I visited the religion section on NL today, browsed through some topics/posts, and I encountered this topic created by PaulGrundy about miracles that had been researched to be proven true by Dr Richard Casdorph. On seeing that (and after the reading the first page), I tried checking the net to read anything about this "incontrovertible" miracles and I got this from Reddit...

...Dr Richard Casdorph. That's a distinctive name. Shouldn't be too hard to find more info on this person. Huh... Lots of things saying he's a doctor, and a researcher, respected and eminent. Very nice. Good for him. Oddly enough all of them are in context of his faith ministry and books he's made a fortune from shilling. He's as much an impartial, skeptical observer as I am a penguin made of chocolate.
(I'm not. In case you were wondering.)
Calling someone a doctor doesn't make them a doctor. Even if they ARE a doctor (which he probably is) that doesn't make them definitively reliable. It seems to me that this is one faith healer being followed by a true believer. Scientific? Bullshit. Science suspends belief. This guy wallowed into it.
While I was looking for more info on him, though, I found out a bit more on Karthryn Khullman, too. In particular I found out about a man called William A Nolen, a legit respected doctor, respected enough to have an actual wiki entry to himself.
http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/William_A._Nolen
He interviewed people Kathryn "healed" and found she did not, in fact, heal them at all. In fact, one of the women who was healed of spinal cancer threw her crutches away. Her spine collapsed the next day and she was hospitalised for some time, dying shortly after.
This is remarkably unconvincing.
If you're going to take the anecdotes of this one agenda driven man, why not take other studies into account, too? The Templeton Foundation (a Christian organisation trying to get some science up in this bitch) paid a substantial amount of evidence into an "Intercessory Prayer" study, and found that there was absolutely no difference between those people and a control group.
Don't pick and choose the results that suit your agenda. Take a look at all of them.

www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1i062f/to_atheists_scientifically_studied_miracles/

Wonderful,

Na today. E don tey. Spiritual Fraudster

Boss13:
Na today. E don tey. Spiritual Fraudster

In the name of "GOD"

I knew a topic like this would come up, I had been expecting it. Anyway derailers enjoy your thread its your paradise.

Funny thing is that none of the contents of the OP debunked any miracle in my thread, the topic is obviously misleading.

If you want to hang a dog by giving it a bad name, make sure you do it very well.

Dr. Richard Casdorph is from California -

This book is fake and it should only promote the healings of Kuhlman, the book come out one year before the death of Kuhlman her follower is Benny Hinn.

It takes me a long time to search this, because the net time I found his name together with The `Miracle` at Medjugorge It Began With Visions In This Yugoslavian Village, But The Miracle Now Is The Advent Of Tourism.

the catholic church didnot accept this miracles and say it is a fraud.

nora544:


Dr. Richard Casdorph is from California -

This book is fake and it should only promote the healings of Kuhlman, the book come out one year before the death of Kuhlman her follower is Benny Hinn.

It takes me a long time to search this, because the net time I found his name together with The `Miracle` at Medjugorge It Began With Visions In This Yugoslavian Village, But The Miracle Now Is The Advent Of Tourism.

the catholic church didnot accept this miracles and say it is a fraud.

Nora has become Catholic somebody praise the Lord!

paulGrundy:
I knew a topic like this would come up, I had been expecting it. Anyway derailers enjoy your thread its your paradise.

And why wouldn't it come up? It's worth doubting to hear that an imaginary guy healed some people. Just as you would find it skepical that Santa Claus gave someone a gift in real life. You would take it as a make up story and then debunk it; or just ignore the fo0l that asserts such.

Funny thing is that none of the contents of the OP debunked any miracle in my thread, the topic is obviously misleading.

There's nothing misleading there. You only read the post with a closed mind; it's obvious you did.

If you want to hang a dog by giving it a bad name, make sure you do it very well.

Mission accomplished.

I see nothing in this thread that legitimately discredits the book. Quoting personal and atheist-site prejudice without addressing a single miracle in the book or the merits of the medical evidence therefor is illegitimate. I've never been a Kathryn Kuhlman fan, but the evidence in the book must be evaluated on it's own merit — which Pr0ton and others have NOT done. It seems obvious that Pr0ton has not read the book and therefore is in no position to discredit it.

I've not read the book yet either, but I have read the ten account summaries at http://www.is-there-a-god.info/life/tenhealings.shtml. According to that site, Casdorph provides supporting medical documentation (xrays, arteriograms, etc.) in his book for at least three or four of the cases he describes.

I've recently analyzed the before-and-after medical and testimonial evidence for a dramatic sight-restoration miracle (my 10,000+ words and graphics will soon be available online), leaving me unalterably convinced of its genuineness and divine origin. And as an analytical personality (a PhD scientist), I was not initially convinced. I've also looked carefully at the medical evidence for another miracle involving the quite substantial regrowth of an almost-destroyed an adult small intestine (which CANNOT regenerate per two GI specialists I consulted, one of whom is the consulting GI guy for the Short Bowel Syndrome Foundation).

NO evidence and NO analysis, regardless of validity or extent, will convince a closed-minded person with emotional/lifestyle/pride/worldview investments in the non-existence of miracles in particular and God in general. However, a reasonable person would doubtless join me in my assessments.

Those are just two of a large number of miracles I'm aware of. More broadly, for tough-minded high-endurance types, consider reading Craig Keener's extensive (1248 page!) discussions of both ancient and present day miracle claims in 'Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts'. Yet more broadly, the percentage-data findings of a 2006 Pew-Forum-survey * suggest that --- per today's world population figures --- nearly a billion residents of ten countries have claimed experiencing and/or witnessing divine healings. Some such claims doubtless are redundant and some doubtless relate to coincidence, trickery/fakery/suggestion, psychosomatic relief, false attribution of natural cause and effect, etc. However, even if we assume that 999 out of 1000 claims fall into those categories --- a very ruthless discount, that leaves a million (1 in 1000) that don't.

For readers who struggle to accept the reality of miracles, consider that Hume's main argument against miracles has been thoroughly discredited as logically invalid. (Not an empty claim; I can supply a rebuttal, though that's beyond the scope of this post.) Moreover — contrary to common perceptions or claims — science (vs. scienTISM — a worldview) has absolutely *nothing* legitimate to say against true miracles. Miracles by definition *transcend* the domain of science — the natural — and, I submit, are implicitly implemented using a physical-law SUPERset that *transcends* the time-dimension, space-dimension, and physical-law SUBset that defines the physical essence of our universe, starting at the Big Bang.

For the more technically minded among you, note that physics and cosmology still wrestle with what initiated the Big Bang:

"...there was nothing before the Big Bang as time also started with the Big Bang: there was no ‘before’ for anything to be happening in. Nobody has come up with a testable explanation of what caused the Big Bang, and the question may not actually be meaningful. [[I disagree.]] This is mind-boggling stuff, but it does seem to fit the facts.” **

Ideas of initiation by quantum fluctuations somewhere *outside* of our space-time — a forever unknown domain with forever unknown properties — don't logically cut it. Our universe was logically initiated by *transcendent* agency at some point in a *second* time dimension *outside* of OUR time dimension — which is generally recognized (per the space-time theory of general relativity) to have been *created* at the Big Bang.



__________________________________
*'Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals', Pew Forum On Religion & Public Life, 2006, p. 137. I look at ‘All’-labeled statistics with ‘Yes’ answers from the GENERAL populace of those countries, not Pentecostals specifically. Accessed 2/6/2015 at http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/ spirit-and-power-a-10-country-survey-of-pentecostals3/.

** 'How did the Universe begin?', Science and Technology Facilities Council, LHC Project Simulator, Take 5, 2013. Most recently available as of 1/4/14 at: http://www.particledetectives.net/html/universe_begin.html. I'm not sure it's available *directly* at that URL today; I can supply a PDF of the original page if someone wants to see it.

Sir JoelB

Remember this research was done by one man, and not a complentary team of researchers. He is not even a recognized expert in the medical conditions that he assess for the study (he was a Cardiologist, which doesn't give his research much merit), a fact that could be easily overlooked by someone without medical expertise on his own. Casdorph didn't try to check those "cured" patients a year or two after to see whether they perfectly had been cured. There is no evidence that he checked the patients' family, care givers etc to confirm whether these patients had been perfectly healed. Wikipedia has the record of Kuhlman's ministry including the case where a respected Doctor investigated Kuhlman's "healed" patients and found out that they (23) weren't cured at all. In fact, one of the 23 patients died some months after.

It's also worthy of note that this same faith healer died of a heart disease in 1976.

Those alone could discard Casdorph's own evidence, if taken to a court. His evidence is weak.

Dr Casdorph has recently retired. However, I was a patient of his. I can vouch for his absolutely intergrity & professionalism. There is no doubt in mind that anything that Dr Casdorph has written is done with absolutely integrity & very thorough research.