Lourdes, in France, has a reputation for miracles but are these 'inexplicable' cures evidence of divine intervention? Raj Persaud investigates
16/01/2002
CAN science prove that God exists?
Debate over this issue has been sparked again with the publication of the
latest meticulously conducted clinical trial of whether praying for the
sick assists their recovery.
Two previous large studies - the
last one published in 1999 - seemed to find that, astonishingly, seriously
ill patients in Coronary Care Units improved medically if they were prayed
for. However, the latest study of 800 Coronary Care Unit patients, published
in the prestigious journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, found no significant
beneficial effect of prayer.
This publication coincides with a
call from some scientists to cease this kind of research. No matter how
rigorously conducted, it could never reveal the hand of God. Dr John Chibnall
a psychiatric researcher at St Louis University School of Medicine, says
a key element of all clinical trials is testing the dose-response relationship.
But what kind of God would give more help to patients who were prayed for
10 times a day, as opposed to those who were prayed for just once a day?
Even if the latest disappointing
results of the research on prayer spells the possible death knell of this
particular kind of investigation, there remains one last natural laboratory
where science is still being used to investigate God - the remote town
of Lourdes in south-west France.
Every year about six million people
from around the world visit the town because of its reputation for miraculous
healings of incurable illness. Despite the age of scientific rationalism
we are supposed to live in, the numbers of visitors are going up dramatically.
And, astoundingly, the miracles are
still happening. Jean Pierre Bely, a French man, was confirmed as recently
as 1999 by two separate medical and scientific committees associated with
Lourdes as having been cured of multiple sclerosis (following his pilgrimage
to the town) in a way that was scientifically inexplicable - the science
code for a miracle.
The sick first started turning up
in substantial numbers in Lourdes from 1875. They were attracted by a report
that a blind man could see again after bathing his eyes in a spring discovered
by a peasant girl, who had been told where to dig for it by visions of
the Virgin Mary. Eight years later a local medical bureau was established
properly to check allegations of miraculous cures, in order to protect
the reputation of the town from fraudulent claims.
Some cynics would say these independent
doctors and scientists are merely collaborating in an exercise in maintaining
the powerful image or "brand" of Lourdes. Yet this committee, which has
since grown in size and sophistication, will now spend years checking individual
cases, with up to 250 different doctors interviewing and testing a patient,
before a claimed cure will be accepted as not explainable by science.
Even at the end of this exhaustive
process, the case is then turned over to an independent international medical
committee, where another set of doctors and scientists re-examine the case
and conduct further tests. Then the phenomenon is finally submitted to
a vote among the investigating scientists - as to whether any other explanation
other than a miracle is plausible. For example, was the condition accurately
diagnosed in the first place?
The final part of the process occurs
when the Church is invited to decide whether it wants to pronounce that,
since the cure is inexplicable scientifically, it is therefore a sign of
God's intervention.
Given the scientific rigour of the
process, Jean Pierre Bely had to wait a decade before his sudden ability
to walk during a mass at Lourdes, despite previously suffering from a debilitating
disease, was officially sanctioned as not explainable by science. The toughness
of this scientific peer-review process explains why only 66 Lourdes cases
since 1862 have made it to official "miracle" status.
It is intriguing that the Catholic
Church puts up with such a small number of divine interventions, given
that about 7,000 pilgrims have sought officially to claim that a miracle
has happened to them since the medical committee has existed. Instead,
the Church is relying on scientists first to validate the claim that an
event cannot be accounted for by natural phenomena before religion proceeds
to sanction a cure as a divine event. This would appear to be an implicit
recognition by the Church that science is a privileged method for getting
at the truth, a relationship with science that has never been officially
acknowledged by religious authorities.
But if scientists and doctors can
agree that some, albeit a small number of cases, are representative of
phenomena beyond scientific understanding - is this evidence for something
that exists beyond rationalism - in other words, proof of God?
Alexis Carrel, one of France's greatest
physicians in the first half of the 20th century and a winner of the Nobel
Prize for Medicine for his work on transplantation surgery, thought so.
Carrel had been a sceptic and lost his Catholic faith before he went to
Lourdes on an invalid train, out of scientific curiosity. He became especially
interested in a woman he thought was too severely ill even to reach the
goal of her pilgrimage. However, she made it to Lourdes, where her stomach
was bathed in a pool and her large abdominal tumour soon disappeared -
Carrel believed that he had witnessed a genuine miracle.
But sceptics such as the novelist
Emile Zola famously asked why in Lourdes there are no piles of wooden legs
alongside the crutches cast aside by those who had been supposedly cured,
suggesting that these were not proper miracles, as they did not radically
challenge fundamental laws of physics or biology.
There are many astonishing remissions
of large cancerous tumours amongst the official miracles of Lourdes, though
admittedly spontaneous remission of cancer is not unknown in the outside
world. One study found on average about three spectacular cases each year
are reported by surgeons in medical journals - another suggested that,
depending on the particular cancer, up to one per cent might subside entirely
of their own accord.
One theory is that spontaneous regression
of a cancer represents a sudden mobilisation of natural host defence mechanisms.
Since it is well established that our immune system is influenced by our
emotional state, it is possible that strong emotions evoked by visiting
Lourdes could have beneficial physical effects in suddenly galvanising
an immune system to start attacking the cancer.
Two independent studies into spontaneous
remission of cancer found psychological changes, occurring just before
the physical disease began to improve dramatically, could be significant.
Both found that resolving an existential crisis in the person's life, a
dramatic change in life outlook and a reduction in anxiety and depression,
seemed to occur just before the cancer started to resolve by itself.
Indeed, a British study testing at
regular intervals the mental state of pilgrims to Lourdes found that up
to a year later, the pilgrimage had produced significant reductions in
anxiety and depression - an effect equivalent to the strongest anti-depressants.
But it is this ability of science to explain away religion with advances
in understanding of brain and mind which suggests that science could be
more an enemy of God than an ally.
For example, another recent study
found that by brain scanning the spiritual while they were meditating,
it was possible neurologically to account for the religious sense of transcendence
- oneness with nature or unity with God. The brain scanner showed that
during meditation the part of the brain responsible for orientation of
the body in physical space, the parietal lobe - near the top of the brain
- went to sleep.
People who have suffered damage to
this area have difficulty negotiating their way around their surroundings.
The sense of a self as separate from your environment could reside in this
part of the brain, so now scientists can explain why the sense of self
disappears during religious states.
But does the relentless advance of
science mean the universe of phenomena that remain inexplicable gets ever
smaller and so religion should eventually disappear? Dr Patrick Theillier,
the head of the Lourdes Medical Bureau, acknowledges that authentic "miracle"
cures seem to be getting markedly fewer in recent years, as what lies outside
of scientific explanation appears to ever diminish.
Today, people do not need miracles
to inspire faith. In a recent survey of the spiritual beliefs of American
scientists, 39 per cent of biologists, physicists and mathematicians said
they believed not only in God, but also in a god who answers prayers. The
highest rate of belief was found in the field of mathematics, the language
of the sciences.
In fact, the most recent attempt
to review the link between religion and health found that across 42 studies,
involving nearly 126,000 people, highly religious people were found to
be almost a third more likely to live longer, for reasons that still remain
mysterious. The best scientific theory is that religious and spiritual
practices engender positive emotions like hope, and limit negative emotions
like hostility, and this has profound long-term hormonal and immune system
benefits.
So it would seem that if you follow
the latest science, faith is, oddly, still the most pragmatic approach
to a long life - but you should only start relying on prayer after you
have exhausted what medicine and science have to offer - after all, isn't
that what the Church does in Lourdes?
Dr Raj Persaud is a consultant psychiatrist
at the Maudsley Hospital in London. His BBC radio documentary The Miracle
Men can be heard at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4
© Copyright of Telegraph Group
Limited 2001
Dr Raj Persaud