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 was talk of miracles taking place in Mozambique so she said “I’m going to study this.” So she 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 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 door. Oh wow after prayer in the name of Jesus she can 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 prayer 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 but I’m willing to say I think something supernatural is going on.
And then another kind of test or 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 then 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 great to this day. So here we have a case study published as I say in a periodic 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 light of the evidence. And then there’s another one that happened that was published in in another peer-reviewed medical journal. Recently another case study of a man who had the 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 very disruptive to his life since childhood, since he was an infant. And he went for sure to 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 lists these kinds of studies and more.