionary Francisco was tormented constantly until his death by the fear and terror of hellfire that he had seen in the visions (page 113). He had no peace, and this to me indicates that the apparitions were evil. It is foolish to say that this fear made him holier—what is holy about doing good because of terror? Francisco's holiness was meant as an example to others, so is it really good to want to inspire others to have the same terrors as yourself? He agonized over tiny sins, like playing jokes (page 115). Lucia encouraged all this; she even asked Jacinta to take milk on her deathbed, though she hated milk, just as a penance for sinners.

Sister Briege McKenna, a popular Catholic mystic, says that the view that you have to please Jesus by saying what you think he needs to hear is wrong. She rejects the view that parents with a dying child should ask Jesus to take the child because it is his will, for Jesus understands that it would be unnatural (page 151). This conflicts with the Gospels, where Jesus tells us that sincere prayer is always answered, but not necessarily in the way you expect, for God knows what is best. Christians all pray “Thy will be done,” as Jesus commanded in the Lord's Prayer, so it follows that anyone who can’t mean it is willfully fighting the will and grace of God, who never asks the impossible.

Briege knows that the Gospel shows Jesus commanded a lot of unnatural things. He forbade sexual desire outside of marriage and ordered that if your persecutor wants you to carry his pack one mile, you should go an extra mile. Her ministry is primarily a prayer ministry. Jesus appears to her to give it an impetus. He must have told her to say what she said. In any case, he didn’t correct her, so he must approve. The Jesus who appears to her must be Satan in disguise.

The alleged healing of Delizia Cirolli, in which her bone cancer vanished, was discovered four months after her visit to Lourdes, when it was first found that she was better (page 141). So, how do we know that this gradual cure was really a miracle and had to do with Lourdes? Real miracles are instant.

Overall, the errors spoken by visions indicate that if a natural explanation is out of the question, then they are produced by psi. The human mind would be able to fool with realistic visions and messages, just as it is so good at slipping into realistic fantasy. Fantasy can take over and seem to have a mind of its own. That is proof. The evidence for psi is a million times better in quality and especially in quantity than the evidence that an apparition of Mary is actually caused by the real Virgin Mary.

And that is not a compliment to psi evidence!
  
Further Reading ~
 
Answers to Tough Questions, Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Scripture Press, Bucks, 1980
Apparitions, Healings and Weeping Madonnas, Lisa J Schwebel, Paulist Press, New York, 2004
A Summary of Christian Doctrine, Louis Berkhof, The Banner of Truth Trust, London, 1971
Catechism of the Catholic Church, Veritas, Dublin, 1995
Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Karl Keating, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1988
Enchiridion Symbolorum Et Definitionum, Heinrich Joseph Denzinger, Edited by A Schonmetzer, Barcelona, 1963
Looking for a Miracle, Joe Nickell, Prometheus Books, New York, 1993
Miracles, Rev Ronald A Knox, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1937
Miracles in Dispute, Ernst and Marie-Luise Keller, SCM Press Ltd, London, 1969
Lourdes, Antonio Bernardo, A. Doucet Publications, Lourdes, 1987
Medjugorje, David Baldwin, Catholic Truth Society, London, 2002
Miraculous Divine Healing, Connie W Adams, Guardian of Truth Publications, KY, undated
New Catholic Encyclopaedia, The Catholic University of America and the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc, Washington, District of Columbia, 1967
Raised From the Dead, Father Albert J Hebert SM, TAN, Illinois 1986
Science and the Paranormal, Edited by George O Abell and Barry Singer, Junction Books, London, 1981
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Headline, London, 1997
The Book of Miracles, Stuart Gordon, Headline, London, 1996
The Encyclopaedia of Unbelief Volume 1, Gordon Stein, Editor, Prometheus Books, New York, 1985
The Hidden Power, Brian Inglis, Jonathan Cape, London, 1986
The Sceptical Occultist, Terry White, Century, London, 1994
The Stigmata and Modern Science, Rev Charles Carty, TAN, Illinois, 1974
Twenty Questions About Medjugorje, Kevin Orlin Johnson, Ph.D. Pangaeus Press, Dallas, 1999
Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer, Freeman, New York, 1997