¶1Hey everyone. In this video, I want to talk to you guys about a medically documented case of a miraculous healing. Personally, I think the argument from miracles is a way bigger deal than a lot of people realize. When we usually hear the word miracle, we imagine some vague story with no records, no witnesses, and no way to check what really happened. But in this video, I want to talk about a case involving years of documented illness, numerous doctors, multiple witnesses, and a recovery so sudden that ordinary naturalistic explanations look extremely strange.
¶2And the reason why I want to talk about this is this particular case played a role in the recent conversion of Joe Schmid. You know Joe Schmid, Majesty of Reason, Joe Schmid, Joe Schmid going to Princeton getting his PhD in philosophy. That Joe Schmid, he's super well known on the internet as one of the agnostic guys that Christians love because he gives arguments for God a pretty fair shake. But atheists love him too because he ultimately rejects these arguments. But he recently became Catholic and he said that evidence for miracles was a huge part of his journey.
¶3And I wanted to look at one case that he mentioned. He didn't mention Barbara Snyder by name, but we're going to talk about her case because he did describe it. She heard a booming voice on the inside and it said, "My child, get up and walk." And she walked. And so I want to lay out what reportedly happened and look at the main natural explanations and ask which explanation actually makes the most sense. So what was wrong with Barbara?
¶4Well, she had 16 years of decline which came first. So in the mid-60s she was in her mid- teens and she developed coordination problems, blurred vision, later spinal taps and clinical findings supported that she had multiple scerosis. Progressive multiple scerosis wasn't good. In 1978, she went to the Mayo Clinic and if you're going to the Mayo Clinic, you know things are usually bad. The second opinion produced no treatment that stopped the decline.
¶5Breathing, vision, mobility, bowel and bladder function greatly worsened. And by the time she was 31 in 1981, she was in hospice care. She was bedridden, severely contracted, dependent on a tracheosttomy and oxygen, and expected to die the next time that she got sick, basically. So, multiple body systems had failed. Her doctor said that Barbara was one of the most hopelessly ill patients that he had ever seen.
¶6Again, her breathing was terrible. She was on a TRA on continuous oxygen. She had 50% of one side of her lung and that was it. The other side was collapsed. Her mobility was terrible.
¶7She had been unable to walk for years. She had dropped feet, severe contractions. She was a mess. Vision, she was blind except for small areas in each eye. Digestion, well, her gastrointestinal system was paralyzed.
¶8She relied on an ilostomy and her bladder was nonfunctional. She was on a permanent catheter. So, she was in rough rough shape. Craig [snorts] Kener summarizes it like this in his book, Miracles Today. In her words, she was wrapped up like a pretzel.
¶9Her feet pointed down, unable to rest flat against the floor, even had someone try to stand her up. Her arms remained tight against her chest. Normally, when anyone had tried to pull one of her arms away from her body, it would automatically clamp back against her chest. Her hands curled up against the inside of her wrist, leaving them full of dead skin, except when periodically someone would pry them open to clean them out. And so, just a rough rough condition.
¶10But on June 7th, 1981, which was Pentecost Sunday, two friends from Barbara's church had come to visit her and were reading after 450 letters were poured in of people who said that they were praying for Barbara. What had happened was is WMBBI, the radio station run by Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, aired a prayer request for her. And people were praying and they were sending in letters and her friends were reading her these letters to encourage her. And while they were reading, Barbara reported hearing a booming voice saying, "My child, get up and walk." She told her friends that God commanded her to walk. And she asked them to quick, you know, go get my family.
¶11But before they could get back, she was just too excited. She got out of bed and began walking. And this is where the account gets actually like really crazy. Her feet were so badly deformed that she couldn't even wear slippers. But now she noticed that they were flat on the ground.
¶12That was the first thing that she noticed, oddly enough. But then she also realized, wait a second, I can actually see my feet and I can actually breathe. I can move. I can walk normally. And she noticed that even her leg muscles were an attribute.
¶13So all of this was instantaneous and it included witnesses, her friends, and her family. Now, this is her doctor's note. And I understand that this is an upload and it's blurry and it's from the 80s. And I'm not going to read the entire thing here, but if you want to screenshot it and, you know, zoom in or ask AI to read it for you, that's totally fine. But I'm just going to read the bottom half here because basically it just repeats all the symptoms that she had that I already discussed.
¶14But basically, this is Dr. Harold laid off saying that the patient now has none of the findings of multiple scerosis that she's walking normally that the TRA tube is out but she has no pulmonary problems and she's just anxious for her wounds for her ilostomy and tra to be closed and then he says that at the present time she has no findings of MS walks normally speaks normally and is very happy as is her family over the obvious answer to prayer in the good hand of God in her life and we have multiple doctors testimony it's not just Adolf here we also have Dr. Thomas Marshall who says, "I've never witnessed anything like this before since and consider it a rare privilege to observe the hand of God performing a true miracle." Barb has gone on to live a normal life in every way. And we have Dr. Donald Edwards, a family practitioner, who says that there is no medical test to explain what's happened.
¶15There's no neurological trace of the problem. The proof is time. Well, that proved out. Barbara died in 2021 at the age of 71 after a 3-week illness. Her obit doesn't identify MS as the cause.
¶16She lived 40 years without reported MS occurrence. And so she went on to live a normal life. So this wasn't a brief remission followed by a relapse. This was something that was permanent. And so now, how could a skeptic explain what happened to Barbara?
¶17Now, we have to keep in mind that each proposal here, it has to explain the whole pattern of evidence, not just one piece of it. And so let's talk about some of the alternatives here. There are four main natural explanations. First, you got fraud. Maybe Barbara really never was sick.
¶18But that would require several doctors, years of medical records, Mayo Clinic visits, invasive procedures, a breathing tube, and her whole family and friends to be part of the pointless conspiracy. She gained nothing from spending years uh claiming to be blind, bedridden, and dependent on constant care. I mean, is this technically possible? I suppose maybe, but the odds of it are not a safe way to bet. Second, maybe her symptoms were psychossematic, but that doesn't explain the objective physical problems.
¶19A paralyzed diaphragm, a collapsed lung, tracheosttomy, and ilostomy, incontinence, and severe contraur. Her condition also developed gradually over many years, and spinal taps supported the MS diagnosis. They had tests. We know that this is what she had. Third, people might say, well, maybe she was just misdiagnosed and whatever she had actually just kind of cleared up on its own.
¶20Well, misdiagnosis is always possible, especially when we're dealing with older records, but it doesn't solve the main problem. Whatever the disease was called, she was still gravely ill. We need some explanation for why her sight, breathing, movement, and ability to walk reportedly returned altogether at once. Ordinary neurological recovery usually unfolds gradually over weeks, but months. It doesn't restore years of lost function all at once.
¶21Well, what about spontaneous remission? That might be the strongest natural explanation because MS can go into remission, but this doesn't look like an ordinary remission. The recovery was reportedly immediate, involved several different body systems, restored her ability to walk despite years of muscle wasting, and lasted roughly four decades without a reported recurrence. It also happened during a context of prayer and immediately after she claimed to hear, "My child, get up and walk." And so, none of this makes miracle a medical diagnosis, but it's the basic facts. All right, guys.
¶22I mean, fraud, psychosmatic illness, misdiagnosis, spontaneous remission, they all leave major parts of the case unexplained. And so, the best explanation is that something supernatural happened. Now, immediately skeptics are going to jump up and go, well, [snorts] okay, well, why Barbara and not everybody else? There's kids with pancreatic cancer in hospitals right now. Why doesn't God heal them, too?
¶23Well, here's the thing. The problem of suffering, it's already a live issue for theism. Theists actually have categories to explain suffering like soul building, free will, or if you're a Christian, maybe spiritual warfare, man's fallen nature. And the fact that God will eventually defeat evil at the end. And so, the existence of some miracles doesn't make the problem worse.
¶24It just shows that God isn't completely absent, which contradicts the skeptic. The naturalist, he doesn't have really any resources to solve this problem. So yeah, I don't think this is a very good hey look over there type of argument. It's just more of a distraction. Well, what about the idea that hey testify?
¶25Come on. Miracle claims they happen in lots of religions. This doesn't prove that Christianity is true. Okay, fine. It doesn't by itself prove that Christianity is true.
¶26But show me one this well attested in a non-Christian setting. And Barbara's case is just one of many. I've talked about other miracle testimonies on this channel before. Also, I'm not a Catholic, but I do accept some Roman Catholic claims, like many of the Lord's miracles, which is something that Joe mentioned in his video. A lot of those are highly investigated and pass a very high criteria.
¶27One example of that is Sister Bernardet Marose healing from coda aquina, a nerve and lower spy disorder. Again, I've talked about that in another video. I can't really explain that one away. Even if it doesn't neatly map onto my theology. So if miracles happen in other religions, say Islam or I don't know, Hinduism, then I want to know that.
¶28Show me. And I will say this, if miracles like this were happening in Islam, don't you think every da guy on the planet would be lining up to tell us about it? But instead, no. we get like, "Oh, look at the number 19 in the Quran or you know, Muhammad is in the Bible or look at these scientific miracles and all this other goofy stuff that these Dao guys come up with." And so, yeah, you can't really accuse me of special pleading. And the fact is is that there's lots of miracles in a Christian context, whereas there's not well attested miracles in really any other context.
¶29And so, now someone might say, "Well, weird things happen. Barbara was just lucky. But the odds of all symptoms reversing simultaneously are extremely low. It's like winning the grand prize jackpot in a major national lottery three weeks in a row with just buying a single ticket each time. Well, confirmed miracles aren't really that uncommon.
¶30Also, as I already said, they're not one in a billion events. There are many examples that Kenir has documented in his book uh the book that he was showing you when I had that slide up earlier. And so, yeah, like this isn't just a a one-time freak kind of a thing. Also, many features of the Snyder case just aren't unlikely. They're completely medically inexplicable.
¶31They should happen zero times. That's the point. That's why we're saying there is no explanation for it is because it shouldn't happen at all, especially with all the occurrences stacked together. And there are no other recorded instances of all MS symptoms vanishing immediately in a case this severe. So to wrap up here, critics basically say that there are no verified miracles today.
¶32So when we look at the Bible, when we look at Jesus cleansing lepers and opening the eyes of the blind and causing the lame to walk, come on, we know that we're dealing with miracles. But guess what? Miracles do happen sometimes. And the best attested cases, where do they come from? They come from Christian context.
¶33This is totally incompatible with atheism. And we can't just call the Gospels unhistorical just because they have miracles. And so I hope this video was helpful for you guys and thank you again so much for watching.