Evidence?

My brother and I have an ongoing debate. He is a devout Roman Catholic and I am an atheist. We constantly exchange our points in an online forum (link is below if anyone is interested in reading or participating).

We've been going back and forth for nearly a year now. It is all good spirited and mature,... except perhaps for a few of my attempts at sarcasm. Sometimes I just can't help myself!

Out of this debate, several key fundamental issues have arisen. Issues that could and very well should have much more time and attention dedicated to them. One of these issues is evidence.

I consider myself to be a scientific minded person. In order for me to believe something is true, I need to see the evidence for myself, or have received it from credible sources. This does not mean that I must examine every claim that is made. But real scientific research is published in scientific journals. It is made available to the public for peer review. It is criticized and scrutinized by other scientists. Research methods are transparent. And any scientist who wishes to be taken seriously must adhere to these standards.

Of course, religion,... especially the Abrahamic religions... base their belief systems on faith. Faith is the firm belief of something without firm evidence. And so my brother and I have gone round and round on this issue and we have joined the countless others who have done this over the centuries.

Far be it for me to think that either of us have broken any new philosophical ground here, but I want to tell this little story to show an example of the difference between the true scrutinized evidence demanded by science on one hand; and the flimsy, blindly accepted anecdotes that a religious person might consider evidence on the other.

TRIP TO MARYLAND

Over the summer, I spent a week in Maryland and I had a chance to visit by brother and his family. We met for dinner in D.C. and we avoided any "non-PC" topics. And then, when it was time for us to part company, he offered me three books. They were:

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Eucharistic Miracles by Joan Carroll Cruz

Cures by Flavio Capucci

As he handed the books to me, he said, "Here is some evidence for you."

I told him that I already owned a copy of Mere Christianity although I had not read it at the time. But I accepted the other two and agreed to at least flip through them when I got a chance. Honestly, it is fairly difficult for me to add new books into my schedule, but on the train ride back to my hotel, I couldn't resist opening one of these books up and seeing what it was all about.

Always trying to keep myself open-minded, I was glad to have some new material to research.

That same night, sitting in my hotel room with not much else to do, I looked through the Miracles book by Ms. Cruz. Just like I do with every other book I read, I do at least a quick Google search on the author. Ms. Cruz has written several books on Catholicism and has done great charity work in New Orleans. The book gives descriptions of 32 incidents that the Catholic church considers to be official miracles of the Eucharist... the act conducted during Catholic mass when members eat bread that represents the body of Christ and drink wine that represents the blood. Of course, Catholics are supposed to believe that these are not representations, but that this transformation actually happens. Each description in the book is anywhere from 3-20 pages long. I picked the first one (which also happened to be the longest one) and read it.

LANCIANO, ITALY

This "miracle" happened in the 8th century. Long story short... In the little town of Lanciano, Italy, while an un-named priest-monk was performing the Catholic tradition of communion, a piece of bread LITERALLY transformed into human flesh and the wine LITERALLY transformed into human blood.

Right off the bat, I had to resist the urge to write this book off as one that cannot be taken seriously. Surely, people can't honestly believe that this really happened. Well it turns out I am wrong.

The story continues to describe the sequence of events that have since taken place surrounding this event. The flesh was passed into the possession of the Church authorities, it was certified as a miracle by the Church during the middle-ages, and the event was recorded by monks. The original church was destroyed by earthquakes, the actual ownership of the flesh and blood is unclear for several hundred years. Somehow it turns up being displayed in the rebuilt church in Lanciano during the 18th century. According to the book, (and confirmed by wikipedia), this flesh and blood is still on display today in the Lanciano Church.

At this point, the story jumps to 1970, when Italian scientists examined the flesh and blood and concluded the following:

"The flesh was indentified as striated muscle tissue of the myocardium (heart wall), having no trace whatsoever of any materials or agents used for the preservation of flesh. Both the flesh and the sample of blood were found to be of human origin, emphatically excluding the possibility that it was from an animal species. The blood and the flesh were found to belong to the same blood type, AB.... " (Cruz, pg 6).

The book also states that these examiners ruled out any possibility that fraud was perpetuated centuries ago (Cruz, pg 6)

So, there it is. We are told that bread and wine LITERALLY turned into human flesh and blood and still exists today in an undeteriorated condition for all eyes to see.

Naturally, I was astonished. I grew up as a Roman Catholic, I went to Sunday School, I got my first communion, but I had never heard of anything like this. My first instinct was to chalk this story up in the same category as all the sightings of the Virgin Mary appearing in muffins and cheetos. I did not buy it. As a student of science, I immediately began the normal process of scrutinizing the evidence that has been presented. Because remember, I was given this book under the name of "evidence." So like I said, if I am going to accept the presented evidence, especially a claim of a miracle, I will need to scrutinize it. If this claim was to be given any credibility, surely there would be neutral analysis, unbiased research, peer-review, etc.

My first reaction was to check out the bibliography of the book and start checking out the references. Astonishingly, there were no references listed in the short bibliography for this instance. No listings for the scientists, even though their names were given in the story (Linoli & Bertelli). This alone is a violation of scientific writing.

So I moved to the next best thing, Google. I searched pretty much all the proper nouns in the story. I found very few references to this story that were not Catholic owned and operated websites. I was looking for any third party that may have looked at this research and validated it. Any entity that was not related to the Catholic Church. Anything like this would add some credibility to the story. I could find absolutely nothing listed regarding the detailed findings of the 1970 research.

The best I could do was the wikipedia page that discusses the Lanciano miracle. You can read the same basic story from the book at this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharistic_Miracle

This wiki page gave me a few new leads though.

Apparently, the results of the 1970 research were published in an Italian journal, the Quaderni Sclavo di Diagnostica Clinica e di Laboratori. This seemed promising. But the search just ran me around in circles. This seems to be a legitimate journal. But I found no entries related to Eucharistic miracles, or Lanciano. There were a couple entries under the names of Bertelli and Linoli, but only on other unrelated medical research. There were no entries related to any work on this Lanciano case.

Secondly, and potentially the most promising lead was the statement that the results were "reaffirmed by a scientific commission appointed by the Higher Council of the World Health Organization in 1973." When I read this, I figured that I would certainly find something to back up this miraculous claim. If neutral, legitimate peer-review was performed on this evidence by the WHO, then I would at least be forced to acknowledge the possibility that the miracle may have happened. So I followed the trail and it led me not to the WHO, but to this website:

http://www.zenit.org/article-12933?l=english

Upon still further research, Zenit.org is a Catholic organization that professes belief in everything the Church claims. Their stated purpose is to spread Catholicism. This article also claimed that the WHO verified the 1970 findings, and provided no further references.

I searched for the "Higher Council of the World Health Organization", and found nothing.

So basically, within about two hours, Google and wiki had gotten me nowhere. But I was still determined to give this one a fair chance. I wanted to exhaust any leads on this. I wanted to come to a conclusion and decide if this thing had even a snowball's chance in hell of being real or if it was just another story of a miracle that got passed along over the centuries. If I was going to accept this claim as legitimate evidence, I would need something more, and I would have to step up my research.

It was getting late, and I had to get up early the next day. So I flipped off the light and the TV and crashed.

TENACITY PAYS OFF

I was finished with my trip to Maryland and back to my "temporary home" in Qatar. I continued searching this claim in my spare time -- something of which I either have a whole crapload of, or nearly none at all.

After a couple days, I decided to use some more advanced search methods. Since I am a student with a university, I have access to many academic databases. I spent about 3-4 hours searching for any scholarly articles about this research. I found nothing. Literally nothing! Every reference to the Lanciano miracle led back to the article on Zenit.org.

This webpage seems to be the original place where this World Health Organization claim began. Whenever I found another site that claimed that the WHO had validated this research, it always led back to this unreferenced webpage.

I decided to email my brother just to let him know what I was doing. He was kind enough to contact the author of this book, Ms. Cruz. She replied to him and he sent me her message:

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Subject: Re: Eucharistic Miracles

Dear James: I'm very pleased that your brother is willing to investigate Eucharistic miracles. To answer your question--I never, in all my books, ever used anything that was not approved by the church, whether on a local level or by 'higher authorities'. I've been very careful about this so as not to give false information. I contacted all the shrines mentioned in the book. They very generously sent articles, books, pamphlets, etc. etc. Perhaps your brother could contact various churches about his questions. I believe I gave the names of the churches and their location in each of the chapters. I'm sorry that I lost all my references in the Katrina flood otherwise I could help him with exact addresses. If possible, it would be very good if he could visit the churches which have the miracles exposed. Some are exposed on occasion. If I can help your brother I would be very pleased to do so. God bless you both. Joan

--- jkidd@publicsquare.net wrote:

Dear Ms. Cruz:

I'd like to see if you could help me with something regarding your book Eucharistic Miracles. I recently bought the book for my brother, who's an atheist, and he not only started reading it but decided to try to investigate the claims for himself. I encouraged him, of course, telling him to focus on the ones that have been officially approved by the Vatican. However, he said can't tell which ones have been approved and has been having trouble locating any official documents.

So I'd like to know from you: (1) Which miracles in the book are official ones bearing the stamp of approval from the Vatican? (2) Where could I direct my brother to verify the claims for himself?

Your help in this matter would be much appreciated.

In Christ,

James Kidd

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This correspondence pretty much supports my point about what is accepted as evidence. According to Ms. Cruz, every one of her claims is validated by the Church. And this is apparently good enough to convince countless Catholics who have no desire to question it. As nice and kind as I am sure Ms. Cruz is, it is obvious that she did not require independent third-party analysis to back up the claims. The authority of the Church is sufficient for her and also for my brother. Yet when this claim is put through just basic initial investigation, we come up with next to nothing. Nothing credible or neutral to back up the claims of this so called miracle.

So this pretty much left only one other possible resource. I had to contact the World Health Organization directly.

I went to the WHO website, found a link for contact and sent a quick inquiry about this story. I asked for any info on the results of this 1970 research. I figured it was a longshot. I figured they would blow me off as a religious fanatic. Well, it took about two weeks, but I eventually received the following reply:

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Dear Tony,

Thank you for your email request.

Kindly note that there is no Higher Council of the World Health Organization (WHO) and, therefore, the documents you are referring to have not been produced by WHO.

With kind regards,

Katerina Petruskova
WHO Library

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That pretty much did it for me. This story is a fraud. I don't know who committed the fraud, but somebody did and there are plenty of suspects over 1200 years.

The fraud is still being perpetuated today after 1200 years. All desires to examine this story in detail lead back to lies.

Even though I was personally convinced that this whole thing is a sham, I decided to try one more thing. I started searching the Internet for famous debunkers. You know, like Penn & Teller, James Randi, etc... I wanted to see if anyone else had tried to investigate this.

I found an Italian organization that specializes in debunking religious miracles. I lost the link to it and now I can't find it. But they had an article about this claim and they had pretty much gotten as far as I did and wrote a little bit about it. Even now, as I revisit all these links, I recall the wild Internet goose chases that just lead to religious forums with mindless drones propping up the miracle of Lanciano as "proof" of the existence of a living Jesus.

But alas! The final chapter is not written on this one! In April, I will be leaving Qatar and returning to Italy. I'm pretty sure that I'll be heading up a road trip to Lanciano to pay tribute to the oldest Eucharistic fraud in the world. It's only a few hours away from our place, and just the drive will be beautiful itself!

COMPARE

The point of this story is not to ridicule the faithful. I apologize if anyone takes offense to my sarcasm. But I do not apologize for being a rational person. If you are willing to believe in fairy tales such as this one, that is your right. If it brings you some comfort to believe that there is a higher power up in the clouds watching over you, that is your business. I have no right nor desire to change your mind.

My wish was to point out the process of rational, scientific scrutiny that claims must pass in order to be accepted as real evidence. You can claim your miracles, but don't confuse yourself into thinking that they have been scientifically verified.

I believe this is an important difference that people should be aware of. In this day in age when religious fanatics martyr themselves believing they have virgins waiting for them in heaven, Christian conservatives try to force creationism into our science classrooms and try to force this country to live by their values, and when millions of Americans honestly believe that a nuclear holocaust would be a positive thing because it would be a step towards armageddon and the return of Jesus; it is far more important than ever to understand that science and religion are not the same thing.

Happy winter solstice!

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