  —David Hume  Last week the Vatican announced that a meeting of
cardinals and bishops had ruled that the late Pope John Paul II
was responsible for a second miracle, and thus the way was
cleared for sainthood.  The Congregation for the Causes of
Saints decided he had cured a woman from Costa Rica in 2011
after a panel of doctors apparently ruled that her recovery was
otherwise inexplicable.  View/Submit Comments for this story
There's the rub, of course. There are many medical results we do
not understand. Spontaneous remission of cancer, for example,
occurs in a reliable but small fraction of the population; no
immediate explanation can be presented on a case-by-case. basis.
Attributing that lack of understanding to the intercession of a
dead pope is a huge step, and it illustrates a fundamental
difference between "evidence" in religion and "evidence" in
science.  The physicist Richard Feynman pointed out that in
science, when we have an idea, we try to prove it wrong as well
as right. This is an essentia