The Sean McDowell Show - The Miracles Science Can't Explain (Dr. Marc Siegel)

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Do miracles still happen or have we explained them away with modern medicine? Today, I am with Dr. Marc Siegel, Fox News senior medical analyst, NYU clinical professor, and practicing physician, to explore why many doctors believe miracles are not relics of the past, but realities they still encounter today. He argues that as medical skill advances, the value of human life and the reality of the soul become harder to ignore. Miracles are often not single supernatural moments, but an accumulation of unlikely outcomes, faith, perseverance, and healing. READ: The Miracles Among Us, by Dr. Marc Siegel: https://amzn.to/4rVVPGy *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [smdcertdisc] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Want to keep God's word with you wherever you go? The King James Bible Study KJV app by Salem Media makes it easy to read, study, share, and pray daily with a timeless KJV translation. Enjoy features like offline access, audio Bible listening, smart search, and tools to highlight bookmark and take notes, all designed to keep your Bible studies simple and organize. Best of all, it's free to download in the Google Play Store. Grow in your faith every day. Search for King James Bible Study KJV and download the app today. I think the valuing of a human life and the preciousness of the soul is intertwined with the physical skills we have. And the more of those skills advance in modern day, the more that physicians have the hands of God.

And that's what my book is about. I'm really curious how other doctors and or academics view you. What I'm bringing to this that isn't really been talked about before is that I'm creating a theory that's really going to be quite popular, which is that instead of dismissing people, let's honor them. And doctors want to do that. From the collapse of the NFL player, Dmar Hamlin, to the son of Fox News host Brett Baer, to an eighth grader from Missouri who fell through the ice and was underwater for 10 minutes and flatlined for more than 50.

Our guest today claims there are miracles all around us today. Dr. Mark Siegel is a Fox News senior medical analyst, as well as a clinical professor of medicine, and a practicing internist at NYU. Dr. Siegel, thanks for writing a fascinating book, and thanks for joining me on the show. Great to be on with you, Sean. Of course, my intro question is, why would a practicing medical doctor,

professor and TV analyst, who's got a million things going on, not only write a book, but write this book? Well, I write books all the time, and I'm a writer. I trained in writing and creative writing and journalism before I ever became a physician. That helps because when you become a physician, a lot of physicians think, oh, I can do anything when you can't.

But I believe you can do two things well in life. And I started my life as a writer and then became a physician. And I mean, I believe that being able to communicate is important to a physician. But medicine is a different language. It's its own language. And not everyone can translate it into layman's terms. It's a struggle to do that. I think it's more important that we get the medicine right than that we communicate, but both are important.

I think it's not even a question about the idea of combining faith with medicine because it shouldn't even be a question. Because when you begin to study medicine at a very young age, I mean, when you're young and you're in training, one of the first things that you discover is this incredible qualities in the human body, in the mind, in the body, the spirit, the preciousness of each life. We learn it in medical school. So how does a physician go from there

to where it's imbued in their early training to start dismissing people? Like in Canada, where medical assistance in dying is leading to homeless people being put to death. That's an extreme example. Sure. But I think the valuing of a human life and the preciousness of the soul is intertwined with the physical skills we have. And the more of those skills advance in modern day, the more that physicians have the hands of God.

And that's what my book is about. That's one of the things my book is about. Another thing that it's about is the idea that miracles don't occur all at once most of the time. It's not that they don't ever occur that way. I think that the miracles that the Catholic Church honors are real, and they have very strict criteria, and I believe it does happen that direct divine intervention leads to miracle cures that science can't explain.

But there are other miracles that are an accumulation of what are seemingly coincidences, where positive outcomes occur, where negative outcomes were far more likely, and then there's an accumulation of positive outcomes that occur that add up to the miracle. the publisher of this book kept saying to me, identify the miracle in each chapter. And we had a very fun back and forth on that because I feel that each chapter is an accumulation of multiple miracles.

Well, it definitely reads that way. And it's interesting. We're going to get to how you kind of define what you mean specifically by a miracle. But I'm really curious how your training in internal medicine shapes the way you think about assessing miracles. And in part what I'm asking is help those of us who are not medical doctors as best you can get inside your mind, how you think about and approach this given your training in medicine. Well, I don't think it's, I don't think that's what it is. I think, I don't, I think that doctors participate in miracles and whether they believe or not is almost beside the point. In my book,

There's multiple doctors who are disbelievers or doubters, and then by virtue of what they participate in, they become true believers. Some do, some don't. It almost doesn't matter as long as you show the flexibility and honoring the patient and healing, and you're a healer. You are participating in miracles. God is present. God fills in the gaps. I mean, you could argue that all day long, but it's just a fruitless argument. because it doesn't change the reality.

As long as the physician is open to the idea that there's a greater reality than that they themselves control, the better the physician they're going to be. What really influenced me early in my training was that when I was an intern, I was assigned to a case in the ICU of a guy who was in a vegetative state and in a coma.

And the family was at the bedside praying all day long every day. And they kept saying to me, look, his eyelids are fluttering, look, his heart rate is going up a little. Look, his blood pressure is going up. It imbued on me the frustrations of this family not accepting what seemed to be the reality and they're not giving up. And I thought it was going to form a very negative view in my approach to health care.

I thought this is going to be the future, me consoling families to accept a limited reality. Instead, after three months, the guy woke up. He got out of bed and he went back to work. And they were right. They were right. And we were wrong. And we were jaundiced and we were sarcastic. And we were educated by this case. And it changed how I viewed medicine. Super interesting. Some of that comes through in the book and a lot of the stories. Give us a sense of what you mean by miracle. Because you talk about medical miracles. You talk about some that seem to take place through the means and practice of a doctor. You talk about some that seem to just result that there's this healing process of somebody who just believes in God and has hope.

But then there's other times where you talk about these clear, almost unmistakably supernatural interventions, which is probably more typically what we mean by a miracle. So when you say the miracles amongst us, tell us what you mean by that. You know, early on in the process, I, I got the privilege in honor of interviewing Cardinal Dolan. And Cardinal Dolan surprised me, and I think he unintentionally broadened the motif of this book, because I asked him what he thought a miracle was. And he said, there is the Catholic Church definition, but there's also what I'm calling, he said, soft miracles.

I said, what is a soft miracle? He says, a soft miracle is an accumulation of great faith and great science, and they're intertwined and they and they established themselves over time. He gave us an example, someone in his family, where they asked someone close to him, was she healed? Did her cancer go away because of divine intervention? And the response was that and Dr. Bergenelli. So in other words, it's not one, A or B. And it's so important that this book is out because we went down a rabbit hole with Spinoza in the 1600s where he said God is only found in nature. He didn't say there was no God. He said God is only found in nature. And to be sure, nature is a direct manifestation of God and God's

beauty and God's grace. But there's also a personal God. As in my book, Pope John Paul II made that point to Robert Redfield, the former CDC director when they were meeting to discuss the AIDS epidemic right at the heart of it. He said, the pontiff said there's a personal God that we all have to recognize and we can channel our prayer towards that personal God, which makes prayer the greatest tool we have for healing. That's one and two. One, there's a personal God accepted. Two, prayer is a very powerful tool, the most powerful tool. And the third is there's a redemptive value in human suffering. Well, Redfield rejected that as a physician. He didn't like that. He said, I don't agree with you, he said to the Pope. But he said that over his career, he's come to see

that that that's correct, that there is a redemptive value in human suffering. I think in the Jewish faith, that has to do with something very basic in the Old Testament, in the Talmud, that basically says we're being tested by God every day. We're being tested by God. And do we pass the test, do we not? And it helps define who we are as people and whether we're deemed worthy in the Almighty's eyes. I'm a Christian theology professor, more specifically apologetics and evangelism. So most of the people I interview here will be Christians and evangelicals. But I talk with a lot of people of different faith, just had a friendly debate with an Orthodox Jew about the expectation of the Messiah and the identity of Jesus. Really fun. In this book,

you talk about your Jewish faith some. I'd be really curious what you mean by that, because obviously there's conservative Jews, there's Orthodox Jews, and how that shapes the way you approach miracles. You know, I'm a Levi, and the Levi is someone that's a servant of the Kohane, and interestingly enough, Aaron, Moses' brother,

was the first Levi. And what he did was he performed miracles all day long. with his staff and those were minor miracles and I think that's another thing that led to this so that's another thing that informed my faith is that I see myself as someone who performs service for others that's what I do as a physician that's what I try to do as a person I think it's a deep part of my identity my faith so I don't distinguish I don't distinguish you know so much between being Jewish, between being Christian. I think it's a matter of believing in God.

And I don't really think of it as a separate issue. I think of it in terms of faith. And I've experienced miracles in my own life that have led me to that. Like when my first son was born and I was going through a period of confusion, like, what's my role, what am I going to do? And how do I care for my son? and I was walking down the street and I saw a man praying

and he handed me his prayer book and he said take this and pray for the health of your newborn son and I said how do you know I have a son? I didn't say anything so he was an angel from the Lord I mean he was there as I left Sean I look back over my shoulder is he really there is it a visitation he was there but that changed my life and I and I pray

but I don't judge people to say oh this this is their faith this is my faith. I think there's a community there. My friendship with Cardinal Dolan is a great example of that. Or Joel Osteen. I'm friends with Joel Osteen. Pastor Osteen.

Pastor Sam Rodriguez, a dear close friend of mine, inspired a lot of the parts of this book. He, in fact, did a movie on Breakthrough. You were talking about Breakthrough. And the breakthrough moment, actually, is when John Smith, after everything he experiences, communes with Pastor Sam. And then he decides that what he's been through is so special and so unusual,

it brings him faith that he then wants to show to the rest of the world. It's the same thing that's happened to Christopher Smith. He's not in my book, but he'll be in the next one, who I reported on recently on TV, Smith got shot in the head. And a woman he was going on a first date with got shot in the head as well. and she died, he survived, and got a visitation from his father who died when he was eight years old. And the vision said to him, the way you know this is me, that I'm your father, is that when I was lying in my coffin, my best friend Brett, put two marijuana cigarettes in my left pocket.

And there's only two people in the world that know about that, Brett and your mother. and he said, you're going to live, you're going to survive this ordeal, and you're going to wake up, and you're going to go on to have a fairly normal life. Chris Smith woke up two months later in the ICU, remember that visitation, told his mother, and she broke into tears, talked to Brett, only two people that knew it was absolutely true. And then Smith went on cognitively and recovered. He's got stem cell injections to get strength back in his life. left side, and he's going around spreading the word. And I think that that's another message in my

book, which is spreading the word. Read the stories and see if you believe. See if you believe after you read the stories compared to when before you read them. Well, your book is primarily full of stories, and I was reading it this morning to my wife as she was running out the door to teach math today. I said, oh, man, there's some stories here over dinner tonight. I want to share with you and talk about and process. So that jumped out to me really quickly. It's full of stories. Part of me has a million theological questions for you about your faith and how you practice it and what that means. That is a separate conversation. Maybe we'll come back to that. But I've also, I've done a lot of shows on visions and near-death experiences, and I'm convinced they're veritical. But let's jump to some of the

stories in the book. I read a lot of different news sources. I read New York Times every morning, but one host I really enjoy is Brett Baer. And him and his son is the first story in your book, which just jumped out to me. So share that story as much as you can. And tell us why you put that in the realm of a modern day miracle. Because of the accumulation of events. It's like everybody listening to this podcast or watching it right now will know about the coincidence that occur when you're thinking of someone and the phone rings right after that.

How did that happen? What is telepathy? Where is that coming from? It's a direct proof of a larger spiritual reality. So are dreams. Brett Baer, their son, Paul, their first son, Amy, they meet with a series of coincidences, but then their first son is born and he's not thriving and he's very pale. And the first miracle in that chapter is that Want to keep God's word with you wherever you go? The King James Bible Study KJV app by Salem Media makes it easy to read, study, share, and pray daily with a timeless KJV translation.

Enjoy features like offline access, audio Bible listening, smart search, and tools to highlight bookmark and take notes, all designed to keep your Bible studies simple and organize. Best of all, it's free to download in the Google Play Store. Grow in your faith every day. Search for King James Bible Study, KJV, and download the app today.

at this, happens to be passing the hospital, and he's not even on call. And he says, you know, I think I'm going to go in. And he doesn't know why. Why does he go in? Goes in, finds out about Paul and says, I'm going to look into this, even though he's not working. He does an echocardiogram. He finds the problem in his heart, which is multiple abnormalities, cardiac congenital abnormalities. and over the next several months they work on repairing them and it's not perfect because of the size being so small of the heart. Brett and Amy are a team. Amy full of love, Brett, full of having to have his questions answered. They meet another woman there who has a child the same age as Paul in similar straits and they root for each other and they pray for each other. And Brett's prayer is in my book. I have a prayer.

section in my book of famous prayers written for the book by great spiritual leaders. If I had known you, Sean, I would have asked you for a prayer when I wrote the book. But Brett's prayer is in there and he says we pray for one more day. We pray for one more day. That's a lot of in the theme of this

book. And through the years, they go through different and tragically the woman who is rooting with them, her daughter dies. And they feel great suffering over the the loss, but she stays with them as a dear friend over the years as they become more and more involved in National Children's Hospital. The chapter focuses on the fifth heart surgery where Paul has a cold, and he goes in to see his new internist, and he says, this is just a cold.

But then he says, but you know, same as the doctor passing the hospital, you know, just to be sure, I'm going to do a chest x-ray. If you ask that, doctor, as part of a board question, Sean, should you do a chest x-ray? The answer's no, you don't. You wouldn't check that box. But God checks the right box, right? So that

intuition, maybe I should do a chest x-ray. And he does it and it shows a slight widening of the heart. And he said, you know, this is normal for a kid and for a guy in his

condition. But just to be sure I'm going to show this to his cardiologist. Shows it to his cardiologist who says, you know, I could pass this. But just to be sure, I'm going to do an echocardiogram. He does an echocardiogram and he finds an aneurysm that's about to burst. They have surgery scheduled for the next day. Paul goes out and plays golf with Brett. Paul wins.

And then he gets, his life is saved with another. successful operation. And over the years, Amy and Brett, who are fantastic parents, are relinquishing more control of the situation to their son, which is correct. So he's a very courageous young man with a lot of spiritual

transcendence. Because if our souls are tested enough, we mature. The miracle in that chapter is not one miracle. It's an accumulation of, well, maybe, I shouldn't, but just to be sure is the miracle. That distinction is helpful. I want to make sure our audience doesn't miss that you have some examples in your book of prayers that are done and just instantaneous, supernatural

events take place to save somebody's life that because the timing and the specificity just can't be explained away scientifically alone. Then you talk about miracle as a certain number of seeming coincidences that collectively lead towards something positive that in themselves can't be explained away when taken collectively. I'll let folks think about that and analyze that, but is that a fair distinction to you? Yeah, it's perfect, except that one thing needs to be added here is that Brett and Amy prayed and prayed and prayed every single day. And I believe that that's part of it too. That's part of it too. And I don't want science analyzing that. How ridiculous that we would use the tool of science to analyze whether prayer is working or not. Well, wait, that's the

opposite of what we should do. You should use the tool of prayer to analyze whether the science is working or not. That, that quote you just said might go viral. I love that. That'll get some people thinking. So you mentioned within the story, before we moved to the NFL player, Damar Hamlin, and then a couple of other counts that I think are just stunning examples of sudden supernatural, kind of one-time intervention miracles. You mentioned somebody in the story with Brett whose child was not healed and may have been praying as well. Before we get to some of the other miracles, what would you say as a person of faith,

as a scientist, as somebody who says, I prayed. And you say there's miracles amongst us, but I'm not experiencing one. There's two answers to that. One is that God chooses the miracles he wants to give. That came from Dolan also and other people in the book. God gives us the miracles he wants to give us, not the ones we pray for. And the second part of that is, let me stick on the first part. Sure.

The two examples from the Old Testament on that I use in the book. One is Hana is praying for a son, and she's not given a son until she's very, very old. her sister has seven children, I believe, multiple children, and Hana finally gets a son, and the son, she calls the son Shmul or Samuel, mean God hurts my prayer. But the lesson there is that God doesn't grant her wish because she wishes for it. He grants the child because he knows that Samuel is going to go on to become a great prophet and lead a nation and lead to King David. So that's the reason he grants the prayer.

And another striking example from the Old Testament is Hezekiah, who's a king, and Hezekiah is suffering from a sore that looks like it's going to kill him. And he goes to Isaiah, and Isaiah says, you're going to die from that sore. And Hezekiah doesn't really want to accept that prophecy from Isaiah, because Isaiah is not God. He's a prophet. He doesn't want to accept that prophecy. So he goes to God, and in going directly to God, Hezekiah learns that what's really at stake here is that Hezekiah has a father who was a bad king. Hezekiah was a great king. Hezekiah's son is destined to be a bad king. And God says, I will save you, but you have to follow your fate.

So Hezekiah marries Isaiah's daughter and has a child who's a bad king. and his sores are healed and he lives on. God saves him. That's a really great lesson of God giving the miracles that he wants us to have, not the ones we're asking for. Because what Hezekiah was asking for is I don't want my son to be another bad king, but God had chosen that he would be a bad king. The other thing I want to, and I have that in a chapter in my book.

And then it leads to a story from the Holocaust. But I also want to talk about something else, which is that a few of the characters in my book, most strikingly, in the chapter about October 7, 2023, an amazing story of a family that was saved from a fire where they were burned alive by Hamas. I asked, when I'm interviewing them, why did God choose you for the miracle? Why did God choose you? And their answer is very sobering. And it's the same thing that Benjamin Hall, our amazing reporter at Fox, has said to me, which is, I refuse to call what happened to me a miracle because even though it is, it dishonors those who didn't make it.

To be the recipient of a miracle is a very humbling thing. It's not something that you brag about. That's such an interesting point. There's a certain weight to experience a miracle. Everybody wants one, but then when you get one and others don't, for reasons, like you said, God's sovereignty, we may or may not understand. There's a weight that comes to that, maybe akin to what some people call survivors' guilt. But nonetheless, you and I might differ over some things in the New Testament,

but we agree that God is sovereign in that he does miracles according to his prerogative and larger desire for the world. So that's a really helpful point to draw out. Tell us about the chapter on the NFL player, DeMar Hamlin, and why you consider that a modern miracle. Because it's not, the other thing I'm trying to do in this book is to look underneath what everyone thinks the miracle is and see if there's another miracle that you don't know about. I wanted to be, and my editor to the book says,

make it so that the reader doesn't know the miracle off the top. The miracle with DeMar would seem to be, wow, he fell down, he had a cardiac arrest, they brought him back. That would seem to be the miracle. Sure. Here's the real miracle. The real miracle is that DeMar Hamlin, safety for the Buffalo Bills,

got hit in the chest with a helmet right in the middle of his cardiac cycle, even with shoulder pads on, and had a cardiac arrest. That is really, really unusual for someone of his age wearing full garb. It's really, really, really, really rare. But on top of that, it turns out, and I found this out through interviewing multiple people,

I interviewed the team physician for the Cincinnati Bengals who talked about what happened on the field. But then I got to Leslie Bisson, who's the team physician for the Buffalo Bills, and they run the show for their players, even if they're in a visiting stadium. And Bisson said back in 2007, look at how this miracle works. Sean. We're talking 2023 here and the miracle starts back in 2007. This is how God performs miracles. I had a skater, he said, that was visiting the Buffalo Sabres and I was their team physician and he got a skate to the carotid artery and he almost fled to death and I barely saved them. And he had multiple units of blood and thank God he was okay. And I said at that point,

if I'm going to participate in sports medicine for these guys who are a lot, larger than life. They're like superheroes. They're like, you know, physical prowess. He says, I'm going to insist that we rehearse severe outcomes and cardiac arrest every month, every single month as what we would do. And he said, everybody made fun of me. There hasn't been a cardiac arrest in the NFL since 1955. Why would you do that? And I made him do it, he said. I made him do it. Take the shoulder pants off. Here are the scissors. Apply the defibrillator, rush onto the field, rehearsed. So when it got to DeMar, they just pulled out the rehearsal,

and they got his heart started again within one minute. Time his brain. So the reason he recovered was because of that protocol that everyone thought was insane. Then, of course, he had several days where he was coming back to himself. It wasn't the way the media presented it. And it is a true miracle that he went from there to playing again. But the reason the miracle occurred was because of this spooky rehearsal that Bisson told me he had a premonition.

I do have to say one of my favorite parts of the chapter is that when DeMarre came back to consciousness, his first question was, who won the game? And the doctor says back, you won the game of life. Like, that gave me goosebumps. And I agree with you. If we're using the term kind of a soft miracle, like, I think you're right about this. but I can also understand why skeptics go, yeah, but maybe they're just lucky. Like, try to explain it away, evidentially speaking. These next two examples that you give.

By the way, I don't think they can. I don't think they can. Tell me about that. Let's explain something away. Why would you do that? Why don't you learn and listen from the proximity issue? You know, like I just told you something about Hamelin that's unbelievable, but it actually happened.

You know, so I call it not in the book, but I've called it since the book, The Miracle Lane. You're in a lane. And somebody said to me last night at an interview something I liked, imagine all the things that wouldn't have led to this lane. In other words, where it didn't all come together the right way, that's also evidence of God's fingerprints, when everything happens in just the right way. My father's 102 years old. He's on dialysis. He had a ventilator when he was 98. He had a hip operation and a pin put in his hip when he was 98.

He survived major abdominal surgery and hernia repair when he was 98. He had a fistula that was draining, and the surgeon said, it's never going to heal, but it healed. And he's 102. And my mother's 100. How did that happen? Because at each turn of the road, a seeming non-miracle, added to an accumulation, is a miracle. 100 and two, 100, still with it, held together by love, doesn't want to leave the other one alone. So if a skeptic were to push back and say, you know, Dr. Siegel, it makes sense. There's a number of

factors that line up for, say, DeMar Hamelin, line up for your father, who's 102, which is pretty amazing. But most people don't survive that kind of cardiac arrest. Most people don't live to 102. So given how many people there are, it makes sense that just mathematically at times we'd have these exceptions, and we're calling them a miracle, but mathematically speaking, there could be an explanation for him. Well, that's part of what a miracle is. A miracle, that's Dolan's soft miracles, which is that at each juncture, there could be a partial scientific reason.

I looked at for... Want to keep God's word with you wherever you go? The King James Bible Study KJV app by Salem Media makes it easy to read, study, share, and pray daily with a timeless KJV translation. Enjoy features like offline access, audio Bible listening, smart search, and tools to highlight bookmark and take notes,

all designed to keep your Bible studies simple and organized. Best of all, it's free to download in the Google Play Store. Growing your faith every day. Search for King James Bible Study, KJV, and download the app today. Another book I did on that, not a miracle book, but I have a story in this book of a guy who rises out of a wheelchair to attack someone who owes him two million dollars when he hasn't walked in months and months and months. And a psychiatrist said, we're putting you in a mental hospital for saying you're going to do that because you can't do that. You can't do that. Well, he did it. And why did he do it? How did he do it? How can somebody walk again that was told they're never going to walk again? I mean, I can come up with some size. that your brain inhibits the hamstrings and that when your mind is on fire, you can somehow

partly over. There's always some science, but miracles aren't, again, only the Catholic Church maybe disagrees with me, the strict interpretation of the Vatican. And that's why I include in the book a chapter on Lords. And I take very seriously what the Catholic Church is saying. but there's a whole broad expanse of miracles that are in accumulation like Aaron's miracles in the Old Testament. And so this guy rising out of the wheelchair is a miracle. So this story really hit me because it's about an eighth grader outside of St. Louis.

And I have a son who rode his bike to school this morning. He's a seventh grader who fell through the ice and was underwater at least 10 minutes, flatlined for more than 50. While I'm reading this, I got goosebumps and just this sense of like the worst nightmare a parent could imagine. Tell us what happened and why you consider that a miracle. By the way, I just want to be clear on something that I believe that each miracle in each chapter of this book, whether I'm using my definition of soft miracles or accumulation of miracles or one that's more stark, where like, you know, like Doty Osteen comes home and pray. and has a series of prayers.

And cancer goes away. Four times. Four different cancers go away. And she's in the Lakewood Church, and people come there to have their cancer go away. And some of them do. Some of them do. There's a great healing aspect going on there

with Joel Osteen and Paul Osteen and Doty Osteen and Lisa Osteen. Combs. All of them I interviewed for this book. But I also believe the other chapters of miracles. I think Damar is a miracle. I think Brett Bair's son is a miracle. I think some of the ones I haven't mentioned are. The chapter on breakthrough,

I'll tell you something that I haven't been saying, which you'll resonate with. Part of that miracle does involve Pastor Sam Rodriguez because he had a sister, he had a daughter who was, he had a daughter who was dying in the ICU of COVID, and she was one of the first that was put on steroids and she was on ECMO, she was on respiratory assist,

and she was fading. And Sam was in another room praying. And all of a sudden he felt something. He felt something. And he called up his daughter and he said, has something just changed? Because I was just praying for you. and she said there were just angels in the room here with me.

And he asked what the angels look like. She said they were light and they were very positive. From that moment on, she recovered. So that's one kind of miracle. And then Sam was involved with the breakthrough miracle where the eighth grader, these guys go to the lake, Lake St. Louis, and it's freezing out. And they go skating on the ice the way boys,

do, they come home and the sister of one of the boys says, why didn't you include me? So they say, okay, we'll go again. So the next day they go back to the lake, idiots, it's in the 40s. And they go skating on the ice again, and they all fall in. The emergency responders come, and they can't find John Smith. They got the other two. And then there's a voice from the shore that says 15 feet to the right. And one of the things, and one of the things, things I do in each of these chapters is verify all of this, because I want the reader

to know this is the truth I'm telling you. It's not just some fanciful story. That's why you don't have to be a believer to believe at the end of this book. Because there was no one at the shore, but the voice was of the boss of the emergency responder. I know that

because I called him, and I went over with him. I said, where were you when this happened? He said, I was in my office in St. Louis. I said, did you have a sense of what was going on? He said, yes, but I wasn't there. And so they pulled John Smith out of the water. And so then I knew some medical critics might say to me,

and no one has, by the way. I think doctors are actually believers, because I haven't been getting a lot of negative feedback at all on this book because it's so researched. And they pull him out of the water, and I knew someone was going to say, could this be hypothermia? So I called up Michael Bodden, who's in another one of the chapters in this book, the top forensic pathologist in the country.

I said, what would it be to be in the water for 15 minutes in the 40s, temperatures in the 40s? Like on that day. He says, minimal, minimal. He says if it's in the 20s or, you know, 10 degrees, then you could say the organs are frozen and it might take a while for them to thaw. But in the 40s, you get a minimal amount of hypothermic effect. So the fact that he has no pulse for like 50, 55 minutes is unheard of. Now, they start CPR, they get him to the hospital, and the team in the hospital wants to let go.

They've never brought anybody back from 55 minutes. I talk to all of them, the emergency responders, the physicians. They all say that they've never had a case like this. She, the mother, would not let him go. She said to them, and I interviewed her too. She said to them, wait till I get to the hospital. Do not let him go. Now that sentiment is normal.

Yeah. That part's not a miracle, but the fact that they listened to her. And she gets to the hospital, she hits the ER and gets down on her knees and prays to God. As soon as she does that, his pulse comes back. And then I said to the doctors, okay, that's clearly God's presence. That's divine intervention. But what's the chances that John Smith could get from there to anything resembling normal life? They say zero.

We've never had a case like that. We've never had the 55 minutes. We've never had under the ice. We've never had that voice from the shore. And John Smith fully recovers when his pulse comes back. I interviewed him for this book. And then the breakthrough occurs years later when he meets Pastor Sam and tells him this story. and he becomes a devout Christian, realizing that he is the recipient of a miracle.

And like a lot of people in this book, and this may be the part I'm proudest of, and it goes for DeMar Hamlin, it goes for many of the people in the book, DeMar gives back, he's out in the community, doing CPR, teaching CPR, teaching the proper use of defibrillators, creating scholarships for underprivileged young people as a result of God blessing him. And that's what John Smith did. It became an evangelical. He uses his story to teach people to believe.

That did jump out to me because I teach a class at Talbot School Theology on why does God allow evil? And one of the things we talk about, and there's so many more pieces than this, is that when people go through suffering, that often awakens them to give back in exponential ways. you see that with Damar, you see that with so many other stories that you tell. So that's one way God can use such tragedies. But let me ask you, this might be one of the- By the way, that may be why the pontiff is saying the redemptive value in human suffering, one of the reasons. One of the reasons, good.

So one of the stories that really jumped out to me for a number of reasons, but in part because one of the doctors and people there were on Camps of Crusade for Christ's staff. My parents are still on crusade staff, what is known as crew. So I've been on trips kind of like this, and it's in the mountains of Sudan. And it's not where the heart of the war is at, but you describe how it spills over into this area and how I think there's a hospital within, I can't remember if you said 100 or 300 miles like medical care is just so rare. And there's a three-year-old named Rita. Tell us the story what happened. And a particular, don't leave out the detail about the YouTube video and the internet connection,

because that strikes as something almost clearly supernatural, I think, at least to critics. I've been lucky enough through an organization called African Mission Healthcare to meet a number of amazing missionary doctors who are out there saving lives by the thousands. And the Nuba Mountains of Sudan is right in the middle of war-torn Sudan, which everybody knows about. People are displaced.

There's more refugees there than anywhere in the world. and people are living in caves, people are living without running water. It's horrendous. In the middle of all this is Tom Katina, who's a family practitioner. He was a Navy flight surgeon. He went to the same university I went to, Brown, and he's a real larger-than-life figure. I have interviewed him a few times on the radio for this book, recently for our Fox Nation special. He's just larger than life, very, very humble man.

and he runs this entire 450-bed hospital. And one day a young girl named Rita comes, and he uses a cat scan and diagnoses her with bilateral kidney cancer called Wilms tumor, but he's only ever operated removing a single kidney. He's never done a partial nephrectomy, remove half of a kidney. And you've got to understand these conditions. Generally, no anesthesiologists. They use bellows to blow the anesthesia over a person.

They have intravenous. They have medications, but they have a lot of scarcity. They have to use old autoclaves to sterilize equipment. It's very rudimentary stuff. And he happened to have visiting him another family practitioner from Washington, D.C., who said, what are you going to do? And Tom said, I'm going to have to try to operate. But I've never done this before.

So the other doctor says, why don't you go on the Internet and see if you can get an instructional video for surgeons on this. And Katina said, and I asked Katina about his surgical skill for the Fox Nation special, and he's very, very, very, very good surgeon. But he made an interesting comment that he didn't train as a surgeon in school, so he doesn't understand surgical disease the way a surgeon might, but his technical skills are top-notch. But he can't do this surgery.

So he goes on the internet, but there is no internet, and there hasn't been an internet working there for weeks and weeks and weeks. So they go to the computer and they're pounding on the computer, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, God wills the internet to be on after weeks of no internet. And it's very slow, and they can barely get anything to upload. And they manage to go to YouTube and to get an instructional video of how to do a partial nephrectomy in Polish, Sean, in Polish. And neither of them speak Polish.

And they're agonizingly going through this video with almost none of the equipment that the Polish surgeons have. And halfway through, it crashes. And they look at each other and they go, well, Polish, we don't understand. Equipment we don't have. What do we do? They said, maybe we just got enough information here to make this work, maybe. So he goes ahead and he does the operation, removes the cancerous kidney, removes what he

he thinks the other half of the kidney is, and is successful, he thinks, but he's estimating. And he gets her out of anesthesia, this rudimentary anesthesia, and he gives her, chemo because they don't have radiation in this hospital and she goes back to her cave or wherever she's living with her mother. Six months later, she comes back completely cured. Year later, comes back completely cured. No recurrence. And that's God's divine intervention. Yeah, that story was amazing to me. I'm just trying to picture it in my mind of like no internet connection. You happen to get an internet connection enough to have a YouTube video. which is more than an email.

Then they find the right video in Polish. And I'm just imagining this brilliant doctor who's watching a YouTube video, how to do a surgery. And it's enough to help them to do it and she recovers. It's just like you can't make this kind of story up. So that was one of my favorite. You have a full story that you don't need to go any detail in in terms of the chapter in which the Congressman Steve Scalise is shot on a baseball field in 2017.

I'm bringing this one up because I'd love you to comment on a quote in there from another... Looking for a simple way to stay rooted in God's Word every day. The Daily Bible Devotion app by Salem Media gives you morning and evening devotionals designed to encourage, inspire, and keep you connected with scripture. Plus, you'll enjoy daily Bible trivia and humor, a fun way to learn and share a smile while growing in your faith. Get the Daily Bible Devotion app for free on both iOS and Android. start and end your day with God's word. Search for the daily Bible devotion app in the app store or Google Play Store and download it today.

Congressman. And the heart of my question is just how you see the connection between faith, just having belief, and healing, even if there's not a supernatural miracle. And I ask it that way because in light of the recovery of Congressman Steve Scalise, another congressman said, quote, Steve's support structure and faith leads to his courage and strength. It leads directly to his ability to recover. So this seems to be this congressmanist is saying there's not necessarily a miracle that took place here, if I read it correctly, but just having faith contributes to somebody healing. How do you see that intersection between faith and healing even if there may not be a miracle?

There is a miracle, and Scalia says there's a miracle. He said flat out for the book and for the Fox Nation special that his survival here was a miracle. But you're talking about something else that I'll get to in a minute. But the first part of the miracle is that Brad Wendstrip, a fellow congressman, happens to be in the batting cage that day. When he's never in the batting cage, he hates the batting cage. He doesn't like balls thrown his way. He doesn't like the automatic machine. He's never in the batting cage.

He doesn't know why he was in the batting cage. If he hadn't been in the batting cage, he would have been shot. Because he would have been in a position to be killed. That's the first part of the miracle. The thing you're referring to, though, is that Scalese says that when he gives over control to God, the way we all should, God is the higher being. God is the Almighty. When you understand that the only thing you're supposed to be afraid of is God, not each other,

not physical circumstances, not daily coincidences, not somebody yelling at you, not somebody antagonizing you, but God is what you have to worry about and be afraid of and make amends with and pray to. When you realize that, Scalese, says, a calm comes over you. And that's what he was referring to. But what happened there was an enormous miracle

because why was Winstrip there? Why did Winstrum think to rush out and apply the tourniquet? Why did Winstrip give him fluids? Why did Winstrip get the guy over with the intravenus from the ambulance. Why did Wendstrips say, not the ambulance, the helicopter, the helicopter? The ambulance would have killed him. He would have been stuck in DC traffic. Why the helicopter? They got the helicopter. They get him to the hospital. He's lost 50 units of blood. He comes in with a blood pressure of about zero. Then a surgeon and an interventional radiologist get together. They've never

worked together before. They put clamps on this severed artery in his belly that's in pieces. It's like, it's like fragmented. And they say, we can't save anybody like this. They wheel a patient out of an operating room with clamps into an interventional radiology suite. I've never seen that. I've never heard of that. These doctors have never heard of that. But the interventional radiologist working with an open abdomen is able to find the parts of the artery to burn off, to close off with a burning equipment called a brovi and made it so that the surgeon was then able to operate while they're pouring blood at him. All of this occurs. Then he gets out of surgery, praying every day, praying to God. And then there's a term that you're very familiar with

called community intercession. People were praying for Steve Scalese from all over the world. Those prayers came in and he says imbued him with more and more strength. Other prayers accumulated. And he got through a very difficult rehab process, recovered completely, and went back. to Congress. So you hinted at this earlier, and I'd love for you to talk about a little bit more. You work at NYU professor as a doctor, so just a prestigious, highly respected university and medical system. And yet, I'm really curious how other doctors and or academics view you, like what

feedback you've got, criticism you've got. Is it like, well, Dr. Siegel means well. he hasn't got the memo that these things don't happen today or are you in the norm like how do people in both those different worlds as best as you can tell perceive the work you're doing and especially going so public with it well this particular book is what you're referring to and it's had a very very favorable reaction in the medical community nobody's feel threatened by it nobody is defending their atheism i think i have a theory as to why i think it's the way i wrote the book i think the book says read this and then you decide.

I'm not beating anybody over the head with anything. Read the book and you decide. I think my beliefs are pretty mainstream, but I think what I'm bringing to this that isn't really been talked about before is that I'm creating

a theory that's really going to be quite popular, which is that instead of dismissing people, let's honor them. And doctors want to do that. That goes back to calling medicine a calling. At a time, of robotics and and AI and computerization and personalized high-tech solutions. It's very refreshing for a doctor to say, let's also honor the human soul and let's honor

the preciousness of each life. Doctors take very well to this message. Tell us maybe exactly who you're writing this to because I really want to interview you because I'm an apologist and an evangelist and I've had a number of doctors and others on again to talk about miracles, prayer, near-death experiences. So this isn't an apologetics book, but there's a lot of apologetic ideas and arguments within it. It's not an academic book. It's a popular book. So who are you hoping primarily picks this up? I think it's a book for everyone. I think it's a book for believers to see another believer and to see examples. It's a book of stories that people can relate to who are believers. It's also a book for.

people on the fence who kind of want to believe, but they don't have examples of it. That's why I wrote the book the way I did with so many sources. I'm not telling you a story of breakthrough from John Smith's point of view alone. I'm telling you from the point of view of his mother. You don't want to believe him or his mother. You got Pastor Sam. You don't want to believe him because you think he's too enthusiastic about Christianity. You've got the doctor in the ER. Why would he make anything up? You got the other doctor that took care of him in the ICU. You have the nurses I interviewed. So, you know, you have the emergency responder who said, I heard a voice.

The voice said, yeah, that was me, but I wasn't there. So all of that is in there. So it's a book for nonbelievers as well as believers. And maybe if I had to say, it would be for people on the fence. Totally fair. So last question, I'm kind of curious how you decided which stories to include. And if there's, I didn't count, correct me on this one, maybe 10 or 12 kind of stories that you focus on. How many other stories are there that you could have included that you didn't?

There's 16 chapters. There's probably 20 to 25 miracles in here. And there's probably another 10 that didn't make it either because I didn't get enough sourcing to be, to feel that I could hit someone over the head with it yet. Maybe I'll put it in the sequel. or I thought of it after I had written the book, or I wish I had put it in, or I got the story after, because people are pouring miracles into me now,

and I'm looking through them already. But I think my favorite miracle, Sean, that didn't make the book and should have, let's put it under the should have, is that I mentioned the prayer of Hana and praying for a son whose name was Samuel, the prophet Samuel. I put that in there, but I also intended to use a prayer about my second son, my youngest son,

because when he was born, I didn't have a name for him. I used biblical names, but I didn't have a name for him. And my wife was pregnant with him, and I was praying in synagogue on the high holiday, Rosh Hashanah, and the guy in front of me had a baby on his shoulder. And I said, what's the name of that baby? And he said, Samuel. And then I looked down and I was reading the prayer of Hana at the exact moment. And it said, you know, and then my son was born and his name was Shmool.

And then I come home from praying. And my daughter is there. And she said, I just saw this TV show, this cartoon about Samuel. All three things occur within a half hour. And I'm telling everybody listening to this, you all know that that's not a coincidence. Then on top of that, I name him that, and he's born, and he can't hear when he's born, which is God reminding me that he's in charge of miracles, not me. So I prayed, and they cleared out his ears, and he got his hearing back before he was discharged

from the hospital, but his first two years of life, he had a lot of hearing infections and hearing issues, and he's over them now, thank God. But God reminding me that he's in charge of not just what name I choose, but what happens. Well, Mark, I thoroughly enjoyed your book. It was actually a friend of mine, Steve Miller, who I've interviewed probably half a dozen times. One of the experts today on near-death experiences who sent me a link. And instantly, I thought, oh, man, if Dr. Mark Siegel would come on and talk about it, I would love to have them. And as I said earlier, my wife was rushing out the door to go teach. I said, hang on, I want to share the story with you about Brett Bear, whom we both

enjoy watching on the news regularly. The story about DeMar Hamlin and the other one. So, I appreciate the tone. I would second what you said that you're not banging people with these miracles. You're saying, here's what I've seen. Here's where I think the evidence points. You read and you decide, and I think that's a great tone for a book like this. So really appreciate you coming on. Folks, before you click away and make sure you hit subscribe, we are going to have more stories and interviews on the supernatural, on miracles. You won't want to miss it. And if you want to study Apologetics formally, come study with me at Talba School of Theology. Information below. And we also have a certificate program that we just updated big discount below where you can

learn apologetics and defending the faith kind of at your own pace and we'll walk you through it. Dr. Mark Siegel, keep us posted on your next book, especially when intersects with kind of supernatural, apologetic theology type questions. We'd love to have you back to talk about it. Thanks for your time. You are a terrific host and a terrific human being. You're walking God's Beth, thank you so much for having me today. You're very kind. Thank you. Hey, friends, if you enjoyed this show, please hit that follow button on your podcast app. Most of you tuning in haven't done this yet, and it makes a huge difference in helping us

reach and equip more people and build community. And please consider leaving a podcast review. Every review helps. Thanks for listening to the Sean McDowell Show, brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, where we have on campus and online programs in apologetic, spiritual formation, marriage and family, Bible, and so much more. We would love to train you to more effectively live, teach, and defend the Christian faith today. And we will see you when the next episode drops. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for working everything out for my good. Help me

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