Emphasis Preaching Journal

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), with Joe Nickell as its one full-time investigator, has debunked countless hoaxes and claims. He has validated Clement Clarke Moore's authorship of "The Night Before Christmas." Another investigator, Charles Hamilton, exposed the Hitler diaries as frauds. Investigators have discredited and disproved the activity of mediums at Lily Dale, New York, where nearly 25,000 people come each summer to talk to their dead. (A Gallup poll has found that half of all Americans believe in E.S.P., 40 percent believe in demonic possession and haunted houses, and about a third believe in astrology, clairvoyance, and ghosts.) Members of the CSICOP have shown that the Shroud of Turin was made with powdered pigments somewhere around A.D. 1300, they have demonstrated that an alleged bleeding vial of blood of St. Januarius in the Cathedral of Naples was made of beeswax and olive oil. They have disproved the claims of firewalkers who supposedly have the ability to walk across 60 feet of burning timbers. While some members of the society refuse to believe almost anything unusual, André Kole, who has debunked witch doctors in Uganda, faith healers in India, and psychic surgeons in the Philippines, says that there is one, Jesus Christ, whose miracles cannot be explained away.

The first miracle of Jesus, recorded in the Gospel of John, could not be explained by the hosts at the Wedding of Cana. It was a miraculous sign pointing to the divine nature of Jesus Christ and his divine power as the Savior of the world.