A Genuine Miracle?

The last few posts have touched on the topic of the inevitability of genuine miracles occurring if there truly exists a multiverse and the difficulty of ruling them out if our world is just one of a vast ensemble of worlds.

I thought it'd be fitting to add an actual contemporary example of what certainly seems to be a miraculous event that's so amazing a major motion picture has been made about it.

The account of the event appeared in a piece by Josh Shepherd at The Federalist, part of which reads as follows:

On January 19, 2015, 14-year-old John Smith was trapped underwater for 15 minutes. First responders pulled him from the icy waters of Lake Sainte Louise in St. Charles, a northwestern suburb of St. Louis, Missouri.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported a month later: “He wasn’t breathing, and paramedics and doctors performed CPR on him for 43 minutes without regaining a pulse.” Yet, after his mother prayed for him, doctors at St. Joseph Hospital West say Smith inexplicably regained consciousness.

“They never expected the heart monitor to respond,” says Joyce Smith [John's mother] in an interview. “The first doctor who treated John wrote in his medical records: Patient dead. Mother prayed. Patient came back to life.”

Even when John reacquired a pulse, doctors anticipated that since his brain had been deprived of oxygen for so long he'd remain in a vegetative state, but the boy has fully recovered and returned to his basketball team. It's truly a remarkable story, and Shepherd provides much more detail in his article than I've given here.

The movie, due to be released on April 17th, and the team behind the film maintains that all the facts have been medically verified, and the story on-screen reflects accounts from multiple sources.

People today are often skeptical of reports of miracles, as they should be, given the number of fraudulent stories that have circulated over the years, but no one should be so skeptical as to rule out the possibility that something for which there's no room in a naturalistic worldview has in fact happened in this instance, and if one believes there's a multiverse, it would seem, one simply can't rule out that such events can and do occur.

This is the multiverse conundrum. If there is no multiverse then the fine-tuning of our universe for life points inexorably to the existence of a supernatural mind, and if one reverts to the multiverse to explain away cosmic fine-tuning she abandons any grounds for skepticism that miracles happen. And if miracles happen the case for that supernatural mind gets much stronger.

Whether you're skeptical or not read the article at the link and see what you think.