is there a scientific explanation for this?

[Alan Burns]

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/missouri-nuns-body-seems-intact-182507482.html

apparently it has happened before:
https://ijov.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/saint-cuthberts-body-remained-incorrupt-for-over-850-years/

[Sebastian Toe]

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/missouri-nuns-body-seems-intact-182507482.html

apparently it has happened before:
https://ijov.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/saint-cuthberts-body-remained-incorrupt-for-over-850-years/

“In general, when we bury a body at our human decomposition facility, we expect it will take roughly five years for the body to become skeletonized,” Nicholas Passalacqua told Newsweek. Passalacqua is an associate professor and director of forensic anthropology at Western Carolina University.

“That is without a coffin or any other container or wrapping surrounding the remains. So for this body, which was buried in a coffin, I personally don’t find it too surprising that the remains are well preserved after only four years.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/27/missouri-nun-body-intact-four-years

[torridon]

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/missouri-nuns-body-seems-intact-182507482.html

apparently it has happened before:
https://ijov.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/saint-cuthberts-body-remained-incorrupt-for-over-850-years/

50,000 people died in Turkey and Syria earlier this year due to an earthquake, an estimated 5 million toddlers under 5 died from malnitrition in 2019, 400,000 people die every year from malaria, but, hey, there is a loving God who can intervene in the natural order to slow the process of decay in one person's dead body.

I'm sure this makes a lot of sense in some universe, but not this one.

[SteveH]

Natural mummification. It can happen in the right conditions. Anyway, in the photo her hands look partly decomposed.
The Catholic obsession with relics, including whole bodies, as here, is very distasteful - downright creepy, in fact.

[Gordon]

The title of this thread says it all - for the highly credulous something that is perhaps unusual gets conflated with something possibly being unnatural.

That decomposition is known to vary with both conditions and types of human intervention allows for the unusual, and the pics (as Steve noted) do suggest deterioration. Bearing in mind this is a nun surely if the RCC wanted to substantiate the 'incorrupt' claim. that is mentioned in reports, all they needed to do was get a pathologist to do a PM to check that the internal organs were indeed 'incorrupt'.

The creepy thing here is that even if there were good reasons to exhume the body for burial elsewhere why put it on public display? After all, the women is just as dead as she was when she was first buried. 

[Nearly Sane]

Even if there was no scientific explanation for something, what do you, Alan, think that shows?

[Alan Burns]

Even if there was no scientific explanation for something, what do you, Alan, think that shows?

That we should not rely on science alone to discern meaning in our lives.

[Sebastian Toe]

That we should not rely on science alone to discern meaning in our lives.

Why the thread title then?
Were you not expecting that there might actually be a scientific explanation?
 

[Nearly Sane]

That we should not rely on science alone to discern meaning in our lives.

What has mummification got to do with 'meaning in our lives'?

[Maeght]

That we should not rely on science alone to discern meaning in our lives.

Don't see how that follows at all. Could you expand on that?

[Gordon]

That we should not rely on science alone to discern meaning in our lives.

Science doesn't discern anything, Alan: it just provides various forms of information that allows people to do the discerning. Not everyone discerns things equally well though since issues like relevant experience, the existing knowledge or degree of ignorance a person has about the subject matter, how capable they are at scrutinising relevant information, that they accept that scientific knowledge is provisional and may be incomplete and, of course, any biases they have. All these aspects play a part in the discerning process.

Your 'not relying on science alone' approach implies you think there are other methods that you don't ever specify in terms equivalent to the robustness of science, which leaves the door open for the gullible to be influenced by all sorts of psuedoscientific woo, magical thinking, superstitions and poor reasoning - and we regularly see examples of these in this wee forum.   

 

[torridon]

That we should not rely on science alone to discern meaning in our lives.

so intervening to slow the process of decay in one dead person in a meaningful use of unlimited powers ?  if this counts 'meaningful' in your world, I want none of it.

[Alan Burns]

Science doesn't discern anything, Alan: it just provides various forms of information that allows people to do the discerning.

I agree entirely Gordon.
Our power to consciously discern anything goes way beyond what can be discovered from science alone.

[Nearly Sane]

I agree entirely Gordon.
Our power to consciously discern anything goes way beyond what can be discovered from science alone.

So what other methodology of discerning do you have? You know, of course, that the post you replied to asked for that but you left it put in your quotemine.

[Gordon]

I agree entirely Gordon.
Our power to consciously discern anything goes way beyond what can be discovered from science alone.

I see you've conveniently ignored the rest of what I said in my post.

To either discern or discover anything implies some form of method, and you also imply a method that is 'way beyond' the methods of science - but of course you don't have such a method so your confidence in "our power" is misplaced, and is just more childlike magical thinking.

[Dicky Underpants]

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/missouri-nuns-body-seems-intact-182507482.html

apparently it has happened before:
https://ijov.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/saint-cuthberts-body-remained-incorrupt-for-over-850-years/

No doubt they smelled of roses and jasmine too.

[Sriram]

Actually, I am unable to understand why preservation of the body is even important from a spiritual point of view. Once the soul leaves the body, the body is unimportant, which is why we Hindus burn the body after death. It is like old, worn out clothes being removed and discarded.

I think this idea of preservation of the body is born of a certain Jewish tradition where people are supposed to return to life in their old bodies once the Messiah comes. In some Jewish traditions the idea of a soul exiting the body at the point of death is absent...I think. 

[Dicky Underpants]

Actually, I am unable to understand why preservation of the body is even important from a spiritual point of view. Once the soul leaves the body, the body is unimportant, which is why we Hindus burn the body after death. It is like old, worn out clothes being removed and discarded.

I think this idea of preservation of the body is born of a certain Jewish tradition where people are supposed to return to life in their old bodies once the Messiah comes. In some Jewish traditions the idea of a soul exiting the body at the point of death is absent...I think.

Certainly true of OT Judaism. In fact the idea of any eternal life at all comes pretty late in Judaism.

[SteveH]

50,000 people died in Turkey and Syria earlier this year due to an earthquake, an estimated 5 million toddlers under 5 died from malnutrition in 2019, 400,000 people die every year from malaria, but, hey, there is a loving God who can intervene in the natural order to slow the process of decay in one person's dead body.

I'm sure this makes a lot of sense in some universe, but not this one.

My immediate thought on reading the op, but you put it eloquently.

[SteveH]

Certainly true of OT Judaism. In fact the idea of any eternal life at all comes pretty late in Judaism.

Indeed - apart from a vague and ambiguous verse in Isaiah, there's bugger-all in the OT about an afterlife. The ancient Hebrews thought you got your reward or punishment in this life.

[Sriram]

The Jewish idea of resurrection in the physical  body is probably what gave rise to the idea of Jesus's resurrection in his physical body.  This than probably got somehow mixed up with the idea of ascending to heaven (which had gathered strength by then) and gave rise to the belief that Jesus ascended to heaven in his physical body.

[ProfessorDavey]

I thought that the natural mumification of bodies (whether human or other species) was a fairly well known and established phenomenon, albeit one that is relatively rare.