I've been gone....just in case there was more intrest in where this could go....


If something is available that will not cause "pain and suffering" like a radionucleotide/CAT/PET scan or surgery with anesthesia, then yes they could...and do...If something was available that may cause "pain and suffering" without anesthesia, then issues of consent and ethics prevent it being done...unless you advocate family having the capacity to cause "pain and suffering" on someone who cannot consent for themselves....is this the road of science, logic and reasoning?


If we were simply talking about "something" then I would agree...but if the arbiters of the best medical science, logic and reasoning have to offer have "declared" your son "dead" and they were about to harvest his organs and he then grabs the nurses arm as she prepares him for surgery...you might want to call it something....."coincidence" "wonderful" "amazing" would be far to weak a word, IMHO.


I guess by "exonerating" I mean that your comment "I'll investigate further" implies that science will find the answer to this phenomena when there is no evidence it will.

"Science never claims to be right"

Since you have shut the door on any other possibility in this matter....you may never be right.

Human error is a factor in medicine as much as any other profession. As far as the plausability of an error in any given medical situation or setting you must determine the factors and variables involved. Many medical situations and settings give the practitioner a certain lattitude in diagnosis and treatment...but still must be under the umbrella of "standards of care" and "community standards" (not geographical, but professional).

Other medical situations or settings do not give the practitioner ANY lattitude in diagnosis and treatment...brain death determination for organ harvest is one.

Most hospitals use the AAN Guidelines I cited earlier (AAN Guidelines).....the tests must be personally witnessed and attested to by two or more physicians credentialed by their facilities to determine brain death (not just any physician can make this determination, only one trained and credentialed may do so)...some modifications are added making them more stringent in some facilities...like making it three or more physicians, dopplar flow studies, etc.....


Like I said above: Human error is a factor in medicine as much as any other profession. As far as the plausability of an error in any given medical situation or setting you must determine the factors and variables involved. Many medical situations and settings give the practitioner a certain lattitude in diagnosis and treatment...but still must be under the umbrella of "standards of care" and "community standards" (not geographical, but professional).

By lumping "medical professionals" together...the mistakes to which you refer are by EMT/Paramedics, Nursing Assistants, Technicians, Physician Assistants, Liscensed Practical Nurses, Registered Nurses and Physicians. The single error most responsible for patient death is a medication error...either the drug dosage or allergy causes the adverse event....we are not discussing medical practice that has very loose non-binding professional guidelines that do not need concurrence by another peer or more.....but one that has the most strict professional and jurisdictional (UDDA) guidelines that must be witnessed and signed off by two or more brain-death credentialed physicians. Other errors are tragic that may or may not result in death, and certainly not preparation for organ harvest.

A comment like yours above could be construed as an attempt to muddy waters on the practice of brain-death determination by two or more credentialed physicians with simple medication errors by a single nurse.......the entire profession has gone to great lengths to avoid these uninformed assessments.


You have a "Report of Autopsy" you would like to discuss?

What does a man with occlusions to the coronary arteries....who could keel over "for no apparent reason" at any moment look like?

Regis Philbin and David Letterman look pretty healthy to me.

Nice post, Pat, very imformative.

My point is that it seems to be that the nature of a miracle is a rare event. In fact, it needs to be in order for a Miraclist to have any hope of making sense of the world when miracles aren't happening (A miracle, by definition, is something that contradicts the laws of nature.)  If miracles were common (or, as I suggest, wholly absent), then there is no such thing as uniformity in nature: there are no laws of nature, there is just arbitrary events.

So, if a miracle supposedly occurs, it MUST, by definition, be rare - extremely rare.

What I suggest is that before one can claim a miracle occurs, you'd have to examine all the material explanationa: all the laws of nature that are laws for a reason: because they are so damn predictable.

Think of it this way: if God created the Laws of Nature, why would he override them?  If you suggest that he does so for some purpose, then you have entered into wild speculation and a Cartoon Universe.

Even Theists often disregard seemingly miraculous events - in fact, many Xians claim that the age of miracles has passed (are they interpreting the Bible correctly?).

So, can science explain what happened to Zack? It doesn't matter. Something happened, but in order to claim something positively, ou can't just assert something.

And the faith of the parents was the same exact faith of Terri Schaivo.

I am really struggling to see how faith and miracles have any relatioship to reality except as a kind of fairy tale ones tells oneself after the fact.

In a nut shell, you are claiming that if science can't answer it, it must be supernatural. Obviously there is a problem with this.
We dont undertand a lot of things. As I said, we often don't know what kills somone - is that supernatural?
But you add the extra ability to perform an autopsy to learn.

Have you heard of someone coming back to life AFTER an autopsy?

Be very careful that you don't commit the fallacy of Argument from Ignorance.  If we don't know, then we don't know - not "if we don't know, then we know its supernatural".

And as far as science coming up with zilch. This is absolutely untrue. Science has brought more people back from the dead, and has explained what people live and die from than any other method. I'm suprised you have such a low opinion of science.

Are you talking about the few examples in which science couldn't come up with something conclusive? How does this lead to a supernatural event? It doesn't follow.

Remember, you can't hold science up as some sort of absolute perfection - it is a learning process.  I often find that Theists believe that in the absense of a god, there must be some other explanation that is perfect and absolute (notice how all theistic arguments are phrased: "if god doesn't exist, how do you explain X so that it is as fully explained?")  Science and religion have two different directions: religion starts with the belief and then finds the evidence, science observes the evidence and tries to develop a belief.  There is nothing about the scientific method that claims to be absolute knowledge, but that doesn't mean it is flawed - that is its power. It also doesn't mean you insert some claim that is unprovable and expect it to be taken seriously.

No there is no faith meter, does faith have variations?  I am truly beginning to believe that faith can't be explained by the people who claim it is so important.

Lets rewind:

If I say "I have Faith in myself", is this the same as having Faith in a god?  Why?

There doesn't seem to be a need for 'laws' in such a case.  Those who made the declaration were wrong - either they made a mistake, or the AAN Guidelines are insufficiently exact.  I'd go for the latter, if only for the reason that most definitions relying on measurement  of some sort (and that means virtually any definition using human perception or measurement of a biological characteristic!) have an area of vagueness. I mean 'vagueness' in the philosophical way - where you cannot make a distinction between two terms except by some purely arbitrary 'plumping' for a number or measureable means.  And that arbitrariness means that in some cases, at some time, you will be wrong.  The simple example is the Sorites paradox.  You have a heap of sand: take away one grain, is it still a heap? yes.  Take another, is it still a heap? yes, etc, etc.   Where does it stop being a heap?   When does Zack Dunlap stop being 'alive'? Somewhere deep down in his brain was a circuit that could react and fire up his whole being.  And nobody could find it, because the tests just weren't precise enough, detailed enough, appropriate enough.  Doesn't surprise me, I know we don't understand the brain that well.... yet.


The motives of those who design and make the tests and make the declarations are of course only speculation and not really part of the discussion (are they?).  All I can say is that if I were Zack's doctor before his marvellous recovery, I would have felt powerless facing the parents.  And I am sure any normal human would have empathised and been immensely saddened.  But that doesn't alter he fact that following all established procedures, to the current best of our technology, Zack was dead.  The only thing I could offer them would be a hope that somewhere something was wrong, but the probabilities were very, very low.  And after the marvel of his recovery, I would have been as delighted and amazed as them.   

But let's get some things in perspective.   There are few enough 'back-from-the-dead' cases, but are they ALL, in every land, to be associated with some religious faith in the loved ones?  How many Chinese or Russian dead arise?  How can you make a connection between the prayers of Zack's parents and his recovery but not in the cases of other hopeful non-religious loved ones?.

You also say "I think it does matter....you place science above all else and it comes up with zilch in these matters."

But, say, three centuries ago, people were dying by the thousand of hundreds of causes from which an escape was seen as 'miraculous'.  Nowadays a quick shot, or some surgery, performs these miracles as workaday activities - at which you assist.   Science does not come with zilch in these matters, it comes up with cures and technologies and life-enhancing products.  The science was shown to be deficient in the matter of diagnosing the state of Zack Dunlaps brain - and there's the apparent difference of attitude twixt thee and me.  I say that in three centuries (given continued progress as we have experienced) Zack's case would NOT be miraculous, because the diagnosis would not have been 'dead', it would be 'there is a problem at location X, that we can attempt to corrrect by procedure Y'.  But really I think you would say the same, and not 'if you pray, you may get a miracle'.


A final point.  Some years ago I was on a ship in the Arctic.  Suddenly we all saw an iceberg that was a fairy castle - Neuschwanstein, Disneyland and Gormenghast rolled into one.  It was a marvel.  But not a miracle.  The unexpected, the amazing, the fantastic can occur.