debate-points, miracles, existence-of-godSometimes, while debating Christians, I encounter arguments of the following form:
Answers should be in a form that would challenge religious people, rather than get applause from skeptics.
We have a family friend who was diagnosed with lymphoma earlier this year, Christian, mother of two, 6 & 9, a lovely person and family.
After several horrific months with racking pain, chemo, inability to care for the kids and everything else that comes with this horrible disease and the cure her doctor declared the desease gone/defeated.
Her first comment on FB after receiving the news was Thank you Jesus.
If Jesus was powerfull enough to cure her cancer then why the hell did such an undeserving person have it in the first place?
In your scenario I would simply say Why did you have the disease in the first place? The obvious answer to come back is God was testing me. To which the reply should be. But doesn’t God already know your heart?
If God cures diseases and performs miracles as often as people suggest, then there should be a statistical difference in outcomes for religious people regarding health and finances after other causes have been corrected for. I haven’t seen any evidence supporting this.
The validity of prayers has been tested. It turns out prayers don’t help - http://www.freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Harvard_prayer_experiment
There’s a fairly powerful “disproof of religions by miracles;” I don’t remember who first came up with it, so I present it unattributed and poorly paraphrased from memory.
This is tough - the same problem pops up with Old Wives’ Tales - or conclusions based on anecdotal evidence and/or selective memory.
There’s no way you can counter this and not be accused of being a wet blanket. These people want to believe that their magic invisible friend cares about them, so they probably won’t listen to reason.
The simplest thing to point out is that doctors are not always right. They could have easily been misdiagnosed, and the body’s ability to heal itself is not completely understood. These gaps in understanding, though, do not mean a god/goddess is taking a hand in things.
Most of the times the argument I see in this vein are from people that are just lucky. A WWII aviator survives a perilous theater in which many of his friends were killed, and instead of counting himself as lucky and/or skilled and the others as unlucky and/or unskilled, pronounces that his god saved him. The flip side of that, though, is that his god did not save his friends who died. Why is that? I don’t even know if they think about that.
Correlation does not imply causation.
The fallacy of the argument is so obvious...
* I prayed to God and I was cured.
* Therefore, God exists.
No reasonable person would agree with this conclusion.
I have never encountered an argument from a person that claimed they were the ones that had received the miracle.(EDIT:with the exception of those cured through medical intervention that were just giving the credit to god.) Whenever I have encountered it, it has always been offered in the third person. My friends, aunts, brothers friend from France, sort of thing. Besides that, I would handle it in the same way I handle the third person approach. I would ask to see the medical file and to speak to their doctor for verification. I would then get second opinions as to the diagnosis, but of course that is never necessary because you never get that far. I have asked for this on a number of occasions and have never been directed to the actual source of the miracle.
When I was an xian I traveled occasionally with an evangelist that was also the pastor of our church. At one point he claimed to have raised the dead. When asked he would never provide details. I began to wonder why did the miracles always happen when he was on the road? Then I saw this was a regular pattern with all faith healers, the miracles always happened somewhere else.
So I guess in short ask to see the evidence.
B.C. Johnson considers this question in The Atheist Debater’s Handbook, chapter 8: God and Miracles.
The following will give you an idea of the way in which he tackles the subject:
He makes the point that even if a miracle occurs, it may have been performed by a human, not god, and therefore a miracle is not necessarily proof of god’s existence.
The theist may claim that only god can perform miracles, but that is to assume the very thing that has yet to be proved - that god exists.
The theist may claim that no human has ever been seen to perform a miracle, but, as Johnson writes, “…we do not see God performing miracles either. In fact we do not see God at all, In this argument his very existence is inferred merely from the presence of miracles.”
The theist may claim that the miracle was physically impossible and therefore god must have performed it; a human could not have done it because that would be physically impossible - and there’s the contradiction! As Johnson observes, “On the one hand, Christians claim that physical impossibility does not exclude belief, and yet, when evaluating the belief of others, they claim that it does exclude belief.” He goes on. “As long as we are in the business of offering ‘explanations’ in terms of who performed a certain act, with no precise reference as to how it was done, we can easily say that anybody did it.”
My response would be something along the lines of “and all those other folks praying who don’t get cured? Your god’s a little mean, isn’t he, not fixing the rest of them?” (I think this can be shortened to God Hates Amputees.)
From what I understand even an aggressive cancer can, in very rare situations, fade away. Please talk to a doctor about the facts. Many people take vitamin c to get rid of a cold, once you have a cold its to late however the cold will get better on average as you take the vitamin c. A person will feel that the Vit c “cured” the cold but in reality it was just the cold coming to its natural end. So I suppose if you prayed for the cold to go and it went in the same manner you could believe it was the prayer.
Listen to Quackcast on Itunes for a very good podcast on cancer, the power of prayer and vitamin c facts or go to www.quackcast.com
You often get this, “The doctors said it can’t be cured” thing. Unfortunately doctors themselves tend to perpetuate the myth that they know what they’re talking about all of the time. Sometimes they have just plain got it wrong. Sometimes they have tried so hard not to give too much hope when there’s only a 5% chance of a cure that they’ve left the impression there was no chance. Sometimes people mis-hear what was said, and are overly pessimistic. Sometimes they reinterpret what was said, at a later date, to reinforce their miracle story (they don’t necessarily realise they are lying.)
But there are indeed many diseases which can be quite unpredictable. Cancer, for instance, can come in many levels of virulence - it can be very difficult to identify initially what level you’re dealing with. So you may have a much less virulent type, which doesn’t grow - many prostate cancers are like this, and can be safely left alone as something else will kill you long before the cancer does. A small percentage, however, you’d better jump on with everything known to science ASAP.
The catholic church consider a miracle any recovery that is unexplained by the current level of science. Contrary to general belief, it does not to contradict science, just to be unexplained by it.
A lot of recovery that are not understood by the science happen both to religious and non religious people. When somebody was praying for recovery, it can be called a miracle, but the fact the it does not a scientific explanation does not indicate any supernatural intervention.
As the science advance, it is able to explain more and more recovery. The catholic church was requiring 4 miracle to name somebody a saint. During the 20th century, it became harder and harder to find people who met that criteria. The catholic church has to make exception and then removed the criteria to still be able to declare new saint.
Here’s how I would answer:
Congratulations on your cure! Every single day in every nation on earth, thousands of people of all possible faiths and no faith at all experience the power of recovery through what’s called the ‘placebo effect’ - It’s extremely powerful and it’s not well understood. However, I challenge you to name ONE documented case anywhere in the entire world of a limb regrowing as a result of prayer, regardless of nation or religion.
When you can document that, I’ll consider it evidence of something other than a natural but poorly understood physical behavior.
I do not see why should you argue with that. The person is healthy now and is happy to have a God on their side, which might help them even further. I would probably only mention that the doctors who worked really hard on their case might feel a bit upset that their patient decided to give the church a huge donation so the church can build even bigger building, while other, apparently less god-loved patients cannot afford healthcare. That is probably the only undesirable effect of their belief I can think of.
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