Speaker 1: Life Audio. I think the valuing of a human life
Speaker 1: and the preciousness of the soul is intertwined with the
Speaker 1: physical skills we have, and the more those skills advance
Speaker 1: in modern day, the more that physicians have the hands
Speaker 1: of God.
Speaker 2: And that's what my book is about.
Speaker 3: I'm really curious how other doctors and or academics view you.
Speaker 1: What I'm bringing to this that isn't really been talked
Speaker 1: about before is that I'm creating a theory that's really
Speaker 1: going to be quite popular, which is that instead of
Speaker 1: dismissing people, let's honor them.
Speaker 2: And doctors want to do that.
Speaker 3: From the collapse of the NFL player Tomorrow Hamlin to
Speaker 3: the son of Fox News host Brett Baer to an
Speaker 3: eighth grader from Missouri who fell through the ice and
Speaker 3: was underwater for ten minutes and flatlined for more than
Speaker 3: fifty our guest today claims there are miracles all around
Speaker 3: us today. Doctor Mark Siegel is new Senior Medical Analyst
Speaker 3: as well as a clinical professor of medicine and a
Speaker 3: practicing internist at NYU. Doctor Siegel, thanks for writing a
Speaker 3: fascinating book and thanks for joining me on the show.
Speaker 2: Great to be on with you sean.
Speaker 3: Of course, my intro question is why would a practicing
Speaker 3: medical doctor, professor, and TV analyst who's got a million
Speaker 3: things going on not only write a book but write
Speaker 3: this book.
Speaker 1: Well, I write books all the time, and I'm a writer.
Speaker 1: I trained in writing and creative writing and journalism before
Speaker 1: I ever became a physician. That helps because when you
Speaker 1: become a physician, a lot of physicians think, oh, I
Speaker 1: can do anything when you can't. But I believe you
Speaker 1: can do two things well in life. And I started
Speaker 1: my life as a writer and then became a physician.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I believe that being able to communicate
Speaker 1: is important to a physician.
Speaker 2: But medicine is a different language.
Speaker 1: It's its own language, and not everyone can translate it
Speaker 1: into layman's terms struggle to do that. I think it's
Speaker 1: more important that we get the medicine right than that
Speaker 1: we communicate, but both are important. I think it's not
Speaker 1: even a question about the idea of combining faith with medicine,
Speaker 1: because it shouldn't even be a question because when you
Speaker 1: begin to study medicine at a very young age, I
Speaker 1: mean when you're young and you're in training, one of
Speaker 1: the first things that you discover is the incredible qualities
Speaker 1: in the human body, in the mind and the body,
Speaker 1: the spirit, the preciousness of each life. We learn it
Speaker 1: in medical school. So how does the physician go from
Speaker 1: there where it's imbued in their early training to start
Speaker 1: dismissing people like in Canada where medical assistance in dying
Speaker 1: is leading to homeless people being put to death. That's
Speaker 1: extreme example, sure, But I think the valuing of a
Speaker 1: human life and the preciousness of the soul is intertwined
Speaker 1: with the physical skills we have, and the more those
Speaker 1: skills advance in modern day, the more that physicians have
Speaker 1: the hands of God. And that's what my book is about.
Speaker 1: That's one of the things my book is about. Another
Speaker 1: thing that it's about is the idea that miracles don't
Speaker 1: occur all at once most of the time. It's not
Speaker 1: that they don't ever occur that way. I think that
Speaker 1: the miracles that the Catholic Church's church honors are real
Speaker 1: and they have very strict criteria, and I believe it
Speaker 1: does happen that direct divine intervention leads to miracle cures
Speaker 1: that science can't explain. But there are other miracles that
Speaker 1: are an accumulation of what are seemingly coincidences where positive
Speaker 1: outcomes occur where negative outcomes were far more likely, and
Speaker 1: then there's an accumulation of positive outcomes that occur that
Speaker 1: add up to the miracle.
Speaker 2: The publisher of this book kept saying.
Speaker 1: To me, identify the miracle in each chapter here, and
Speaker 1: we had a very fun back and forth on that,
Speaker 1: because I feel that each chapter is an accumulation of
Speaker 1: multiple miracles.
Speaker 3: M Well, it definitely reads that way, and it's interesting.
Speaker 3: We're going to get to how you kind of define
Speaker 3: what you mean specifically by a miracle. But I'm really
Speaker 3: curious how your training in internal medicine shapes the way
Speaker 3: you think about assessing miracles. And in part what I'm
Speaker 3: asking is help those of us who are not medical
Speaker 3: doctors as best you can get inside your mind how
Speaker 3: you think about and approach this given your training in medicine.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't think it's I don't think that's what
Speaker 1: it is. I think I don't. I think that doctors
Speaker 1: participate in miracles, and whether they believe or not is
Speaker 1: almost beside the point. In my book, there's multiple doctors
Speaker 1: who are disbelievers or doubters, and then by virtue of
Speaker 1: what they participate in, they become true believers. Some do,
Speaker 1: some don't. It almost doesn't matter. As long as you
Speaker 1: show the flexibility and honoring the patient and healing, and
Speaker 1: you're a healer, you are participating in miracles. God is present,
Speaker 1: God fills in the gaps. I mean, you could argue
Speaker 1: that all day long, but it's just a fruitless argument
Speaker 1: because it doesn't change the reality. As long as the
Speaker 1: physician is open to the idea that there's a greater
Speaker 1: reality than that they themselves control, the better the physician
Speaker 1: they're going to be. What really influenced me early in
Speaker 1: my training was that when I was an intern, I
Speaker 1: was assigned to a case in the ICU of a
Speaker 1: guy who was in a vegetative state and in a coma,
Speaker 1: and the family was at the bedside, praying all day long,
Speaker 1: every day, and they kept saying to me, Look his
Speaker 1: eyelids are fluttering. Look his heart rate is going up
Speaker 1: a little, Look his blood pressure is going up.
Speaker 2: It imbued on me.
Speaker 1: The frustrations of them, not of this family, not accepting
Speaker 1: what seemed to be the reality and not giving up.
Speaker 1: And I thought it was going to form a very
Speaker 1: negative view in my approach to healthcare. I thought this
Speaker 1: is going to be the future, me consoling families to
Speaker 1: accept a limited reality. Instead, after three months, the guy
Speaker 1: woke up, he got out of bed, and he went back.
Speaker 2: To work, and they were right.
Speaker 1: They were right, and we were wrong, and we were
Speaker 1: jaundiced and we were sarcastic, and we were educated by
Speaker 1: this case, and it changed how I viewed medicine super interesting.
Speaker 3: Some of that comes through in the book, and a
Speaker 3: lot of the stories give us a sense of what
Speaker 3: you mean by miracle. Because you talk about medical miracles,
Speaker 3: you talk about some that seemed to take place through
Speaker 3: the means and practice of a doctor. You talk about
Speaker 3: some that seemed to just result that there's this healing
Speaker 3: process of somebody who just believes in God and has hope.
Speaker 3: But then there's other times where you talk about these clear,
Speaker 3: almost unmista'stakably supernatural interventions, which is probably more typically what
Speaker 3: we mean by miracle. So when you say the miracles
Speaker 3: amongst us, tell us what you mean by that.
Speaker 1: You know early on in the process, I got the
Speaker 1: privilege in honor of interviewing Cardinal Dolan and Cardinal Dolan
Speaker 1: surprised me, and I think he unintentionally broadened the motif
Speaker 1: of this book because I asked him what he thought
Speaker 1: a miracle was, and he said, there is the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church definition, but there's also what I'm calling. He said,
Speaker 1: soft miracles. I said, what is a soft miracle? He says,
Speaker 1: a soft miracle is an accumulation of great faith and
Speaker 1: great science, and they're intertwined and they established themselves over time.
Speaker 1: He gave as an example someone in his family where
Speaker 1: they asked someone close to him, was she healed? Did
Speaker 1: her cancer go away? Because of divine intervention? And the
Speaker 1: response was that and doctor Berganelli.
Speaker 2: So, in other words, it's not wont a or b.
Speaker 1: And it's so important that this book is out because
Speaker 1: we went down a rabbit hole with Spinoza in the
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds where he said God is only found in nature.
Speaker 1: He didn't say there was no God. He said God
Speaker 1: is only found in nature. And to be sure, nature
Speaker 1: is a direct manifestation of God and God's beauty and
Speaker 1: God's grace. But there's also a personal God, as in
Speaker 1: my book. Pope John Paul made that point to Robert Redfield,
Speaker 1: the former CDC director when he was when they were
Speaker 1: meeting to discuss the ages epidemic. Right at the heart
Speaker 1: of it, he said, the Pontiff said, there's a personal
Speaker 1: God that we all have to recognize, and we can
Speaker 1: channel our prayer towards that personal God, which makes prayer
Speaker 1: the greatest tool we have for healing those are That's
Speaker 1: one and two. One, there's a personal God accepted to
Speaker 1: prayer as a very powerful tool, the most powerful tool.
Speaker 1: And the third is there's a redemptive value in human suffering. Well,
Speaker 1: Redfield rejected that. As a physician, he didn't liked that.
Speaker 1: He said, I don't agree with you, he said to
Speaker 1: the Pope, but he said that over his career he's
Speaker 1: come to see that that that's correct, that there is
Speaker 1: a redemptive value in human suffering. I think in the
Speaker 1: Jewish faith that has to do with something very basic
Speaker 1: in the Old Testament, in the Talmud that basically says
Speaker 1: we're being tested by God. Every day, we're being tested
Speaker 1: by God, and do we pass the test do we not?
Speaker 1: And it helps define who we are as people and
Speaker 1: whether we're deemed worthy in the Almighty's eyes.
Speaker 3: I'm a Christian theology professor. More specifically apologetics and evangelism.
Speaker 3: So most of the people I interview here will be
Speaker 3: Christians and Evangelicals, but I talk with a lot of
Speaker 3: people of different faiths. Just had a friendly debate with
Speaker 3: an Orthodox to youw about the expectation the Messiah and
Speaker 3: the identity of Jesus. Really fun. In this book, you
Speaker 3: talk about your Jewish faith some I'd be really curious
Speaker 3: what you mean by that, because obviously there's concerted Jews,
Speaker 3: there's Orthodox Jews, and how that shapes the way you
Speaker 3: approach miracles.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm a lavy, and the lavy is someone
Speaker 1: that's a servant of the kohene. And interestingly enough, Aaron,
Speaker 1: Moses's brother was the first lavy, and what he did
Speaker 1: was he performed miracles all day long with his staff,
Speaker 1: and those were minor miracles.
Speaker 2: And I think that's another thing that led to this.
Speaker 1: So that's another thing that informed my faith, is that
Speaker 1: I see myself as someone who performs service for others.
Speaker 1: That's what I do as a physician, that's what I
Speaker 1: try to do as a person. I think it's a
Speaker 1: deep part of my identity, my faith. So I don't distinguish,
Speaker 1: I don't distinguish, you know, so much between being Jewish
Speaker 1: between being Christian. I think it's a matter of believing
Speaker 1: in God, and I don't really think of it as
Speaker 1: a separate issue. I think of it in terms of faith.
Speaker 1: And I've experienced miracles in my own life that have
Speaker 1: led me to that, Like when my first son was
Speaker 1: born and I was going through a period of confusion,
Speaker 1: like what's my role? What am I going to do?
Speaker 1: And how do I care for my son? And I
Speaker 1: was walking down the street and I saw a man
Speaker 1: praying and he handed me his prayer book and he said,
Speaker 1: take this and pray for the health of your newborn son.
Speaker 1: And I said, how do you know I have a son?
Speaker 1: I didn't say anything. So he was an angel from
Speaker 1: the Lord. I mean there as I left Showan, I
Speaker 1: look back over my shoulder.
Speaker 2: Is he really there? A visitation?
Speaker 1: He was there, But that changed my life and I pray.
Speaker 1: But I don't judge people to say, oh, this is
Speaker 1: their faith, this is my faith. I think there's a
Speaker 1: community there. My friendship with Cardinal Doan is a great
Speaker 1: example of that, or Jolo'stein. I'm friends with Jolostein Pastor
Speaker 1: Ostein Pastor Sam Rodriguez, a dear close friend of mine,
Speaker 1: inspired a lot of the parts of this book. He
Speaker 1: in fact did a movie on Breakthrough. You were talking
Speaker 1: about Breakthrough, and the breakthrough moment actually is when John Smith,
Speaker 1: after everything he experiences, communes with Pastor Sam and then
Speaker 1: he decides that what he's been through is so special
Speaker 1: and so unusual. It brings him faith that he then
Speaker 1: wants to show to the rest of the world. It's
Speaker 1: the same thing that's happened to Christopher Smith. He's not
Speaker 1: in my book, but he'll be in the next one,
Speaker 1: who I reported on recently on TV. Smith got shot
Speaker 1: in the head and a woman he was going on
Speaker 1: a first date with got shot in the head as
Speaker 1: well as she died. He survived and got a visitation
Speaker 1: from his father, who died when he was eight years old,
Speaker 1: and the vision said to him, the way you know
Speaker 1: this is me, that I'm your father is that when
Speaker 1: I was lying in my coffin, my best friend Brett,
Speaker 1: put two marijuana cigarettes in my left pocket. And there's
Speaker 1: only two people in the world that know about that,
Speaker 1: Brett and your mother. And he said, you're gonna live.
Speaker 1: You're gonna survive. This ordeal, and you're gonna wake up
Speaker 1: and you're gonna go on to have a fairly normal life.
Speaker 1: Chris Smith woke up two months later in the ICU,
Speaker 1: remember that visitation, told his mother and she broke into tears,
Speaker 1: talked to Brett. Only two people that knew it was
Speaker 1: absolutely true. And then Smith went on cognitively and recovered.
Speaker 1: He's got stem cell injections to get strengths back in
Speaker 1: his left side, and he's going around spreading the word.
Speaker 1: And I think that that's another message in my book,
Speaker 1: which is spreading the word. Not read the stories and
Speaker 1: see if you believe, See if you believe after you
Speaker 1: read the stories, compared to win before you read them.
Speaker 3: Where your book is primarily full of stories. And I
Speaker 3: was reading it this morning to my wife as she
Speaker 3: was running out the door to teach math today. I said,
Speaker 3: oh man, there's some stories here over dinner tonight I
Speaker 3: want to share with you and talk about and process.
Speaker 3: So that jumped out to me really quick. It's full stories.
Speaker 3: Part of me has a million theological questions for you
Speaker 3: about your faith and how you practice it and what
Speaker 3: that means. That is a separate conversation. Maybe we'll come
Speaker 3: back to that. But I've also I've done a lot
Speaker 3: of shows on visions and near death experiences, and I'm
Speaker 3: convinced they're verritical. But let's jump to some of the
Speaker 3: stories in the book. I read a lot of different
Speaker 3: news sources. I read the New York Times every morning,
Speaker 3: but one host I really enjoy is Brett Baer and
Speaker 3: Him and His Son is the first story in your book,
Speaker 3: which just jumped out to me. So share that story
Speaker 3: as much as you can, and tell tell else why
Speaker 3: you put that in the realm of a modern day miracle.
Speaker 2: Because of the accumulation of events.
Speaker 1: It's like everybody listening to this podcast or watching it
Speaker 1: right now will know about the coincidence that occur when
Speaker 1: you're thinking of someone in the phone rings right after that.
Speaker 1: How did that happen? What is telepathy? Where's that coming from?
Speaker 1: It's a direct proof of a larger spiritual reality. So
Speaker 1: are dreams. Brett bare their son Paul, their first son Amy.
Speaker 1: They meet with a series of coincidences. But then their
Speaker 1: first son is born and he's not thriving, and he's
Speaker 1: very pale. And the first miracle in that chapter is
Speaker 1: that a doctor who's an expert at this happens to
Speaker 1: be passing the hospital and he's not even on call,
Speaker 1: and he says, you know, I think I'm going to
Speaker 1: go in, and he.
Speaker 2: Doesn't know why. Why does he go in?
Speaker 1: Goes in, finds out about Paul, and says, I'm going
Speaker 1: to look into this, even though he's not working.
Speaker 2: He does an echo cardiogram.
Speaker 1: He finds the problem in his heart, which is multiple
Speaker 1: abnormalities cardiac congenital abnormalities, and over the next several months
Speaker 1: they work on repairing them, and it's not perfect because
Speaker 1: of the size, being so small of the heart. Brett
Speaker 1: and Amy are a team. Amy full of love, Brett
Speaker 1: full of having to have his questions answered. They meet
Speaker 1: another woman there who has a child the same age
Speaker 1: as Paul, in similar straits, and they root for each
Speaker 1: other and they pray for each other. And Brett's prayer
Speaker 1: is in my book. I have a prayer section in
Speaker 1: my book of famous prayers written for the book by
Speaker 1: great spiritual leaders. If I had known you, Sean, I
Speaker 1: would have asked you for a prayer when I wrote
Speaker 1: the book. But Brett's prayer is in there, and he says,
Speaker 1: we pray for one more day, we pray for one
Speaker 1: more day. That's a lot in the theme of this book.
Speaker 2: And through the.
Speaker 1: Years they go through different oh and tragically the woman
Speaker 1: who is rooting with them, her daughter dies and they
Speaker 1: feel great suffering over the loss, but she stays with
Speaker 1: them as a dear friend over the years as they
Speaker 1: become more and more involved in National Children's Hospital. The
Speaker 1: chapter focuses on the fifth heart surgery where Paul has
Speaker 1: a cold and he goes in to see his new
Speaker 1: internest and he says, this is just a cold. But
Speaker 1: then he says, but you know, same as the doctor
Speaker 1: passing the hospital. You know, just to be sure, I'm
Speaker 1: going to do a chest X ray. If you ask
Speaker 1: that doctor as part of a board question, Sean, should
Speaker 1: you do a chest X ray? The answer is no,
Speaker 1: you don't. You wouldn't check that box. But God checks
Speaker 1: the right box, right, so that intuition, maybe I should
Speaker 1: do a chest X ray. And he does it and
Speaker 1: it shows a slight widening of the heart and he said,
Speaker 1: you know, this is normal for a kid, for a
Speaker 1: guy in his condition, but just to be sure, I'm
Speaker 1: going to show this to his cardiologist shows it to
Speaker 1: his cardiologists who says, you know, I could pass this,
Speaker 1: but just to be sure, I'm going to do an
Speaker 1: echo cardiogram. He does an echo cardiogram and he finds
Speaker 1: an aneurysm that's about to burst. They have surgery schedule
Speaker 1: for the next day. Paul goes out and plays golf
Speaker 1: with Brett. Paul wins, and then he gets his life
Speaker 1: is saved with another successful operation. And over the years,
Speaker 1: Amy and Brett, who are fantastic parents, are relinquishing more
Speaker 1: control of the situation to their son, which is correct.
Speaker 2: So he's a very courageous.
Speaker 1: Young man with a lot of spiritual transcendence, because if
Speaker 1: our souls are tested enough, we mature. The miracle in
Speaker 1: that chapter is not one miracle. It's an accumulation of well,
Speaker 1: maybe I shouldn't, but just to be sure is the miracle.
Speaker 3: That distinction is helpful. I want to make sure our
Speaker 3: audience doesn't miss that. You have some examples in your
Speaker 3: book of prayers that are done and just instantaneous, supernatural
Speaker 3: events take place to save somebody's life. That because the
Speaker 3: timing and the specificity just can't be explained away scientifically alone.
Speaker 3: Then you talk about miracle as a certain number of
Speaker 3: seeming coincidences that collectively lead towards something positive that in
Speaker 3: themselves can't be explained away when taken collectively. I'll let
Speaker 3: folks think about that and analyze that. But is that
Speaker 3: a fair distinction to you?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's perfect, except that one thing needs to be
Speaker 1: added here is get Brett and Amy prayed and prayed
Speaker 1: and prayed every single day. And I believe that that's
Speaker 1: part of it too. That's part of it too. And
Speaker 1: I don't want science analyzing that. How ridiculous that we
Speaker 1: would use the tool of science to analyze whether prayer
Speaker 1: is working or not.
Speaker 2: Wait, that's the opposite of what we should do. You
Speaker 2: should use the.
Speaker 1: Tool of prayer to analyze whether the science is working.
Speaker 3: That quote you just said might go viral. I love
Speaker 3: that that'll get some people thinking. So you mentioned within
Speaker 3: the story before we move to the NFL player Tamar Hamlin,
Speaker 3: and then a couple other counts that I think are
Speaker 3: just stunning examples of sudden, supernatural kind of one time
Speaker 3: intervention miracles. You mentioned somebody in the story with Brett
Speaker 3: whose child was not healed and may have been praying
Speaker 3: as well. Before we get to some of the other miracles.
Speaker 3: What would you say as a person of faith, as
Speaker 3: a scientist, as somebody. He says, I prayed, and he
Speaker 3: say there's miracles amongst us, but I'm not experiencing one.
Speaker 2: There's two answers to that.
Speaker 1: One is that God chooses the miracles he wants to give.
Speaker 1: That came from Dolan also and the other people in
Speaker 1: the book. God gives us the miracles he wants to
Speaker 1: give us, not the ones we pray for. And the
Speaker 1: second part of that is I'll give let me stick
Speaker 1: on the first part.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 1: The two examples from the Old Testament on that I
Speaker 1: use in the book. One is Hannah is praying for
Speaker 1: a son, and she's not given a son till she's very,
Speaker 1: very old. Her sister has seven children, I believe multiple children,
Speaker 1: and Hannah finally gets the son, and the son she
Speaker 1: calls the son schmul or Samuel mean, God hurts my prayer.
Speaker 1: But the lesson there is that God doesn't grant her
Speaker 1: wish because she wishes for it. He grants the child
Speaker 1: because he knows that Samuel is going to go on
Speaker 1: to become a great prophet and lead a nation and
Speaker 1: lead to King David. So that's the reason he grants
Speaker 1: the prayer. And another striking example from the Old Testament
Speaker 1: is Hezekiah, who's a king, and Hezekiah is suffering from
Speaker 1: a sore that looks like it's going to kill him,
Speaker 1: and he goes to Isaiah and Isaiah says, you're going
Speaker 1: to die from that sore and Isaiah and Hezekiah doesn't
Speaker 1: really want to accept that prophecy from Isaiah because Isaiah
Speaker 1: is not God, he's a prophet. He doesn't want to
Speaker 1: accept that prophecy, so he goes to God, and in
Speaker 1: going directly to God, Hezekiah learns that what's really at
Speaker 1: stake here is that Hezekiah has a father who is
Speaker 1: a bad king. Hezekiah was a great king. Hezekiah's son
Speaker 1: is destined to be a bad king. And God says,
Speaker 1: I will save you, but you have to follow your faith.
Speaker 1: So Hezekiah marries Isaiah's daughter and has a child who's
Speaker 1: a bad king, and his sores are healed and he
Speaker 1: lives on God saves him. That's a really great lesson
Speaker 1: of God giving the miracles that he wants us to have,
Speaker 1: not the ones we're asking for, because because what Isaiah,
Speaker 1: what Hezekiah was asking for is I don't want my
Speaker 1: son to be another bad king, but God, prophet God
Speaker 1: had chosen that he would be a bad king.
Speaker 2: The other thing I want to and I.
Speaker 1: And I have that in the chapter in my book,
Speaker 1: and then and then it leads to a story from
Speaker 1: the Holocaust. But I also want to talk about something else,
Speaker 1: which is that a few of the characters in my book,
Speaker 1: most strikingly in the chapter about October seventh, twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: an amazing story of a family that was saved from
Speaker 1: a fire where they were burned alive by Amas. The
Speaker 1: I ask when I'm interviewing them, why did God choose
Speaker 1: you for the miracle? Why did God choose you? And
Speaker 1: their answer is very sobering, And it's the same thing
Speaker 1: that Benjamin Hall, our amazing reporter at Fox, has said
Speaker 1: to me, which is, I refuse to call what happened
Speaker 1: to me a miracle, because even though it is, it
Speaker 1: dishonors those who didn't make it. To be the recipient
Speaker 1: of a miracle is a very humbling thing. It's not
Speaker 1: something that you brag about.
Speaker 3: That's such an interesting point. There's a certain weight to
Speaker 3: experience a miracle. Everybody wants one, but then when you
Speaker 3: get one and others don't for reasons, Like you said,
Speaker 3: God's sovereignty, we may or may not understand. There's a
Speaker 3: weight that comes to that, maybe akin to what some
Speaker 3: people call survivors guild. But nonetheless, you and I might
Speaker 3: differ over some things in the New Testament, but we
Speaker 3: agree to God is sovereign in that he does miracles
Speaker 3: according to his prerogative and larger desire for the world.
Speaker 3: So that's a really helpful point to dry out. Tell
Speaker 3: us about the chapter on the NFL player Damar Hamlin
Speaker 3: and why you consider that a modern miracle.
Speaker 1: Because the other thing I'm trying to do in this
Speaker 1: book is to look underneath what everyone thinks the miracle
Speaker 1: is and see if there's another miracle that you don't
Speaker 1: know about. I want it to be and what my
Speaker 1: editor to the book says, make it so that the
Speaker 1: reader doesn't know the miracle. Off the top, the miracle
Speaker 1: with DeMar would seem to be, Wow, he fell down,
Speaker 1: he had a cardiac arrest, they brought him back.
Speaker 2: That would seemed to be the miracle. Sure, here's the
Speaker 2: real miracle.
Speaker 1: The real miracle is that Damar Hamlin safety for the
Speaker 1: Buffalo Bills, got hit in the chest with a helmet
Speaker 1: right in the middle of his cardiac cycle, even with
Speaker 1: shoulder pads on, and had a cardiac arrest. That is
Speaker 1: really really unusual for someone of his age wearing full garb.
Speaker 2: It's really really, really really rare.
Speaker 1: But on top of that, it turns out, and I
Speaker 1: found this out through interviewing multiple people. I interviewed the
Speaker 1: team physician for the Cincinnati Bengals, who talked about what
Speaker 1: happened on the field. But then I got to Leslie Bisson,
Speaker 1: who's the team physician for the Buffalo Bills, and they
Speaker 1: run the show for their visit for their players, even
Speaker 1: if they're in a visiting stadium. And Bisson said, back
Speaker 1: in two thousand and seven, look at how this miracle works, Sewan.
Speaker 1: We're talking twenty twenty three here, and the miracle starts
Speaker 1: back in two thousand and seven. This is how God
Speaker 1: performs miracles. I had a skater, he said, that was
Speaker 1: visiting the Buffalo Savers and I was their team physician,
Speaker 1: and he got a skate to the coortid artery and
Speaker 1: he almost spled to death and I barely saved them.
Speaker 1: And he had multiple units of blood and thank god
Speaker 1: he was okay. And I said, at that point, if
Speaker 1: I'm gonna petition paid in sports medicine for these guys
Speaker 1: who are larger than life, they're like superheroes, they're like,
Speaker 1: you know, physical prowess, he says, I'm going to insist
Speaker 1: that we rehearse severe outcomes and cardiac arrests every month,
Speaker 1: every single month, as what we would do.
Speaker 2: And he said, everybody made fun of me.
Speaker 1: There hasn't been a cardiac arrest in the NFL since
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty five. Why would you do that? And I
Speaker 1: made him do it, he said, I made him do it.
Speaker 1: Take the shoulder pants off, here are the scissors, apply
Speaker 1: the defibrillator, rush onto the field.
Speaker 2: Rehearsed.
Speaker 1: So when it got to DeMar, they just hauled out
Speaker 1: the rehearsal and they got his heart started again within
Speaker 1: one minute time his brain. So the reason he recovered
Speaker 1: was because of that protocol that nobody thought, that everyone
Speaker 1: thought was insane. Then of course he had several days
Speaker 1: where he was coming back to himself. It wasn't the
Speaker 1: way the media presented it. And it is a true
Speaker 1: miracle that he went from there to playing again. But
Speaker 1: the reason the miracle occurred was because of this spooky
Speaker 1: rehearsal that Bison told me he had a premonition.
Speaker 3: I do have to say one of my favorite parts
Speaker 3: of the chapter is that when Demarrow came back to consciousness,
Speaker 3: his first question was who won the game? And the
Speaker 3: doctor says back, you won the game of life? Like
Speaker 3: that gave me goosebumps. And I agree with you if
Speaker 3: we're using the term kind of a soft miracle, Like
Speaker 3: I think you're right about this, but I can also
Speaker 3: understand why skeptics go, yeah, but maybe they're just lucky.
Speaker 3: Like try to explain it away evidentially speaking, these next
Speaker 3: two examples that you give, by the way, I.
Speaker 2: Don't think they can.
Speaker 3: I don't think they can tell me about that roach.
Speaker 1: Let's explain something away. Why would you do that? Why
Speaker 1: don't you learn and.
Speaker 2: Listen from the proximity issue?
Speaker 1: You know, Like like I just told you something about
Speaker 1: Hamlin that's unbelieve but it actually happened, you know. So
Speaker 1: it's I call it not in the book, but I've
Speaker 1: called it since the book the miracle lane.
Speaker 2: You're in a lane.
Speaker 1: And somebody said to me last night at an interview
Speaker 1: of something I liked. Imagine all the things that wouldn't
Speaker 1: have led to this lane, in other words, where it
Speaker 1: didn't all come together the right way. That's also evidence
Speaker 1: of God's fingerprints when everything happens in just the right way.
Speaker 1: My father's one hundred and two years old. He's on dialysis.
Speaker 1: He had a ventilator, and he was ninety eight. He
Speaker 1: had a hip operation and a pin put in his
Speaker 1: hip when he was ninety eight. He survived major abdominal
Speaker 1: surgery and hernia repair. When he was ninety eight, he
Speaker 1: had a fistol that was draining and the surgeon said
Speaker 1: it's never gonna heal, but it healed.
Speaker 2: And he's one hundred and two and my mother's a hundred.
Speaker 2: How did that happen?
Speaker 1: Because at each turn of the road, a seeming non
Speaker 1: miracle added to an attumnbe that is a miracle. One
Speaker 1: hundred and two, one hundred still with it held together
Speaker 1: by love doesn't want to leave the other one alone.
Speaker 3: So for the skeptic were to push back and say,
Speaker 3: you know, doctor Siegel, it may it makes sense. There's
Speaker 3: a number of factors that line up for say tomorrow
Speaker 3: Hammelin line up for your father who's one hundred and two,
Speaker 3: which is pretty amazing. But most people don't survive that
Speaker 3: kind of cardiac arress. Most people don't live to one
Speaker 3: hundred and two. So given how many people there are,
Speaker 3: it makes sense that just mathematically, at times we'd have
Speaker 3: these exceptions and we're calling them a miracle, but mathematically speaking,
Speaker 3: there could be an explanation for him.
Speaker 1: Well, that's part of what a miracle is a miracle.
Speaker 1: That's Dolan's soft miracles, which is that at each juncture
Speaker 1: there could be a partial scientific reason. I looked at
Speaker 1: for another book I did on that, not a miracle book,
Speaker 1: but I have a story in this book of a
Speaker 1: guy who rises out of a wheelchair to attack someone
Speaker 1: who owes him two million dollars when he hasn't walked
Speaker 1: in months and months and months, and a psychiatrist said,
Speaker 1: we're putting you in a mental hospital for saying you're
Speaker 1: going to do that, because you can't do that. You
Speaker 1: can't do that. Well, he did it, and why did
Speaker 1: he do it? How did he do it? How can
Speaker 1: somebody walk again that was told they're never going to
Speaker 1: walk again.
Speaker 2: I can come up with some.
Speaker 1: Science, said, your brain pivots the hamstrings, and that when
Speaker 1: your mind is on fire, you can somehow partly. There's
Speaker 1: always some science, but miracles aren't. Again, only the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church maybe disagrees with me the strict interpretation of the Vatican.
Speaker 1: And that's why I include in the book a chapter
Speaker 1: on lords, and I take very seriously with the Catholic
Speaker 1: Churches saying, but there's a broad expanse of miracles that
Speaker 1: are an accumulation, like Aaron's miracles in the Old Testament,
Speaker 1: and so this guy rising out of the wheelchair is
Speaker 1: a miracle.
Speaker 3: So this story really hit me because it's about an
Speaker 3: eighth grader outside of Saint Louis, and I have a
Speaker 3: son who rode his bike to school this morning. He's
Speaker 3: a seventh grader who fell through the ice and was
Speaker 3: underwater at least ten minutes, flatlined for more than fifty Well,
Speaker 3: i'm reading this, I got goosebumps and just this sense
Speaker 3: of like the worst nightmare a parent could imagine. Tell
Speaker 3: us what happened? Why you consider that a miracle?
Speaker 1: By the way, I just want to be clear on
Speaker 1: something that I believe that each miracle in each chapter
Speaker 1: of this book, whether I'm using my definition of soft
Speaker 1: miracles or accumulation of miracles, or one that's more stark,
Speaker 1: where like you know, like Dodio Stein comes home and
Speaker 1: praise and has a series of prayers and cancer goes
Speaker 1: away four times, four diferent cancers go away, and she starts,
Speaker 1: and she's in the Lakewood Church and people come there
Speaker 1: to have their cancer go and some of them do,
Speaker 1: some of them do. There's a great healing aspect going
Speaker 1: on there with Joel O'stein and paul O'stein, and Dody
Speaker 1: Ostein and Lisa O'stein comes, lis O'stein comes, all of
Speaker 1: them I interviewed for this book. But I also believe
Speaker 1: the other chapters are miracles. I think Tomorrow Damar is
Speaker 1: a miracle. I think Brett bear Soon is a miracle.
Speaker 1: I think some of the ones I haven't mentioned are
Speaker 1: the chapter on Breakthrough. I'll tell you something that I
Speaker 1: haven't been saying, which you'll resonate with. Part of that
Speaker 1: miracle does involve Pastor Sam Rodriguez because he had a sister,
Speaker 1: he had a daughter who was he had a daughter
Speaker 1: who was dying in the ICU of Covid, and he
Speaker 1: was one of the first that was put on steroids
Speaker 1: and she was on echmo, she was on respiratory assist
Speaker 1: and she was fading. And Sam was in another room
Speaker 1: praying and all of a sudden he felt something. He
Speaker 1: felt something and he called up his daughter and he said,
Speaker 1: has something just changed and the door because I was
Speaker 1: just praying for you, and she said, there were just
Speaker 1: angels in the room here with me. And he asked
Speaker 1: what the angels looked like. She said they were light
Speaker 1: and they were very positive. From that moment on, she recovered.
Speaker 1: So that's one kind of miracle. And then Sam was
Speaker 1: involved with the breakthrough miracle where the eighth grader, these
Speaker 1: guys go to the lake Lake Saint Louis and it's
Speaker 1: freezing out and they go skating on the ice the
Speaker 1: way boys do. They come home and the sister of
Speaker 1: one of the boys says.
Speaker 2: Why didn't you include me? So they say, okay, we'll
Speaker 2: go again. So the next day they go back to
Speaker 2: the lake idiots.
Speaker 1: It's in the forties and they go skating on the
Speaker 1: ice again and they all fall in. The emergency responders
Speaker 1: come and they can't find John Smith. They got the
Speaker 1: other two and then there's a voice from the shore
Speaker 1: that says fifteen feet to the right. And one of
Speaker 1: the things I do in each of these chapters is
Speaker 1: verify all of this because I want the reader to
Speaker 1: know this is the truth. I'm telling you. It's not
Speaker 1: just some fanciful story. That's why you don't have to
Speaker 1: be a believer to believe at the end of this book,
Speaker 1: because there was no one at the shore, but the
Speaker 1: voice was of the boss of the emergency responder. I
Speaker 1: know that because I called him and I went over
Speaker 1: with him. I said, where will you when this happened?
Speaker 1: He said, I was in my office in Saint Louis.
Speaker 1: I said, did you have a sense of what was
Speaker 1: going on? He said yes, but I wasn't there. And
Speaker 1: so they pull John Smith out of the water. And
Speaker 1: so then I knew some medical critics might say to me,
Speaker 1: and no one has. By the way, I think doctors
Speaker 1: are actually believers, because I haven't been getting a lot
Speaker 1: of negative feedback at all on this book because it's
Speaker 1: so researched.
Speaker 2: And they pull.
Speaker 1: Him out of the water, and I knew someone was
Speaker 1: going to say, could this be hypothermia?
Speaker 2: So I called up Michael Boden, who's.
Speaker 1: In another one of the chapters in this book, the
Speaker 1: top forensic pathologist in the country. I said, what would
Speaker 1: it be to be in the water for fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: in the forty temperatures in the forties like on that day.
Speaker 2: He says, minimal, minimal.
Speaker 1: He says, if you're if it's in the twenties or
Speaker 1: you know, ten degrees, then you could say the organs
Speaker 1: are frozen and it might take a while for them
Speaker 1: to thaw.
Speaker 2: But in the.
Speaker 1: Forties you get a minimal amount of hypothermic effect. So
Speaker 1: the fact that he has no pulse for over like
Speaker 1: fifty to fifty five minutes is unheard of. Now they
Speaker 1: start CPR, They get him to the hospital, and the
Speaker 1: team in the hospital wants to let go. They they've
Speaker 1: never brought anybody back from fifty five minutes. I talk
Speaker 1: to all of them, the emergency responders, the physicians, They all.
Speaker 2: Say that.
Speaker 1: They've never had a case like this. She the mother,
Speaker 1: would not let him go, she said to them, And
Speaker 1: I interviewed her too. She said to them, wait till
Speaker 1: I get to the hospital, do not let him go.
Speaker 1: Now that sentiment is normal, Yeah, that part's not a miracle.
Speaker 1: But the fact that they listen to her, and she
Speaker 1: gets to the hospital. She hits the er and gets
Speaker 1: down on her knees and prays to God. As soon
Speaker 1: as she does that, his pulse comes back. And then
Speaker 1: I said to the doctors, Okay, that's clearly God's presence,
Speaker 1: that's divine intervention. But what's the chances that John Smith
Speaker 1: could get from from there to anything resembling normal life.
Speaker 1: They say, zero. We've never had a case like that.
Speaker 1: We never had the fifty five minutes, we've never had
Speaker 1: under the ice, We've never had that voice from the shore.
Speaker 1: And John Smith fully recovers when his post comes back.
Speaker 1: I interviewed him for this book. And then the breakthrough
Speaker 1: occurs years later when he meets Pastor Sam and tells
Speaker 1: him this story, and he becomes a devout Christian, realizing
Speaker 1: that he is the recipient.
Speaker 2: Of a miracle.
Speaker 1: And like a lot of people in this book, and
Speaker 1: this may be the part I'm proudest of, and it
Speaker 1: goes for DeMar Hamlin, it goes for many of the
Speaker 1: people in the book.
Speaker 2: Tomar gives back. He's out in the.
Speaker 1: Community doing CPR teaching CPR teaching the proper use of defibrillators,
Speaker 1: creating scholarships for underprivileged young people as a result of
Speaker 1: God blessing him.
Speaker 2: And that's what John Smith did. He became an evangelical.
Speaker 2: He it uses his story to teach people to believe.
Speaker 3: That did jump out to me because I teach a
Speaker 3: class at Tables School theology on why does God allow evil?
Speaker 3: And one of the things we talk about, and there's
Speaker 3: so many more pieces than this, is that when people
Speaker 3: go through suffering, that often awakens them to give back
Speaker 3: in exponential ways. You see that with Damari, you see
Speaker 3: that with so many other stories that you tell. So
Speaker 3: that's one way God can use such tragedies. But let
Speaker 3: me ask you one.
Speaker 1: It's by the way, that may be why, that may
Speaker 1: be why the pontav is saying the redemptive value in
Speaker 1: human suffering one of the reasons.
Speaker 3: One of the reasons good. So one of the stories
Speaker 3: that really jumped out to me for a number of reasons,
Speaker 3: but in part because one of the doctors and people
Speaker 3: there were on Camps Crusade for Christ's staff. My parents
Speaker 3: are still on Crusade staff, what is known as crew.
Speaker 3: So I've been on trips kind of like this, and
Speaker 3: it's in the Mountains of Sudan, and it's not where
Speaker 3: the heart art of the war is at, but you
Speaker 3: describe how it spills over into this area and how
Speaker 3: I think there's a hospital within. I can't move said
Speaker 3: one hundred or three hundred miles, like medical care is
Speaker 3: just so rare. And there's a three year old named Rita.
Speaker 3: Tell us the story of what happened, and in particular,
Speaker 3: don't leave out the detail about the YouTube video and
Speaker 3: the internet connection, because that strikes as something almost clearly supernatural.
Speaker 3: I think, at least to critics.
Speaker 1: I've been lucky enough, through an organization called African Mission Healthcare,
Speaker 1: to meet a number of amazing missionary doctors who are
Speaker 1: out there saving lives by the thousands. And the Nuba
Speaker 1: Mountains of Sudan is right in the middle of war
Speaker 1: torn Sudan, which everybody knows about. People are displaced, there's
Speaker 1: more refugees there than anywhere in the world, and people
Speaker 1: are living in caves, people are living without running water.
Speaker 1: It's horrendous. In the middle of all this is Tom Katina,
Speaker 1: who's a family practitioner. He was a name flight surgeon
Speaker 1: and went to the same university. I went to Brown
Speaker 1: and he he's a real larger than life figure. I
Speaker 1: have interviewed him a few times on the radio for
Speaker 1: this book, recently for our Fox Nation special. He's just
Speaker 1: larger than life, very very humble man. And he runs
Speaker 1: this entire hot four hundred and fifty bed hospital. And
Speaker 1: one day a young girl named Rita comes and he
Speaker 1: uses a cat skin and diagnoses her with bilateral kidney
Speaker 1: cancer called Wilm's tumor. But he's only ever operated removing
Speaker 1: a single kidney. He's never done a partial in the
Speaker 1: frectomy remove half of a kidney. And you've got to
Speaker 1: understand these conditions. Generally, no anesthesiologists. They use bellows to
Speaker 1: blow the anesthesia over a person. You know, they have
Speaker 1: intravenous they have medications, but they have a lot of scarcity.
Speaker 1: They have to use old autoclaves to sterilize equipment.
Speaker 2: It's very rudimentary stuff. And he happened to have visiting him.
Speaker 1: I'm another family practitioner from Washington, DC, who said, what
Speaker 1: are you going to do? And Tom said, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have to try to operate, but I've never done this before.
Speaker 1: So the other doctor says, why don't you go on
Speaker 1: the Internet and see if you can get an instructional
Speaker 1: video for surgeons on this, and Katina said, and I
Speaker 1: asked Katina about his surgical skill for the Fox Nation special,
Speaker 1: and he's very.
Speaker 2: Very, very very good surgeon.
Speaker 1: But he made an interesting comment that he didn't train
Speaker 1: as a surgeon in school, so he doesn't understand surgical
Speaker 1: disease the way a surgeon might. But his technical skills
Speaker 1: are top notch. So but he can't do this surgery.
Speaker 1: So he goes on the Internet, but there is no internet,
Speaker 1: and there hasn't been an Internet working there for weeks
Speaker 1: and weeks and weeks. So they go to the computer
Speaker 1: and they're pounding on the computer and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: out of nowhere, God wills the internet to be on
Speaker 1: after weeks of no internet, and it's very slow and
Speaker 1: they can barely get it anything to upload, and they
Speaker 1: managed to go to YouTube and to get an instructional
Speaker 1: video of how to do a partial the phrectomy in Polish.
Speaker 1: Sean in Polish, and neither of them speak Polish, and
Speaker 1: they must. They're agonizingly going through this video with almost
Speaker 1: none of the equipment that the Polish surgeons have, and
Speaker 1: halfway through it crashes and they look at each other
Speaker 1: and they go, well, Polish, we don't understand equipment, we
Speaker 1: don't have.
Speaker 2: What do we do?
Speaker 1: And they said, maybe we just got enough information here
Speaker 1: to make this work.
Speaker 2: Maybe.
Speaker 1: So he goes ahead and he does the operation, removes
Speaker 1: the cancer's kidney, removes what he thinks the other half
Speaker 1: of the kidney is and is successful he thinks, but
Speaker 1: he's estimating. And he gets her out of anesthesia. There's
Speaker 1: rudimentary anesthesia, and he gives her chemo because they don't
Speaker 1: have radiation in this hospital, and she goes back to
Speaker 1: her cave or wherever she's living with her mother. Six
Speaker 1: months later, she comes back completely cured. A year later,
Speaker 1: comes back completely cured, no recurrence, and that's God's divine intervention.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that story was amazing to me. I'm just trying
Speaker 3: to picture it in my mind of like no internet connection,
Speaker 3: you happen to get an internet connection enough to have
Speaker 3: a YouTube video which is more than an email, and
Speaker 3: then they find the right video in Polish, and I'm
Speaker 3: just imagining this brilliant doctor who's watching YouTube video how
Speaker 3: to do a surgery, and it's enough to help him
Speaker 3: to do it. She recovers. It's just like, you can't
Speaker 3: make this kind of story up. So that was one
Speaker 3: of my favorite. You have a full story that you
Speaker 3: don't need to go into detail. In terms of the
Speaker 3: chapter in which the Congressman Steve Scalise is shot on
Speaker 3: a baseball field in twenty seventeen. I'm bringing this one
Speaker 3: up because I'd love you to comment on a quote
Speaker 3: in there from another congressman. And the heart of my
Speaker 3: question is just how you see the connection between faith,
Speaker 3: just having belief and healing even if there's not a
Speaker 3: supernatural miracle. And I ask it that way because in
Speaker 3: light of the recovery of Congressman Steve Scalise, another congressman said, quote,
Speaker 3: Steve's support structure and faith leads to his courage and strength.
Speaker 3: It leads directly to his ability to recover. So this
Speaker 3: seems to be this congreman is just saying there's not
Speaker 3: necessarily a miracle that took place here, if I read
Speaker 3: it correctly, but just having faith contributes to somebody healing.
Speaker 3: How do you see that intersection between faith and healing,
Speaker 3: even if there may not be a miracle.
Speaker 2: There is a miracle, and Scalise says there's a miracle.
Speaker 1: He said flat out for the book and for the
Speaker 1: Fox Nation special that his survival here was a miracle.
Speaker 1: But you're talking about something else that I'll get to
Speaker 1: in a minute. But the first part of the miracle
Speaker 1: is that Brad Weinstrip, a fellow congressman, happens to be
Speaker 1: in the batting cage that day when he's never in
Speaker 1: the batting cage. He hates the batting cage. He doesn't
Speaker 1: like balls thrown his way, he doesn't like the automatic machine.
Speaker 1: He's never in the batting cage. He doesn't know why
Speaker 1: he was in the batting cage. If he hadn't been
Speaker 1: in the batting cage, he would have been shot because
Speaker 1: he would have been in a position to be killed.
Speaker 1: That's the first part of the miracle. The thing you're
Speaker 1: referring to, though, is that Scalise says that when he
Speaker 1: gives over control to God the way we all should,
Speaker 1: God is a higher being.
Speaker 2: God is the Almighty.
Speaker 1: When you understand that the only thing you shoul supposed
Speaker 1: to be afraid of is God, not each other, not
Speaker 1: physical circumstances, not daily coincidences, not somebody yelling at you,
Speaker 1: not somebody antagonizing you. But God is what you have
Speaker 1: to worry about and be afraid of and make amends
Speaker 1: with and pray to when you realize that school, he says,
Speaker 1: a colm comes over you, and that's what he was
Speaker 1: referring to. But what happened there was an enormous miracle
Speaker 1: because why was Winstrip there? Why did weinstrimp think to
Speaker 1: rush out and apply the tourniquet. Why did Winstrip give
Speaker 1: him fluids? Why did Winstrip get the guy over with
Speaker 1: the intravenous from the ambulance? Why did Weinstrip say, not
Speaker 1: the ambulance, the helicopter. The helicopter. The ambulance would have
Speaker 1: killed them. He would have been stuck in DC traffic.
Speaker 1: Why the helicopter. They got the helicopter. They get him
Speaker 1: to the hospital. He's lost fifty units of blood. He
Speaker 1: comes in with a blood pressure of about zero. Then
Speaker 1: a surgeon and an interventional radiologist get together. They've never
Speaker 1: worked together before. They put clams on this severed artery
Speaker 1: in his that's in pieces. It's like it's like fragmented,
Speaker 1: and they say, we can't save anybody like this. They
Speaker 1: wheel a patient out of an operating room with clamps
Speaker 1: into an interventional radiology suite. I've never seen that. I've
Speaker 1: never heard of that. These doctors have never heard of that.
Speaker 1: But the interventional radiologists working with an open abdomen is
Speaker 1: able to find the parts of the artery to burn off,
Speaker 1: to close off with a burning equipment called a brov
Speaker 1: and made it so that the surgion was then able
Speaker 1: to operate while they're pouring blood into him. All of
Speaker 1: this occurs, then he gets out of surgery praying every day,
Speaker 1: praying to God. And then there's a term that you're
Speaker 1: very familiar with called community intercession. People were praying for
Speaker 1: Steve Scullies from all over the world. Those prayers came
Speaker 1: in and he says, imbued him with more and more strength.
Speaker 2: Other prayers accumulated, and he.
Speaker 1: Got through a very difficult rehab process, recovered completely and
Speaker 1: went back to Congress.
Speaker 3: So you hinted at this earlier, and I'd love for
Speaker 3: you to talk about a little bit more. You work
Speaker 3: at NYU professor as a doctor, so just a prestigious,
Speaker 3: highly respected university and medical system, and yet I'm really
Speaker 3: curious how other doctors and or academics view you. Like
Speaker 3: what feedback you've got criticism you've got, is it like, well,
Speaker 3: doctor Siegel means well, but he hasn't got the memo
Speaker 3: that these things don't happen today, or are you in
Speaker 3: the norm? Like, how do people in both those different worlds,
Speaker 3: as best as you can tell, perceive the work you're
Speaker 3: doing and especially going to public with it.
Speaker 1: Well, this particular book is what you're referring to, and
Speaker 1: it's had a very, very favorable reaction in the medical community.
Speaker 1: Nobody's feeling threatened by it. Nobody is defending their atheism.
Speaker 1: I think I have a theory as to why. I
Speaker 1: think it's the way I wrote the book. I think
Speaker 1: the book says, Read this and then you decide I'm
Speaker 1: not beating anybody over the head with anything. Read the
Speaker 1: book and you decide. I think my beliefs are pretty mainstream.
Speaker 1: But I think what I'm bringing to this that isn't
Speaker 1: really been talked about before is that I'm creating a
Speaker 1: theory that's really going to be quite popular, which is
Speaker 1: that instead of dismissing people, let's honor them. And doctors
Speaker 1: want to do that. That goes back to calling medicine
Speaker 1: or calling at a time of robotics and AI and
Speaker 1: computerization and personalized high tech solutions. It's very refreshing for
Speaker 1: a doctor to say, let's also honor the human soul
Speaker 1: and let's honor the preciousness of each life.
Speaker 2: Doctors take very well to this message.
Speaker 3: Tells me of exactly who you're writing this to, because
Speaker 3: I really want to interview you because I'm an apologist
Speaker 3: and an evangelist, and I've had a number of doc
Speaker 3: there's and others on again to talk about miracles, prayer,
Speaker 3: near death experiences. So this isn't an apologetics book, but
Speaker 3: there's a lot of apologetic ideas and arguments within it.
Speaker 3: It's not an academic book. It's a popular book. So
Speaker 3: who are you hoping primarily picks this up.
Speaker 1: I think it's a book for everyone. I think it's
Speaker 1: a book for believers to see another believer and to
Speaker 1: see examples. It's a book of stories that people can
Speaker 1: relate to who are believers. It's also a book for
Speaker 1: people on the fence who kind of want to believe,
Speaker 1: but they don't have examples of it. That's why I
Speaker 1: wrote the book the way I did, with so many sources.
Speaker 1: I'm not telling you a story of breakthrough from John
Speaker 1: Smith's point of view alone, I'm telling you from the
Speaker 1: point of view of his mother. You don't want to
Speaker 1: believe him or his mother. You got Pastor Sam. You
Speaker 1: don't want to believe him because you think he's too
Speaker 1: enthusiastic about Christianity. You've got the doctor in the ear
Speaker 1: why would he make anything up? You got the other
Speaker 1: doctor that took care of him in the ICU. You
Speaker 1: have the nurses I interviewed, so you know, you have
Speaker 1: the emergency responder who said I heard a voice. The
Speaker 1: voice said, yeah, that was me, but I wasn't there.
Speaker 1: So all of that is in there. So it's a
Speaker 1: book for non believers as well as believers, and maybe,
Speaker 1: if I had to say, it would be for people
Speaker 1: on the fence.
Speaker 3: Totally fair. So last question, I'm kind of curious how
Speaker 3: you decided which stories to include, and if there's I
Speaker 3: didn't count correct me on this one, maybe ten or
Speaker 3: twelve kind of stories that you focus on. How many
Speaker 3: other stories are there that you could have included that
Speaker 3: you didn't.
Speaker 1: There's sixteen chapters, there's probably twenty to twenty five miracles
Speaker 1: in here, and there's probably another ten that didn't make
Speaker 1: it either. Because I didn't get enough sourcing to feel
Speaker 1: that I could hit someone over the head with it.
Speaker 1: Yet maybe I'll put it in the sequel, or or
Speaker 1: I thought of it after I had written the book,
Speaker 1: or I wish I.
Speaker 2: Had put it in, or.
Speaker 1: I got the story after because people are pouring miracles
Speaker 1: into me now and I'm looking through them already. But
Speaker 1: I think my favorite miracle sean that didn't make the
Speaker 1: book and should have let's put it under this should have, okay,
Speaker 1: is that I mentioned the prayer of Hannah and praying
Speaker 1: for a son whose name was Samuel, the prophet Samuel.
Speaker 1: I put that in there, but I also intended to
Speaker 1: use a prayer about my second son, my youngest son,
Speaker 1: because when he was born, I didn't have a name
Speaker 1: for him. I used biblical names, but I didn't have
Speaker 1: a name for him, and my wife was pregnant with him,
Speaker 1: and I was in I was praying in synagogue on
Speaker 1: the high holiday Rushashana, and the guy in front of
Speaker 1: me had a baby on his shoulder, and I said,
Speaker 1: what's the name of that baby?
Speaker 2: And he said Samuel.
Speaker 1: And then I looked down and I was reading the
Speaker 1: Prayer of Hannah at the exact moment and it said,
Speaker 1: you know. And then my son was born and his
Speaker 1: name was Schmuhl. And then I come home from praying
Speaker 1: and my daughter is there and she said, I just
Speaker 1: saw this TV show, this cartoon about Samuel. All three
Speaker 1: things occur within a half hour, and I'm telling everybody
Speaker 1: listening to this, you all.
Speaker 2: Know that that's not a coincidence.
Speaker 1: Then on top of that, I name him that, and
Speaker 1: he's born and he can't hear when he's born, which
Speaker 1: is God reminding me that he's in charge of miracles,
Speaker 1: not me.
Speaker 2: So I prayed and they cleared out.
Speaker 1: His ears and he got his hearing back before he
Speaker 1: was discharged from the hospital.
Speaker 2: But his first two years.
Speaker 1: Of life he had a lot of hearing infections and
Speaker 1: hearing issues, and he's over them now, thank God. But
Speaker 1: God reminding me that he's in charge of not just
Speaker 1: what name I choose, but what happens.
Speaker 3: Well, mar I thoroughly enjoyed your book. It was actually
Speaker 3: a friend of mine, Steve Miller, who I've interviewed probably
Speaker 3: half a dozen times, one of the experts today on
Speaker 3: near death experiences, who sent me a link and instantly
Speaker 3: I thought, oh, man, if doctor Mark Siegel would come
Speaker 3: on and talk about it. I would love to have them.
Speaker 3: And as I said earlier, my wife was rushing out
Speaker 3: the door to go teach. I said, hang on, I
Speaker 3: want to share this story with you about Brett Bhaer,
Speaker 3: whom we both enjoy watching on the news regularly, story
Speaker 3: about Tamar Hamlin and the other one. So I appreciate
Speaker 3: the tone. I would second what you said that you're
Speaker 3: not banging people with these miracles. You're saying, here's what
Speaker 3: I've seen, Here's where I think the evidence points. You
Speaker 3: read and you decide, And I think that's a great
Speaker 3: tone for a book like this. So really appreciate you
Speaker 3: coming on, folks. Before you click away and make sure
Speaker 3: you hit subscribe. We are going to have more stories
Speaker 3: and interviews on the supernatural, on miracles. You won't want
Speaker 3: to miss it. And if you want to study apologetics formally,
Speaker 3: come study with me at Talbot's School of Theology. Information below,
Speaker 3: And we also have a certificate program that we just updated,
Speaker 3: big discount below where you can learn apologetics and defending
Speaker 3: the faith kind of at your own pace and we'll
Speaker 3: walk you through it. Doctor Mark Siegel, keep us posted
Speaker 3: on your next book. Especially when it intersects with kind
Speaker 3: of supernatural apologetic theology type questions. We'd love to have
Speaker 3: you back to talk about it. Thanks for your time.
Speaker 1: You are a terrific host and a terrific human being.
Speaker 1: You're walking God's path. Thank you so much for having
Speaker 1: me today.
Speaker 3: You're very kind. Thank you. Hey, friends, if you enjoyed
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Speaker 2: H