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Miracles as marketing

By Rodney Crisp - posted Tuesday, 19 October 2010


Healing and religion have always been closely associated from the very beginning and a large number of miracles have to do with miraculous cures.  It should be recalled that illness remained very much a mystery until the 19th century and it is only since that relatively recent period that the paths of healing and religion have diverged to any appreciable extent.

By application of the “argument from ignorance” technique, religions usually take the precaution of allowing a large lapse of time to pass before declaring that a particular spectacular healing is due to a miracle.  This has the twofold advantage of assuring that all the necessary medical analyses and investigations have been correctly carried out and that time has erased all possible material evidence permitting any future contestation.

Despite those elaborate precautions, however, the fact remains that nothing will have been proven, either one way or the other.  It only signifies that science is not able to prove that the recovery is due to natural causes.

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Needless to say, although the state of the art of medical science at any particular point in time may not be capable of providing a satisfactory explanation for the recovery, that does not mean that one may not be forthcoming at some future time as a result of subsequent progress in the state of the art of medical science.

Also, as is often pointed out by the medical profession, many illnesses, including some of the most serious ones such as cancer, are sometimes healed by the patient’s own immune system without any outside intervention whatsoever.  This is called spontaneous remission which actually happens more frequently than one may imagine.  In the case of cancer, for example, it has been estimated that about 1/100,000 cases remit spontaneously.  The second miracle attributed to Mary MacKillop was an unexplained recovery from cancer and may well fall within this category

In addition, there are, unfortunately, quite a large number of diagnostic errors committed by medical practitioners every day of the year.  This seems to be unavoidable given the complexity of the human body and all the variables and particular circumstances that have to be taken into account.  Mistakes are sometimes the result of a lack of specialist medical knowledge or due, alternatively, to a low probability combination of different factors which the doctor who carries out the diagnosis may ignore or fail to take into account.

It is possible that as a result of an erroneous diagnosis, a patient may become convinced some time later that he was miraculously cured of a fatal illness which in fact he never had.  Any subsequent medical examination could only reveal that he no longer had whatever serious illness had previously been diagnosed.

The objective that religions seek to achieve in recognising miracles is obviously not to impress the intellectual elite members of the community but the more modest layers of society which constitute the large majority of the population.  In commercial terms, miracles are marketing tools that help consolidate and increase the client base. 

If it were politicians who declared miracles they would be accused of populism.

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About the Author

Rodney Crisp is an international insurance and risk management consultant based in Paris. He was born in Cairns and grew up in Dalby on the Darling Downs where his family has been established for over a century and which he still considers as home. He continues to play an active role in daily life on the Darling Downs via internet. Rodney can be emailed at rod-christianne.crisp@orange.fr.

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