Scientific Evidence for Miracles: Lee Strobel

There have been other studies. My favorite one was done by a PhD from Harvard who's a professor at Indiana University She heard and this is a trend that we see we see often miracles breaking out in clusters around the planet

Where the gospel is just breaking into a new place. And so there were taught there was talk of Miracles takes place in Mozambique.

So she said I'm gonna study this so she did a study that really makes sense

Scientifically, she sent a team of researchers to Mozambique. They went into the remote villages

They said bring us your deaf and blind So they brought people who were deaf and blind and a very significant hearing loss and vision loss first thing this team did is they

Scientifically tested them to determine what is their level of vision? What is their level of of hearing?

And so they they did scientific tests to determine that then Immediately they were prayed for by people who have a track record of God using them in this area

Hands were laid on them. They were prayed for in the name of Jesus and then immediately

Afterwards they were tested again to see is there any difference in Their vision or their hearing and guess what they found in virtually every case there was improvement

In fact, the average improvement in visual acuity was tenfold

There was a woman named Martine as an example Martine was so hard of hearing that when they tested her they found

Scientifically that she could not hear the equivalent of a jackhammer next to her

Oh, wow after prayer in the name of Jesus she could now hear normal conversations

Well, they were so blown away by the this result that they said we've got to see if they we can replicate this

They went to another place where there is where the gospel is now breaking in which is areas of Brazil They did the same experiment.

Guess what? They found the same results. Now. This is a Scientifically rigorous study that it was accepted for publication in a secular scientific peer -reviewed medical journal the

Southern Medical Journal and I'll read to you if I can find it here the quote from the professor from Indiana University She said quote our study shows that something is going on.

This is more than just wishful thinking It's not fakery. It's not fraud. It's not some

Televangelist trying to get widows to send in their money. It is not a highly charged atmosphere that plays on people's emotions

Something she said is going on now as a social science researcher. She couldn't

Declare that it was a miracle, right? But I'm willing to say I think something supernatural is going on and then another kind of test

Our scientific study that's being done They're being published in again peer -reviewed medical journals that take a different approach

They're called case studies and what these case studies do is they document scientifically the evidence prior to prayer and the

I and the and then the way they document the prayer itself and then they Document the evidence after the prayer to show that something apparently took place now

I'll give you the one that was just published recently this within the last few weeks in a peer -reviewed medical journal

This is a study of a woman who for over a dozen years was blind.

She had juvenile macular degeneration She was educated in a school for the blind.

She walked with a white cane and she read Braille now she married a Baptist pastor and One night they were in their room at night and he

They got very emotional and they started to cry and he prayed and he laid hands on her and he prayed and he said

God I know you have the power to heal her right now to heal her tonight I pray that you will and she opened her eyes and and I'll read you her quote.

She said I was blind when my husband prayed for me then just like this in a moment after years of darkness

I could see perfectly it was miraculous within seconds My life had radically changed and I could see

I could see now. This has been 47 years Since this incident happened and her vision remains a great to this day so here we have a case study published as I say in a peer -reviewed medical journal that Documents what happened the medical evidence before and the medical evidence afterward now

Can you say it's a coincidence? Yeah, I suppose you could make that claim. But golly, that's kind of a hard claim to maintain

In the life of the evidence and then there's another one that happened that was published in another peer -reviewed medical journal recently another case study of a man who had

Gastroparesis which meant that for a period of 16 years He had two feeding tubes

Inserted into him so he could eat Of course, it's a very disruptive to his life.

This is since childhood since he was an infant and He went for church a prayer in a church hands were laid on him

He was prayed for he said he felt an electric shock go through his body and he was instantly healed

This is by the way a condition like the juvenile macular degeneration For which there are no cases that I can find in any medical journal of any spontaneous healing of these illnesses and yet he was

Spontaneously healed the feeding tubes have been removed and now it's been seven years and he's still perfectly healthy so again

Scientists are trying to address these issues by trying to investigate Claims of miracles and try to document them

And we're seeing more and more of this and I think there's a very positive trend and your book the case for miracles