Chase Kear’s odds were not good. He was pole vaulting when he fell on his head. Doctors said his brain was swelling and they would need to remove some of his skull. They feared either the surgery or an infection would kill him.
And yet, he survived.
A couple hundred years ago he would have been dead — doctors would not have been able to perform the surgery nor could they have fought the infection he had. Thanks to modern medicine, he had a chance to survive.
The Woo Begins
But that’s not how area Catholics see it. Chase’s mother said:
“Chase survived in part because hundreds of people prayed to Father Emil Kapaun to intercede on his behalf. It was absolutely a miracle.”
Did you catch that? Because some people prayed to a dead priest, Chase survived.
In fact the church is so serious about this being a miracle that they are officially “investigating” it:
Prompted in part by what the Kear family has said publicly, and partly by a preliminary investigation begun by the Catholic Diocese of Wichita, a Vatican investigator named Andrea Ambrosi will arrive from Italy in Wichita on Friday….
Ambrosi, a lawyer by training, is coming here to thoroughly “and skeptically” investigate whether Chase’s story is a miracle, said the Rev. John Hotze, the judicial vicar for the Wichita diocese. The church requires miracles to elevate a person to sainthood.
I can’t wait to see his “skeptical” report. Somehow, I think we have different definitions of what that means.
Is It a Miracle?
The entire idea of this being a miracle is ridiculous. No matter how you look at it, Chase survived only because he lived in a time when there was modern medicine. He was rushed to a hospital on a helicopter — without that, he likely would have died before a doctor could have reached him. He had surgery and part of his skull removed. He was given antibiotics and other medicines.
A miracle is when the impossible happens — it’s something supernatural. A miracle is not when doctors save a man’s life — that’s science.
A miracle is when a man with his head cut off comes to life after a week of being dead. It’s when a leg grows back in a few seconds. But, of course, those sorts of things don’t really happen. They’re impossible.
So we’re left with two options. We can believe Chase survived based on the prayers of some Catholics to a dead priest. Or we can believe he survived because he lived in a time with modern medicine and was close enough to get to skilled doctors before he was dead.
No one is stubborn enough to believe only the first option — they must give at least some credit to those who saved Chase’s life.
But if they do that, then there’s no way of knowing how much the prayer helped, if it helped at all. We all know doctors and medicine save lives. Nobody knows if prayer helps anything.
Not a Miracle, But That’s Okay
There’s no reason to think this is a miracle, except in the sense of it being amazing and unlikely. But there is no evidence of any involvement of a deity, or some magical powers in mumbling words.
There is only evidence of humans helping their fellow humans. Not a miracle, but good enough for me.
Is it amazing? Yes. Miracle – no. In a time when doctors have the time, skill, and means to attempt to save someone’s life after such a serious injury even it’s unlikely they can, there will be statistical outliers, x% survival. Science and medicine improves through doing, finding cases and working them over and over, documenting their cases in journals and other doctors researching and finding similar cases of their own from time to time. It was seriously… that’s how medicine freakin’ works. Try what you can, develop new techniques, publish. That’s how fatal conditions become survivable.
I wonder how doctors feel when the families of the people they have healed attribute all their hard work (and years of study) to a mythological creature and the Power of Nothing (prayer).
And yet, when the doctors are unable save the patient, the family does not get upset with God…they sue the pants off of the doctors/hospitals.
Shit in one hand and pray in the other. See which fills up first.
Of course, the Catholic Church will invoke the “sign of contradiction” clause, which is an official church policy that the more their detractors disagree with them, the more they believe that they are doing the right thing. (For example, sainthood for Mother Teresa, a woman who gave sick people little more than a place to suffer and die.)
And, you know, the whole Crusades thing. Everyone disagrees with that, so it must be right?
This explains why they’re hiding child molesters.
How in heck is that even a logical position? By that execrable attempt at logic, the more people say the world is round (even going so far as to show me pictures of a pretty freakin’ round Earth), I can say, “Nay! For thou that disagreest with me proveth that I am verily correct!”
I’m surprised the U.S. is still foundering over a national health care system; prayer obviously works. Think of all the money they could save to invade another sovereign nation who doesn’t pray the right way?
What would happen if a believer prayed to satan to save a person’s life? Would it still be a miracle if satan intervened? If not, what is it called?
Not Satan, but pagan:
Wicca teacher claims lottery win
I guess it’s all Satan to Christians.
Never ceases to piss me off that, according to fundies, all of your years of training and hard work in whatever you specialise in mean nothing – no, you’re not a great surgeon because of the three years at college, six years at medical school and five years as a surgical intern. You’re a great surgeon because God wants you to be.
Bullshit. Bullshitbullshitbullshit. If God really existed (in the commonly accepted definition of an all-powerful being) and he wanted somebody to be a great surgeon, he could just zap the requisite skills and knowledge into them. But he doesn’t.
Fundies devalue your achievements. Resent them.
Ah yes. I didn’t pass an extremely difficult exam because I studied for two years; it’s because God wanted me to work there. Obviously. And to waste two years of my life while at it.
Yes. I’m guessing a lot of people gave God credit when a bible in a man’s pocked prevented a bullet from entering far enough to kill him, but not a word of praise to the Apple Mac God when an iPod conducted enough lightning to save a young woman from being killed by a lightning strike.
Damn biased irrational imbecilic pre-biased head-in-the-ass quarter-wit simpletons.
Only part of the article is shown here. One of the parts that was left out were statements from the doctor who did the surgery on him. This surgeon didn’t expect him to survive and he also called it a miracle!
Even if I believed in miracles, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want this to be one. The implications are too terrible. People pray to a dead priest so God steps in and saves a pole vaulter’s life, but millions of children around the world die every year from preventable diseases like tuberculosis, or just from drinking unsafe water.
Yeah, I’ll pass on that idea of a “loving God”.
If this “save” really was down to God, that does raise an interesting point: Why did he let the guy land on his head in the first place?!
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
Hey God! A bunch of people are asking me to ask you to heal this kid who landed on his head. So…will you do it?
Well since you’re so special, OK.
In another part of town Maria lies in a hospital bed with final stage cancer. Unfortunately, she does not have lots of friends praying to a special dead priest.
It might have been a bit more miraculous if the poor boy had woken suddenly in the middle of surgery and gotten up off the operating table bathed in a brilliant golden glow of sparkling light as his fresh cuts healed before everyone’s eyes. Then he might have strolled out onto the helipad and begun to flap his arms faster than a hummingbird’s wings and fly across the nation to spread the news of his sudden and miraculous transformation as cash for the poor materialized in his armpits and fluttered down to the bankrupt masses below.
Instead, he went through major surgery and spent time in a coma and received a lot of rehabilitation therapy and is still on the road to full recovery. Who knows how long it will take or if he will ever fully regain every last little thing he lost in the accident. Why would God perform such a partial miracle and need so much human help in doing so? Perhaps the real miracle takes place every time someone pole vaults and does not get injured, or perhaps it’s a miracle so many people even believe in stupid miracles.
I hope Chase Kear makes a full recovery and does not suffer the myriad of lifetime after effects which often plague victims of serious head trauma. I live with someone who suffered a very similar injury by flying through the t-roof of a Trans Am and skidding on his head down the pavement for about 120 feet. He had a very similar operation and he also “miraculously” survived when the odds were clearly against him. One by one the problems began popping up — tremors, short term memory loss, loss of balance, chronic pain, personality changes and emotional disorders — and they have only gotten progressively worse over the years. It isn’t pretty. Where is our miracle? Is living like this really better than death? I often wonder, and I know I don’t believe in miracles.
A Team of Medical Professionals and their Tools = A Miracle
They’re the same thing really.
There is only evidence of humans helping their fellow humans. Not a miracle, but good enough for me.
Very clever line, Daniel. It’s gotten me to thinking this morning… good way to start the week!
No doubt there’ll be some who claim that God worked his miracle through the doctors.
Which does make God look rather capricious and indifferent when we take into account all the thousands of patients who die every day on the operating table. But I suppose Christians are used to this kind of God, to the point where they see such fickle behavior as simply a confirmation of His divine nature.
Dr. House would be so pissed.
Haha, he certainly would. I reckon House could have saved this guy =]
I’m very glad to hear he survived. People love to give themselves credit for helping others. If praying to a dead priest to help save an injured man helps people feel good about themselves … whatever. Nothing but harmless crazy babbling.
Hail modern medicine, full of grace.
Our Doctor is with thee.
Blessed art thou among nurses,
and blessed is the fruit of thy surgery.
Miracle or not, it’s a great story of survival in the face of tragedy. Helping prove the strength of man and science in a godless world.
I work in a hospital and hear this all day long. ALL DAY LONG!! (yes, that was shouting). “God is so great” and “it wasn’t us, it was god” and “god was with me in the operating room” or my personal favorite, “god answered our prayers”
Apparently my education and skill count for nothing according to christians. If I would have known that, I’d have skipped school all together and just taken the nursing boards without prep- god would have obviously guided me through them.
I wish I could say to all religious patients or their relatives before I treat them: “Shall I leave this up to God, or do you want me, a human being, to do it?”
Yeah, if they thought it was the prayer responsible, why’d they bother with the surgery?
I wonder, if Saul of Tarsus (later known as St. Paul) had had this surgery available, he might not have heard a voice in his head (Why do you persecute me?) and xtianity as we know it would never have emerged.
I’ve always thought that prayer was selfish. I mean, if you are praying to this god who is all powerful, omnipotent, and knows everything, then why bother praying for something that could very well go against the will of this god?
I think most people turn out to be very self-centered and it’s the basis of religion. The mental process: Not only did this god create everything I see, he created everything I can’t see and yet, because I have no better way to explain it to myself or others, I experience his presence; he has time just for me.
I don’t necessarily think people pray favor their needs over someone truly in need. God is a multi-tasker. I don’t really have the mind of a religious person but as an atheist, I feel that the world spins for everybody and I can only concentrate on me, or better stated, I only have power and control over myself, and only so far at that. If god was watching everything on the megatube, and I think he sees me, and he’s going to do his will either way, and I have no power, and you have to admit even the surgeons and other medical professionals don’t have complete power over the situation, praying is the literal most anyone who is not in the operating room can do. To pass the time, and remind god you are faithful in case he thought you might doubt that he was the one in control. Of course, if you have the time, and maybe even the religious consider it a waste of time, ironically, you can ask god to focus his attention on others. However, I more likely think that even the prayerful are not asking god to drop whatever he’s doing and come over here and take a look at this. He’s doing everything all at once, even if he’s doing a shitty job of it. That’s called his “will” and to comfort ourselves, we imagine he has a “reason” we cannot understand.
In one sense, I give credit to the surgeons and the advances of medicine, but the ailment has an unknowable power to go either way too. The part where it’s a miracle is a lot too much. The injury had just enough less than the surgeons had for them to succeed with their skill and timing. Everything that happens, any way it happens has a “size,” I’ll call it. It’s the coincidences where people almost have a fatal accident vs. the ones who get in the way a second too late or early at just the right speed and angle.
Last year, I fell on the last step getting off the bus and the very point of my elbow caught the stair very hard. It hurt worse than anything ever has in a long time and I couldn’t extend my arm. I was sure my bone fragmented. A couple hours in the ER, and it was merely bruised. My sister had a similar injury, I believe she tripped on the cuff of her pants with the heel of her shoe and broke the bone. Miracle? No doctor healed my arm, but a combination of factors coincided to keep my elbow from breaking but not my sister’s. It’s just that people have selfish areas of concern and limited areas of power. God is supposed to worry about the rest so I can take care of me.
…no offence meant, but this is quite a veritable wall of text!
In the past, miracles involved turning a bigass river into blood, parting the seas, rising the dead, stopping the sun in the middle of the sky.
Today, anything good but unlikely that happens is a miracle.
Clearly, miracles are devaluing.
I think that’s why we can actually trust the ‘investigator’ to be skeptical: The Catholic Church can’t have everyone and their grandmother thinking that miracles are things which are possible through medical science. They need to save that qualification for much bigger and harder-to-explain situations.
This trend was spotted 30 years ago:
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78oupdate.phtml
I have a phone that makes calls without being tethered to a–what do they call it?–land line. It’s a miracle!
Isn’t Wichita also also the home of the Phelps nutjobs and the Westboro Baptist church? Someone should check if there something in the air that breed crazy.
When someone says that something like this is a miracle I always wonder why just that one person when thousands of others die. I hear people claiming how people survive car wrecks are miracles yet they don’t look into how reaction time and training of first responders have save these lives.
Because if everyone were protected, it wouldn’t be a miracle. It would just be the natural order of things. A very mysterious natural order, where living human tissue is far more resilient than science would expect, but a natural order nonetheless. So you see, God has to let the ninety-nine die, in order for the one to know he got lucky.
(I’m not entirely sure whether the answer I just gave was meant to be sarcastic.)
Many of we free people are aware of the website dedicated to why the big sky daddy doesn’t heal amputees – never has; isn’t presently;, never will. At this time, there are scientists working on how to regenerate lost limbs, and it is a fact that they are having success initially. It is expected that it will not be too far into the future that they, scientists and not an imaginary god, will be able to announce to the world, Christians included, that they have developed a method to regenerate limbs that people have lost. My guess is that Christians will knock each other over trying to get to the front of the line! Suggested reading: Mark Twain’s ‘Letters From the Earth’.
so i think that most of you need to hear the real story before you comment. you can’t take the media seriously. first i had almost no heartbeat on the field, then they told my parents that i was not going to make it through the night. not even a slim chance, a NO! i lived. then i was never supposed to wake up. institutionalize for the rest of my life. but i woke up and less than a week later, i walked. they put me in rehab for less than a month! i relearned everythin, eating, walking, even talking, in less than a month! now im back to 100%! i even pole vault from time to time. im the pole vault coach at the college for christ sake! none of the doctors, top ppl in there fields, have any explanation for why im still alive, much less that im where i am today! figure it out for yourself! I WAS DEAD! NO HEARTBEAT! belive what you want. im not here to convince you of anything. just get your facts right and ill belive what i want.
Yes, I know what the symptoms of a sub-arachnoid haemorrhage are. You got lucky. Your assertion that “none of the doctors, top ppl in there fields, have any explanation for why im still alive” is an out-and-out load of bullshit. You’re not the first to make a full recovery from that kind of injury by a long way, and you won’t be the last.
“I WAS DEAD! NO HEARTBEAT!” – Yes, it happens. It’s called a cardiac arrest. I’ve seen quite a lot of people come back from that state. Often I’ve been one of the people that helped them do it. Neither Gawd-uh nor Jeeeeeezus-uh has never noticeably been present at the time.
So yeah. Believe what you want. But don’t be surprised when one of the people who actually saved your life tells you to go f*ck yourself for giving credit for their work to your mystical sky-daddy.
Doctors made an incorrect estimation of someone’s chances for survival, therefore, god.
Hey, look, a new logical fallacy!
People survive after having had no heartbeat all the time. Like, every day it happens. Probably in every hospital every day. It’s called modern medical care. Funny how this miracle didn’t happen before medicine got really good.
If it was a Real Miracle ™ you wouldn’t have to relearn ANYTHING.
Why are all of you so angry?
I don’t know. Why are you such a troll?
Who’s angry? Skeptical does not equal angry.
Stop stalking me Ty :-p
Puppies.
Why are you so concerned?