Miracles

O’Dorney and I discovered we share a common view about an aspect of our faith: the preponderance of well-documented miracles of the Catholic Church sets it apart from all other religions.

Part of the reason I agreed to this interview is that you put together Marian apparitions, Eucharistic miracles, and demonic possession, which in theology would be minor details in three separate classes. I really sympathize with that—putting those three things together—because they’re all evidence that science isn’t enough. In our age, science has advanced tremendously, but there’s a lot of scientism [the belief that science is the only legitimate path to knowledge], and yet there’s always this fascination with the supernatural or the paranormal as well.

I have to say the miracles did play a major role [in my faith]. For instance, when I first heard about Medjugorje, even though it hasn’t been fully approved by the Church—it’s a step-by-step process—it was like, wow, there’s a large-scale report of miracles taking place in our own time. It’s happening in the Catholic faith, and no other religion has anything comparable to this. So I got interested in that.

O'Dorney is referring to Medjugorje, a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Marian apparitions have been reported since the 1980s. The Church has indeed not yet approved the authenticity of the apparitions, but in September 2024, it approved devotions linked to Medjugorje thanks to the unusually high volume of spiritual conversions that have taken place among visitors to the site.

But I challenged him: What about the common argument that miracles are improbable, and that natural explanations are more probable than the occurrence of miracles? He responded:

It all depends on your starting point, doesn’t it? If you start out by just observing the laws of physics and knowing that they imply that it’s astronomically improbable for a dead body to recover its living state, then your conclusion will be that the resurrection was faked somehow. But if you step out of the physical and the mathematical, and if your heart is open to reading in history a story of God’s search for man—a story arc spanning many millennia—then you see that we could never have written it any better than He did.

Here O’Dorney is citing a thought often attributed to C.S. Lewis: “Every other religion is the story of man’s search for God; but Christianity is the story of God’s search for man.”

I speak of stepping out of mathematics because this is also how I was able to appreciate music better. Some say that Bach’s music is the most mathematical, and it’s true there are some numerological designs in some compositions. When he writes triple fugues, taking three themes and permuting them in all six ways, there’s a mathematical design, but that doesn’t explain all the notes he wrote, especially in some pieces. Stepping back, you realize there’s emotion to it—movements of the heart. “Emotion” is an approximate word here, as we use it to describe states like happiness and sadness that are more lasting, but even a rise or fall in a melody says something that speaks to the heart.

I then mentioned to him that a childhood friend of mine had insisted miracles are not worth believing without a double- or triple-blind study, and asked for his thoughts on the matter. O’Dorney explained:

If you try to set up something like a double-blind study of miracles, you're trying to say that they consistently happen. By definition, they don’t; they’re gifts from God to particular people, and you can’t anonymize [them]. … Many people go to Lourdes to get healed; they say they were crippled, then throw away their crutches, and you can find many discarded crutches… If your heart is open, you see this as a lot of evidence. And ditto, when people study things like the Shroud of Turin and the tilma of Guadalupe, they find strange things; [for example] the tilma has colors but tested negative for known dyes. In that sense, you’re using the methods of science to come to a conclusion: there’s no physical explanation under what’s currently known for what happened, and that’s about as far as science can get, because science by its nature has to be open to new discoveries.

Philosophy

When I asked O’Dorney to share what role philosophy played in forming his faith, he responded:

As far as philosophy goes, I've never been into philosophy a lot; neither has my family. If my mom and I tried to read a philosophy book, we’d be looking at each other and shaking our heads. We’re just not versed in that language, and I’m picking it up bit by bit. On the other hand, the fact that works like the Summa Theologiae [a 13th century work by St. Thomas Aquinas] exist and that someone could go through, ask a bunch of questions, and lay out the answers in logical order gives me a lot of faith too. Not all religions are philosophically equally coherent. For instance, the story of Scott Hahn, who tried to write something like the Summa for Protestantism and was led to a crisis, is a powerful witness.

Scott Hahn is a former Presbyterian pastor who experienced a change of heart similar to O’Dorney’s. Hahn converted to Catholicism after his theological research convinced him that the Catholic stance on sexual morality was the most consistent with divine law, and he went on to become a prominent Catholic theologian. His wife Kimberly Hahn, despite her initial struggles with Catholic doctrines, eventually came to the same conclusions and became a Catholic apologist and author.

O’Dorney continued:

In math, there’s something analogous. Something like the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem or the classification of finite simple groups are huge projects that have been carried out, and research builds on itself from century to century, from decade to decade, and people solve problems. That pattern is what you expect in a field based on something real, where the results are true. Obviously, there are mistakes in math—people write up proofs, even get them into print, and it turns out there are errors—but the errors do get corrected. It’s not a field with a constant rechallenging of basic assumptions, [unlike] philosophy or even economics.