Answering Skeptics: Modern Miracles

The Christian Case Apologetics & Evidence Notes

Ten Modern Miracle Cases Worth Investigating

Documented healings, resuscitations, and unexplained deliverances — graded by evidence quality, not by enthusiasm.

The skeptical claim that "nobody documents miracles today" is empirically false. The Southern Medical Journal has published field data on it. The Lourdes International Medical Committee has been producing case files on it since 1883. A Yale-trained psychiatrist has staked his professional credibility on it. The evidence exists. The problem is most people haven't read it.

This post showcases ten specific cases — cases drawn from medical literature, peer-reviewed publications, and academically credentialed researchers — and examine what each one actually establishes. Each have been graded honestly by the quality of its documentation, because sloppy apologetics that overstates the evidence does more damage to the Christian witness than any skeptical objection.

A note on sourcing: a substantial number of these cases appear in the work of Craig Keener, whose two-volume Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Baker Academic, 2011) remains the most comprehensively documented academic treatment of this question in print. Where cases have independent institutional documentation, this is noted accordingly. Where the evidence is thinner than some would like, this article acknowledges that fact.

Confidence key → Institutionally Verified Documented, Ongoing Review Single / Limited Source

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Case 01

Sister Marie Simon-Pierre — Parkinson's Disease

Diagnosis: Idiopathic Parkinson's Disease · France, 2001–2006

In 2001, French nun Sister Marie Simon-Pierre was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. After Pope John Paul II died in April 2005, her religious community began praying specifically for his intercession in her healing. By June 2005 she reported a sudden recovery of normal motor function and, critically, was able to discontinue her Parkinson's medication without relapse. Neurological examinations confirmed the absence of previously documented disease markers.[1]

What makes this case unusually strong is the procedural trail behind it. The Vatican's medical commission — distinct from the theological body — examined the case before John Paul II's beatification in 2011. The Positio documenting the case runs into hundreds of pages. Several physicians were involved at the diagnostic and recovery stages. There was long-term follow-up. This is not a story: it is a dossier, assembled under institutional scrutiny by people with a professional interest in finding a natural explanation.

Institutionally Verified · Vatican Medical Commission

Case 02

Delizia Cirolli — Ewing's Sarcoma

Diagnosis: Ewing's Sarcoma (Bone Cancer) · Italy, 1970s

Italian teenager Delizia Cirolli was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, an aggressive and often fatal bone cancer. Surgical intervention was considered, but physicians indicated limited prospects for long-term survival. After a pilgrimage to Lourdes, physicians documented an unexpected and complete disappearance of the tumour — confirmed by subsequent imaging and clinical examination.[2]

Her case passed through the Lourdes Medical Bureau's review process, which included cross-examination by specialists who were not party to her care and who had no stake in affirming a miraculous explanation. The Bureau's criteria — confirmed pre-existing diagnosis, complete recovery, lasting recovery, absence of adequate medical explanation — were each satisfied before the case was advanced for further investigation. It is worth repeating that the Bureau formally recognises fewer than 1% of the cases it reviews, which means Delizia's case was not rubber-stamped: it was examined, debated, and then recognised.

Institutionally Verified · Lourdes Medical Bureau

Case 03

Barbara Snyder — Multiple Sclerosis

Diagnosis: Progressive Multiple Sclerosis · United States

Barbara Snyder had been diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis and, by the time of her reported healing, was largely bedridden and dependent on others for basic care. During a Christian prayer meeting she reported an immediate, complete restoration of function. Her neurologists subsequently confirmed that active disease was no longer detectable, and they acknowledged the recovery as medically extraordinary — though they stopped short of attributing it publicly to supernatural cause.[3]

The strength of this case lies in physician acknowledgement of the extraordinary character of the recovery, and in the fact that it is documented by Keener with supporting medical testimony rather than based solely on the patient's account. The limitation is that it did not pass through an independent institutional review body the way the Lourdes or Vatican cases did. Readers should weigh it accordingly.

Documented · Physician Testimony

Case 04

The Lourdes Healings — Cumulative Record

Since 1858 · Approximately 7,000 claims reviewed

Lourdes is treated as a single entry here, not because the individual cases aren't distinctive, but because the cumulative institutional record is itself the argument. Since 1858, roughly 7,000 healing claims have been submitted to the Lourdes Medical Bureau for evaluation. Of those, only 72 have ever been formally recognised as miraculous — a recognition rate well below 1%.[4]

That rejection rate is actually one of the most important data points in this debate. If the Bureau were a credulous body in the business of confirming miracles, the recognised count would be in the thousands. The fact that it is 72 tells you the review is genuinely adversarial. To be recognised, a cure must meet four criteria without exception: the original diagnosis must be confirmed by medical records; the recovery must be complete; it must be lasting; and it must be inexplicable by any known medical process. The 2025 recognition of an Italian woman's recovery from primary lateral sclerosis — a condition with no established course of spontaneous remission — came after sixteen years of investigation. That is not folklore. That is institutional rigour applied to an inconvenient claim.

Institutionally Verified · Lourdes CMIL

Case 05

Ophthalmological Restorations — Vision Healings

Multiple Cases · Various Locations

Keener's two volumes document a recurring category of cases involving sudden restoration of vision in individuals with documented prior blindness or severe visual impairment. The more compelling instances in this category are not self-reported: they are supported by ophthalmologist reports, pre-treatment diagnoses, and in some cases independent witnesses who were present at the moment of recovery.[5]

Not every case in this category is equally compelling. Some are better documented than others. But several remain medically unexplained even after specialist review. The honest summary is that this is a category with a range of evidentiary strength — some cases strong, some thin — and the strongest deserve more attention than they typically receive in popular debates about miracles.

Documented · Varies by Case

Case 06

Mozambique Hearing Restorations — STEPP Field Study

Diagnosis: Profound Deafness · Mozambique, 2010

This case deserves its own entry separate from the broader Keener category because it has something the others in this list rarely have: independent clinical measurement. In 2010, religious studies scholar Candy Gunther Brown published the STEPP study in the Southern Medical Journal, a peer-reviewed medical publication. Using a calibrated audiometer and standardised vision charts, her team tested 24 consecutive Mozambican subjects with documented hearing or vision impairment — before and after they received prayer. Statistically significant improvements were recorded in both auditory function (p<0.003) and visual function (p<0.02).[6]

Brown herself is not an apologist and was careful to acknowledge the study's limitations — small sample size, no randomised control group, field conditions rather than laboratory conditions. She did not claim to have proven the supernatural. What she did demonstrate is that the skeptic's empirical claim — "nobody measures anything like this" — is simply not true.

Peer-Reviewed · Southern Medical Journal

Case 07

Medically Verified Healings at Pentecostal Conferences

Multiple Cases · Tumours, Paralysis, Mobility Restoration

Keener documents cases from Pentecostal and charismatic healing contexts — tumours disappearing between diagnosis and surgery, restoration of mobility following paralysis, and similar recoveries — where medical records from before and after the event are available for scrutiny. Critically, Keener explicitly excluded poorly documented claims from his two volumes and dealt only with cases where the medical paper trail was strong enough to withstand academic review.[7]

The category is harder to evaluate than the Lourdes or Vatican cases because it lacks an independent institutional review body. What it does have is Keener's own scholarly methodology — he is a trained historian who spent years assembling and cross-checking this material — and the underlying medical records he references. It is worth noting that Keener wrote these volumes for a sceptical Western academic audience, not to reassure people who already believe.

Documented · Medical Records Referenced

Case 08

Richard Gallagher's Clinical Cases — Demonic Affliction

25 Years of Clinical Psychiatric Consultation · United States

Richard Gallagher is a board-certified psychiatrist and professor at New York Medical College, trained at Yale and Columbia. For twenty-five years he served as a clinical consultant to Catholic exorcists — brought in not to confirm possession but to rule out psychiatric illness before any ritual was performed. He evaluated hundreds of cases. He concluded that the overwhelming majority were psychiatric in nature. A very small number, he argued, were not.[8]

In those outlier cases, he documents phenomena he was unable to attribute to any psychiatric diagnosis: accurate disclosure of information the subject had no access to, reported speech in languages the subject had never encountered, physical strength disproportionate to body weight exhausting multiple restrainers, and pronounced aversion to sacred objects. Gallagher is careful to say he is not asking anyone to accept Catholic theology. His claim is narrower: these are phenomena that fall outside current psychiatric understanding. Critics dispute his interpretations, and reasonable people can disagree about how much weight to give them. What is not reasonable is dismissing the testimony of a tenured psychiatrist as though he were a credulous village elder.

Clinical Testimony · Board-Certified Psychiatrist

Case 09

Near-Death Experiences with Veridical Perception

Cardiological & Resuscitation Research · Multiple Studies

Near-death experiences are not miracles in the strict biblical sense — they are not claimed healings or restorations of function. What they are, in certain documented instances, is something more philosophically significant: evidence that consciousness appears to continue operating in conditions where neuroscience says it cannot.[9]

Cardiologist Michael Sabom documented patients who accurately reported the details of medical procedures performed on them while they were clinically unconscious — details they could not have known from prior medical exposure. Physician Sam Parnia has led prospective studies investigating reports of conscious awareness during cardiac arrest, including his AWARE studies conducted across multiple hospital sites. Neither Sabom nor Parnia is making a theological claim. What they are doing is producing empirical evidence that challenges the confident materialist assumption that the brain is simply a generator of consciousness that goes dark at death. For the Christian apologist, that is not a proof of the gospel — but it is a crack in the materialist framework that makes miracles philosophically inconceivable in the first place.

Empirically Interesting · Not a Miracle Claim

Case 10

Dr. Chauncey Crandall — Cardiac Resuscitation

Diagnosis: Death by Cardiac Arrest · Florida, 2006

Dr. Chauncey Crandall is a Yale-trained cardiologist in active clinical practice in Palm Beach, Florida. In his book Raising the Dead, he describes in detail a 2006 case in which a 53-year-old patient, Jeff Markin, suffered cardiac arrest, received seven defibrillator shocks without response, was declared dead, and had cyanosis visibly setting into the extremities and face. As the body was being prepared for transport to the morgue, Crandall returned to the room, prayed over the body, and asked a colleague to apply the defibrillator once more. The machine registered a normal heartbeat. Markin began breathing independently, recovered consciousness, and ultimately made a full recovery.[10]

The limitation here is that this is one physician's first-person account, not a multi-doctor adjudicated case file of the Lourdes variety. It is supported by a named patient and a documented clinical timeline, which puts it considerably above rumour. But it has not been independently reviewed by a specialist board, and readers should calibrate their confidence accordingly. What it is, at minimum, is the kind of account a sceptic cannot simply wave away by saying "nobody credible reports this kind of thing." Crandall has reported it, under his own name, to medical audiences, and has not been professionally discredited for doing so.

Single-Source · Named Physician Testimony

"The biblical worldview never promised miracles would be common, predictable, or laboratory-repeatable. It promised they would be real — and the evidence suggests they are."

What to Do With All of This

Ten cases is not a comprehensive survey — Keener's two volumes alone run to more than eleven hundred pages of documentation, and the Lourdes Medical Bureau has produced case files on thousands of claims. But ten specific cases, examined honestly and graded by evidence quality, is enough to put a significant burden of proof back on the person making the "no modern miracles" assertion. They need to explain Sister Simon-Pierre's neurological examinations. They need to address the Lourdes Bureau's 16-year investigation into primary lateral sclerosis. They need to account for statistically significant results in a peer-reviewed journal. They need to respond to a board-certified psychiatrist's 25-year clinical record.

Some of these cases are stronger than others. A single physician's first-hand account is not the same class of evidence as an institutionally verified case file, and conflating the two is a mistake that damages credibility. But even the weaker entries in this list — the single-source physician testimony, the clinical psychiatric notes — are still more than nothing. And the stronger entries, particularly the Vatican-verified and Lourdes-reviewed cases, are precisely the kind of evidence the sceptical framework says shouldn't exist.

To conclude, the biblical worldview never promised miracles would be common, predictable, or laboratory-repeatable. It promised they would occur, attested by reliable witnesses, in a world that otherwise operates on ordinary providence. Reading through these ten cases, that is exactly the pattern to be observed.

Endnotes

1. Sister Marie Simon-Pierre's case is formally documented in the Positio submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in connection with the beatification of John Paul II (2011). See also Craig S. Keener, Miracles Today: The Supernatural Work of God in the Modern World (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), pp. 105–110 for analysis of the medical documentation.
2. Delizia Cirolli's case is listed in the publications of the Lourdes Medical Bureau (Bureau des Constatations Médicales de Lourdes). See also Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), for discussion of the case in the context of documented spontaneous tumour resolution.
3. Barbara Snyder's case is documented in Keener, Miracles, vol. 2. Keener includes reference to physician testimony acknowledging the extraordinary character of her recovery. He gathered this material with specific intent to present it to a sceptical academic audience rather than to a sympathetic popular readership.
4. Official statistics and case criteria are maintained by the Lourdes International Medical Committee (Comité Médical International de Lourdes, CMIL) and the Bureau des Constatations Médicales at lourdes-france.org. The 72nd formally recognised miraculous healing was announced in 2025, concerning an Italian woman's recovery from primary lateral sclerosis following sixteen years of investigation. See also FSSPX News, "Lourdes: A 72nd Miracle Recognized" (July 2025).
5. For ophthalmological case documentation see Keener, Miracles, vol. 2, chapters addressing visual restoration. Keener notes that the most compelling cases in this category are supported by pre-treatment ophthalmologist diagnoses and independent witness corroboration, rather than patient self-report alone.
6. Candy Gunther Brown, Stephen C. Mory, Rebecca Williams, and Michael J. McClymond, "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Proximal Intercessory Prayer (STEPP) on Auditory and Visual Impairments in Rural Mozambique," Southern Medical Journal 103, no. 9 (September 2010): 864–869. PMID: 20686441. Brown conducted the research in her capacity as professor at Indiana University Bloomington and made explicit her methodological limitations, including the absence of a randomised control group.
7. Keener, Miracles, vol. 2. Keener's methodology involved deliberate exclusion of poorly attested claims; he dealt only with cases where medical records or direct physician testimony was available. His academic appointment at Asbury Theological Seminary and his prior work in New Testament studies means his credibility as a historian is staked on this material meeting evidentiary standards.
8. Richard Gallagher, Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolic Attacks, and the Paranormal (New York: HarperOne, 2020). Gallagher is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York Medical College and a faculty member of Columbia University's Psychoanalytic Institute. He has discussed his findings in peer contexts including the Washington Post and the New Oxford Review.
9. Michael Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998); Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (New York: HarperOne, 2013). For the AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) prospective study, see Sam Parnia et al., "AWARE — AWAreness during REsuscitation — A Prospective Study," Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (December 2014): 1799–1805.
10. Chauncey W. Crandall IV, Raising the Dead: A Doctor Encounters the Miraculous (New York: FaithWords, 2010). Crandall is an interventional cardiologist at the Palm Beach Cardiovascular Clinic and has presented the case in Christian medical contexts. The case involves a named patient (Jeff Markin), a documented time of death, and a recorded clinical response. It has not been independently adjudicated by a multi-physician review board.

The Christian Case · rajkumarrichard.blogspot.com