Final thoughts on the Barbara Snyder miracle
Even more skeptical considerations
After reading Bentham's Bulldog’s piece on the purportedly miraculous instant-healing of Barbara Snyder’s multiple sclerosis, I did my best to do some skeptical research and came away fairly baffled. Since then, I have done a little more digging and uncovered some evidence that makes me further doubt the existence of a true miracle.
Dr. Harold Adolph
Three doctors attested to Barbara’s recovery: Dr. Adolph, Dr. Marshall, and Dr. Edwards. Only one—Dr. Adolph—has published much material beyond this specific miracle. And published he has. Dr. Adolph has had an incredible life of mission work, mostly across the less developed world, and none of the foregoing is to imply that he is a quack or not an accomplished surgeon. He has published at least half a dozen different books, mostly self-published, all with heavy religious themes. Not only does Dr. Adolph think Barbara was healed by a Christian miracle, he attests to many—at least a dozen, probably more—healing miracles, to the point of arguing that Christian faith and prayer are important contributors to physical health. As far as I know, there is absolutely zero evidence that Christianity specifically (rather than spirituality in general) is associated with better health outcomes. Adolph writes in his self-help book Stop Making Yourself Sick: “As a rule, I’m willing to argue that [non-Christians’] physical health probably will not be as good as a Christian’s.”1 The book is interspersed with Bible verses, and this is a theme of Adolph’s work.
Now that I own six Adolph books that I had to buy second-hand (they’re all long out of print), I can tell you that his bar for what he considers a miracle is on the floor. Examples include:
He was lost in the NYC subway and a tall Black guy helped him get home2
A friend agreed to lend him his Mercedes temporarily3
His son got a tuition scholarship to attend University4
He ruptured a kidney and recuperated without the need for surgery5
His University refunded a $10 deposit intended to replace broken glass in the Chemistry lab
His books are chock full of many small and large positive events that he identifies as acts of God. Because he has lived a life centering his Christian faith, he sees Jesus in everything good that happens.
All this is to say—Dr. Adolph is not some skeptical doctor, baffled by an immediate recovery that he cannot ascribe to modern medicine. Dr. Adolph believed in miracles, especially healing miracles, long before he met Barbara.
Testimony regarding Barbara herself
I got no reply from the myriad of sources I tried to contact, including Dr. Keener, who popularized this case in the first place, and so maybe Bentham knows something that I don’t. But I am a little offput by his invocation of Adolph’s quote:
Barbara was one of the most hopelessly ill patients I ever saw. She was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic as having multiple sclerosis. She had been admitted to the local hospital seven times in the year that I was first asked to see her. Each time she was expected to die. One diaphragm was completely paralyzed so that the lung was nonfunctional, and the other worked less than 50 percent. She had a tracheotomy tube in her neck for breathing, always required extra oxygen, and could speak only in short sentences because she easily became breathless. Her abdomen was swollen grotesquely because the muscles of her intestine did not work. Nor would her bladder function. She had not been able to walk for seven years. Her hand and arm movements were poorly coordinated. And she was blind except for two small areas in each eye.
This appears in his 1987 book Today’s Decisions, Tomorrow’s Destiny on page 48. But in the next paragraph, Adolph writes that “Although some life-threatening complications briefly developed, she was eventually restored to complete health.”6 It is therefore false to argue, as BB does, that: “At no point, between then and her death at 71, did her symptoms reappear.”
There’s just not enough information
There are so many unanswered questions. At what point did she relapse? What did she actually have? What did the laparotomy, done two weeks prior, reveal? We don’t know any of these answers—we have not even seen the patient’s chart.
You’re not supposed to diagnose MS (or any disease) without seeing a patient’s chart. You shouldn’t diagnose a miracle either.
Stop making Yourself Sick: A physician explores the connection between spiritual health and physical health.
Today’s Decisions, Tomorrow’s Destiny, p191-192
Ibid, p186
Ibid, p194
Ibid, p203
Ibid, p48