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entirelyuseless comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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John Paul II was canonized more than a year ago (you might have been looking at an older news source and not noticed the date on it.) There are definitely problems with the Church's canonization process, and if they really cared about the validity of miracles like that, they should publish the facts of the case and an explanation of why they think it was a miracle. But they don't do that, which allows for a lot more wishful thinking.
A more reasonable example of a miracle claim (which is not about the afterlife) is this. Most explanations which do not accept it as a miracle are mistaken in obvious ways, as for example Brian Dunning's explanation in the linked article. I'm not sure where he got the idea that doctors did not testify to the amputation, but that is simply completely false.
Whoops, you're right, he's been canonized now. Sorry about that.
I agree that the most convincing miracle stories aren't about the afterlife, but the question at issue here wasn't "do miracles ever happen?" but "do we have good evidence of an afterlife?"; the question arose because CCC cited the existence of an afterlife as something better explained by his variety of theism than by atheism.
(As to the specific alleged miracle you mention: at a remove of nearly 400 years, it seems difficult to say much about what actually happened; e.g., I don't see how we have enough evidence to rule out the possibility of a concerted fraud some time after the alleged events, the enquiry at Zaragoza being an outright fiction; or a smaller-scale earlier fraud along Dunning's lines, but with the doctors having been bribed to say what they did. Of course either of those would be a strange and unusual happening -- but stranger and more unusual than a completely amputated leg miraculously growing back?)
I agree that even the most convincing miracle accounts do not necessarily imply that it is more reasonable to accept them than to suppose that they most likely have strange and unusual human and natural explanations. That's what I said earlier in comparing claims of revelation to claims of intelligent design in biology.
This is circular reasoning. You can argue that your theory makes it likely that the miracle didn't happen, but then you can't use it as evidence for your theory.
It's not circular reasoning; even without deciding between naturalism and the various candidate supernaturalisms we know from straightforward observation that major miracles are extremely rare and hoaxes are not so rare.
Depending on the scale of the hoax.