I would consider supernatural forces can work for good or for evil and that even people who have terrible theology can still be used by God. After all, if God spoke through a dumb jackass, he can use stupid people. From a scientific standpoint, if the healings are documented, and are indeed miraculous, then something that does not follow the normal laws of cause and effect can't just simply be dismissed because of prejudice against it; even if I thought the person's faith was in error or wrong.
Speaking of jackasses, check out this Pat Robertson interview. Do you believe Reinhard Bonnke? ROBERTSON: What is God saying to you about Africa? I know you have a call to Africa. Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. What is He saying to you? The fire of revival is burning like never before. BONNKE: Yes. Nigeria has its problems, nobody denies that, but there is a surge of spiritual, I would say, Christian dynamics that are awesome. We are not at all with our back to the wall, not at all. I mean, it just moves like a mighty ocean wave of freshness and strength and power. Jesus saves. We see testimonies like this man coming back to life. ROBERTSON: I want you to tell us about him. He was in one of your meetings. He was hit by a car. I understand he was stiff and rigormortis had set in. I don't know if they had embalmed him or not. BONNKE: They did. ROBERTSON: He had been embalmed? BONNKE: He was embalmed, but not the way it is done in America with the removal of organs. They injected chemicals into the body to slow down decay, since there was no refrigeration. ROBERTSON: So what happened? BONNKE: His wife was one with a promise from God that woman have received back the dead by resurrection. She said, 'My husband will come back, and I have heard Reinhard Bonnke is in Onitsha this Sunday I will bring him there. She brought him there. I was preaching and I knew nothing about it. Suddenly, the man started to breathe. His story is awesome and what he was shown while he was in eternity. ROBERTSON: Tell me, what did he see? BONNKE: An angel took him to show him Paradise. He showed him the mansions that are waiting for the saints. And he showed him hell. He saw the people in hell. He said one shouted to him, 'I was a pastor and I stole money. Help me to return the money.' He said it was so frightening to him that the angel turned to him and said, 'The prayer of the rich man in Luke 16 will now be fulfilled, and you will be sent back to earth as a last warning to this generation.' ROBERTSON: For those who are not aware of that, in Luke 16 the rich man lifted up his eyes in torment and said, 'I have a number of brothers. Let me go back and warn them.' Father Abraham said, 'No, they have Moses and the prophets. If they won't believe them, they will not believe the one who rose from the dead. Now, he says that in this last day, he's going to be the one? He has come back? BONNKE: He has come back. People who see this video [Raised from the Dead] are getting saved by the thousands. I hear reports from across the world. It is such a powerful tool of evangelism and we are absolutely delighted. I wish I could have produced Pastor Daniel here today. ROBERTSON: We tried to get him through customs, but it is so tough in America to get a visa in this country. We couldn't get him in. You say he saw hell. Were there fires? Torment? BONNKE: He said he saw no fire but he said he saw these people cannibalizing themselves. Every time they had done it, the flesh seemed to jump back to the same places and then the torment started again. He said it was so horrible. He came back and said, 'Heaven is real. Hell is real. Become serious with God. You need to be saved by the blood of Jesus Christ and live a holy life.'
Also, what about the dog that didn't bark? i.e., there are roughly 300 million people in America, and at least three quarters of them profess some affiliation to Christianity. Even if you weed out the slackers, that still leaves tens of millions in the genuine believer camp. Add to that observation the fact that cancer, cardiovascular disease, and alzheimers are three of the leading causes of death in western societies. The question: if great swathes of believers are being afflicted with catastrophic disease every year... and presumably all if not most of these folks are being prayed for... why don't we have statistical miracle evidence coming out the wazoo? Given the political power of the religious right, do you really think the godless medical community could cover up widespread documentation of the fact that faith healing works? If not, why don't we see evidence of such faith healing on an awesome scale, and not just an anecdotal one? Why do the number of documented cases appear microscopic in comparison to the number of believers? And why do they trend toward highly exotic ailments? What are all these sadsack believers who get no results doing wrong? Have they not tithed enough?
Not sure what your point is. The question originally framed is: God doesn't heal amputees [do miracles]; ergo no God. IF that assumption is challenged even by a small sampling of documented miracles, then you have evidence for God that disproves or calls into question the validity of the first premise. The second question then is a question of theodicy. Why does God heal some and not others; why are there not more miracles and healing a more regular occurrence? If you read one of my prior posts on the difference between intellectual assent and absolute trust [the Greek definition of faith], there is a confusion in the western mind between ideas and practice: simply because one understands the principle does not mean one has walked the path. Looking at a map of California doesn't mean you've actually been there. Yet many people treat the scriptures just like that map. Rational understanding of the mechanism isn't the same thing as being able to do it. I may understand the steps to a dance by reading a book and looking at diagrams, but I am totally left footed and cannot dance a lick. I knock down the whole line when I try the Electric Slide. I understand how it ought to work, but I cannot do it. My body doesn't cooperate. Faith, by all indications of the scriptures, was notable because it was the exception to the rule of life. Not everyone could regularly do the miraculous. Elijah could, and that is what made him so extraordinary and WHY they wrote about him! If everyone did it, there would be no story to tell. Read between the lines! The norm of that day was that NO ONE ELSE was doing miracles. And there are silent centuries recorded in the scripture where God appears to be inactive. We get the scriptures as a highlight of significant events, but they are time compressed. There are often hundreds of years between supernatural events which don't make it into the book. There was about 400 years between Malachi and the birth of Jesus where Hanukkah is the only recorded miracle. So, if you want to disprove God by the record, at least take into account the fact that not every day was crowned with miracles. Faith in Jesus' day was not common either. Even Jesus' disciples got rebuked by Jesus for their constant failures. And Jesus could not do many miracles in his home town because of their mindset: they didn't believe he was anything special and were not open to his ministry. This apparently wasn't a problem of Jesus' faith but of the receptivity of the people. We have a strong mindset of rationalism in the West which discounts and dismisses out of hand the supernatural or the possibility of miracles. We have the same skepticism towards Jesus as Nazareth did. Apparently, faith is one of the rarest commodities and hard to come by. What passes for 'faith' is often rationalizations, wishful thinking, desperation, and intellectual assent. It doesn't matter how religious one is; just wanting it badly enough doesn't make it so. Faith does not come from the organ of the mind or through logic, or through reason. Otherwise only the smart people would have faith; however, God does not measure a man's mind, but his heart and makes faith available to all whom he so chooses. Everywhere in the scriptures it says that faith is a gift. It isn't earned or learned by academic study of the idea of faith. Logic and reason and labors of the mind CANNOT produce it. It isn't a formula. Faith comes by the Spirit of God and out of the depths of one's being. It is an inner confidence or assurance that surpasses knowledge. When it is active, there is no stress or anxiety involved; but a deep peace and assurance. Faith is not trying to get God to do something you want; it is not trying to convince God that what you want is reasonable or worthy or logical. Faith is knowing what God's will is in a given situation and totally trusting and believing God will do so-and-so in a given situation. It is a total confidence that what you see in your heart will come to pass. Jesus even said this about faith, "Trust God, I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, âGo, throw yourself into the sea,â and DOES NOT DOUBT IN HIS HEART but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done FOR him." Now the whole approach to God in this thread starts not with trust but with doubt as the first principle. Empiricism seeks to discover truth about the natural world by the presumption of doubt. Doubt about God's goodness, God's willingness, God's ability, are all prima facie antithetical to very nature of faith's operation. According to Jesus, who was, granting that he was who he says he was, a master of faith's operation, said that where doubt exists, faith does not. In other words, doubt and questioning are the very evidences that faith does not exist and would prevent it from operating. A lot of sincere and well intentioned religious people mistake intellectual conviction for living faith. And some religious people are just sincerely flakey or in denial. Unlike the Disney adage, wishing does not make your dreams come true. To expect someone who has lived all their lives by reason and rationality to suddenly develop faith in a time of panic or desperation it unrealistic; however, it does happen as a unpredictable gift. I have been through enough of my own trials to know that often when I thought I was acting in faith, I was not. I was being rational, logical based upon an intellectual assent to what the scriptures meant, but I was still hiding and repressing my doubts and anxieties. I had no assurance. However, when I have that assurance, faith just works. It is, however, not under my jurisdiction. Sometimes I have faith over some situation, many times not. I don't control when I do; it is still a gift. I've seen a few miracles, but not enough to satisfy me. I seek for more, but God will not yield to my outstanding arguments and impeccable logic of why there ought to be more. He is not under my control. And I also consider that Paul said the marks of an apostle are signs and wonders. In other words, while some Christians may operate in gifts of healings or miracles from time to time, the ordinary and predictable operation of miracles by one individual may be associated with a calling. So expecting a new Cadillac to arrive magically in the driveway every morning, just because one has prayed, is not a sign of faith but presumption and greed. Yet this whole thread presumes that you can treat faith like a spoiled child demanding ice cream for breakfast every morning and expecting the dutiful mom to hop to. It is rather insulting actually.
Another good deconversion story as we study the premis that"once you believe you cannot not believe again" postulated by Maverick: Kelly The Emperor's Clothes... I have recently learned about your publication through your web site. Oddly enough, I learned about it through Greg Koukl's Stand to Reason web site, www. str.org, a Christian apologetics organization. Whichever way, I am happy to have found your articles. I do have some reservations about some of your articles, however. My main reservation is that biblical errancy efforts seem somewhat like criticizing the clothes the emperor is no longer wearing. The issue isn't just whether this verse or that is flawed; I find scholarly textual analysis of the Bible is miles beyond this. I was a thoroughly serious, studious Christian up to the age of 24, that is, until I started doing my undergraduate engineering studying on the third floor of the University Research Library at UCLA. I would procrastinate by picking up a book or two on Biblical analysis. Almost the entire floor is dedicated to research on the Bible as if it were some sort of archeological find. What I found is that for more than 70 years, biblical scholars have been amassing a growing consensus on a core set of theories on the evolution and development of the biblical texts that are all but incontrovertible. In very general terms, I derive from this consensus the following set of near-facts: (1) The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and the gospel of John simply cannot be reconciled in their details of the storyline of Jesus's ministry. (2) As for the synoptic gospels, Matthew and Luke agree in order of events only when the events are also contained in Mark. These agreements reflect textual agreement rather than thematic agreement, which indicates they copied the text of a document [Matthew and Luke copied Mark or its precursor document] rather than gathering independent facts and accounts. In fact, scholars seem to agree that the copying was of a written document not the copying of an oral tradition. (3) To the extent the rest of Matthew and Luke agree in subject matter [albeit out of order], the agreements again reflect the copying of another single written document, termed Quelle or Q, which was identified in 1838 by Christian Weisse. Today, Q is well accepted by biblical scholars. (4) The rest of Matthew and Luke disagree irreconcilably. Mostly, this is the nativity and the resurrection, I believe. The strong implication is that the synoptic gospels contain agreement only because Matthew and Luke copied two existing texts, Mark and Q. Apart from this large-scale copying, at least one of the copying authors (Matthew and/or Luke) didn't know the first thing about Jesus's life and times. (5) In the midst of all this literary copying, the amount of literary license that the authors of Matthew and Luke granted themselves, altering the meaning of Jesus's words and deeds, should by itself be sufficient reason to doubt every verse of the Bible. (6) Mark is a set of short stories which themselves may contain some degree of accurate oral tradition, but the connective tissue between each story, the overall storyline of Jesus's ministry, was shown to be the author's own creation as early as Karl Ludwig Schmidt in 1919. (7) Q is an interesting document, parts of which can be pieced together from Matthew and Luke. It appears to have had its own evolution, but the earliest version of Q may well have been accurate, even nearly contemporaneous, reflections of Jesus's sayings. (8) The gospel of John also contains facts and subtleties that indicate that its earliest version may have contained reliable and accurate information of Jesus's life; at least it enjoys more corroboration than Mark. In John, however, Jesus talks just like the author writes when the author is writing in his own voice. Much has been written on this point. It is possible, however, that the author was a close follower of Jesus and so aligned in thought with Jesus that he sounds like Jesus. There is evidence that Johnlike cosmic discourse was alive and well in the Essene sect, which was centered near the desert region where John the Baptist and Jesus were claimed to have begun. (9) The Acts of the Apostles is a classic deification of the apostles and Paul. This was a common occurrence in literature about nonbiblical figures throughout the Roman empire in that era. Few scholars address Acts as much more than whole-cloth fiction. Unlike the Acts story, Paul never mentioned any blinding revelation from Jesus when he was desperately trying to justify his authority in Galatians, 1 Thessalonians and elsewhere. Also, his description of his compromise with the Jerusalem "pillars" pales in comparison with his near coronation found in Acts. (10) The authentic Pauline letters [1 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Philippians., Philemon, Galatians and Romans] are probably the most reliable documents in the New Testament. They show a quickly evolving mind. Some of his earliest thoughts were very scary, e.g., 1 Thessalonians 4-5; others were just screwy, e.g., Galatians 3-4. Generally, however, it appears Paul never knew the first thing about Jesus's teachings, nor did he get along with hardly anyone who knew Jesus. In fact, Paul reduces Jesus's entire life and ministry to simply the idea that he was sinless, was crucified, and was resurrected for our sins. Paul's letters include some later editorial insertions, such as 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16. (11) Several books attributed to Paul sound nothing like him, such as Colossians, Ephesians, Hebrews, 1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus. (12) Second Peter includes nearly all of Jude, which is an entirely unnoteworthy book of its own. (13) Revelation is the rantings of a madman. There is certainly much more that can said about any one of these points, and other points not included above. I would just turn the attention of anyone interested in these points to authors like Burton L. Mack, John Dominic Crossan, and Paula Fredriksen, whom I find most accessible to most of us. Alternatively, the reader could go to the nearest university research library. However, in such libraries, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone that seriously analyzes simple questions of errancy.
Another good deconversion story as we study the premis that"once you believe you cannot not believe again" postulated by Maverick: Douglas R. Larson A Former Pastor... Within the past few months, I've been sitting in my study, reading, thinking, and absorbing material found on the internet. Presently, I'm on infidels.org and I have been left speechless. Night by night, I read the material presented, and I find myself digging out all the unanswered questions I had put upon the "mental shelf," realizing that someday I would begin to pull them down, one by one, seeking answers to all my unanswered questions. Why am I writing this? Well, I'm a former pastor, who preached his last sermon in July of this year. I have been keeping track of the "theological contradictions" contained within scripture hoping that someday I will be able to share my "notes" with those on the internet. The nature of "Jehovah God" has always been puzzling at best. Even the kids I taught in Confirmation (Lutheran) would point out God's "paranoid-schitzo" qualities that included a heavy hand in murder. I nearly drove myself crazy trying to bring a reconciliation of the two natures possessed by God and His Son Jesus (God). I no longer can. I no longer have "all the answers" that I once possessed as a "Christian Apologist" (note email address). The mental hold that "Christianity" has upon my soul runs deep--I often wonder if I'll ever escape its guilt, fear, and shaming qualities as it lays a question mark across my eternal destination. Now, I find the internet to be a very useful tool, in finding material that I can read, and resources that can help me see through problems that I cannot escape on my own. I found your ad for a free one-year subscription to The Skeptical Review. Please, if you think this resource can help me, could you put me on your list? Also, on the issue of "Biblical Inerrancy," can you recommend a very detailed book that explores the nature of the "Biblical God?" It's hard for me to request such a thing. I and my wife have spent hours and hours discussing this issue. After requesting a removal from the clergy roster, I found out how many friends I have left in this world. None! You wouldn't believe the treatment I've received from the brethren, and you would really be amazed at how denominational heads react. I could just as well have an "H" tattooed upon my forehead for "heretic" or the proverbial "A" for apostate. Thanks for hearing me out!!
Mark Wenneborg A Familiar Story... As a former fundamentalist Christian turned skeptic, I continue debating and talking to my Christian friends and family. When I present to them reasons for my unbelief, they will invariably evade these reasons and postulate that some internal condition is to blame for my current skepticism. In other words, they will accuse me of being angry with God because he's not who I want him to be, or they will say I never truly understood what salvation, i. e., being "born again," means, or they will claim that in the past I had some bad experiences that turned me away from God. In most cases, this evasion is not purposeful, nor is it maliciously done; instead, I believe that these people just cannot accept that someone actually left the faith because of a rational examination of the claims of the Bible. Others accuse me of leaving God because I harbored sin in my life, or they theorize that I've allowed myself to be "brainwashed" by "the world" because I was not grounded firmly enough in the Bible and in fellowship with God's people. Such evasions exasperate me, especially when I try to redirect the topic back to my rational objections to the inerrancy of the Bible. Most fundamentalist Christians just do not want to be bothered with the facts. My more intellectual Christian friends (who insist they are not fundamentalist but evangelical) try to "counsel" me to open my heart to God, give him my anger and doubt, and he will open my eyes. "Seek and ye shall find," they firmly believe, and God will finally touch my heart. But they insist I've got to rid myself of my anger and pride first. Few of these people, no matter how intelligent, can imagine a life outside Christianity. That is why they continually insist that the problem must be within me. But realizing how much better my life has been since I cast off the chains of dogma, I continue to try to persuade my Christian friends and family to listen and honestly think about the issues I raise. That is why I am writing this letter to you. I am requesting first-year subscriptions to The Skeptical Review for two of my friends whom I believe may be open to critical thought. Both are in the ministry and both are committed bibliolaters. (I have their names and addresses listed below.) Because I believe so firmly in your work, I wish to pay for their first-year subscriptions. You have my permission to let them know I requested these subscriptions. I also would like to purchase the videotape of the Till-Dobbs Debate. Enclosed is [a check] for the subscriptions and the tape. You have my permission to apply anything left over to other free subscriptions, overhead, etc.
Craig Cunningham Another Familiar Story... Today, I received my first issue of The Skeptical Review, and found it to be fair and helpful. Until last December, I was the leader of a university student organization for 12 years until I hit the wall and left the ministry. My reasons for leaving began at the heart of my emotions. After spending several summers ministering to Catholic Christians, Muslims, and atheists in Europe and South America, I began to doubt seriously that such people were going to hell. That led to a period of deep depression and questioning, followed by months of study, which led to my rejection of Christianity for moral and rational reasons. Having built my life on Christian beliefs, I now find myself alone in the world. I have lost my closest friends (who feel sorry for me), and the tension this has brought to my family relationships is enormous. I do not want to acknowledge Christmas, and I am finding it difficult to figure out which hills I should die on. They are right in saying that my doubting came as a result of "battle fatigue," but I also believe that suffering is many times the exact agent we need to face reality. It has been only 6 months or so since I gave up trying to reconcile Christianity and all its problems and inconsistencies, but I am still battling depression and I would like to know if you have some suggestions that might be helpful as I try to move on with my life. Thank you very much.
But I don't treat faith that way. I have known many wonderfully devoted people, deep in their walk and their faith, whose prayers in time of grief nevertheless all seemed to bounce against the ceiling. Tragic illnesses, tragic accidents, ailing parents, stricken children... all the accidents of life with no divine intervention. Between the substantial body of faithful I knew well, and the people in turn they knew well--six degrees of separation and all that--you would think word of at least one true miracle or two would have gotten around to my ears. Can you tell me that none of these truly had faith? I certainly was not blind or deaf to the possibility of miracles back then, as I believed as fervently as anyone. Yet I heard and received nothing, other than an anecdote here and there of the 'friend of a friend' sort that could never come close to being verified. If you were to canvas 1,000 protestant churches, in how many of those church bodies would you find evidence of documented healing miracles? Would that evidence be statistically significant in comparison to, say, a canvas of 1,000 mosques or hindu temples? Spend enough time in foreign lands where the holy book is unfamiliar, and you will no doubt come across miraculous tales. Whether they were truly miracles is another question. The implied notion that "people are just not faithful enough" seems to be a canard, and an insult to the church to boot. If even the Christian masses are of so little faith, then what population of the visible church is truly and actually saved? One tenth of one percent? One hundredth of one percent? Is it not 99% of people who are going to hell, then, but 99.999%? Can you see how this gets ludicrous fairly quickly? By focusing on the "God is not a sugar daddy" line, I think you are setting up a bit of a straw man. The validity of a position is determined by how well it does against a strong challenge, not a weak one. And the amputee observation still bears strength in regard to no evidences of documented limb regeneration. People have thrown out hearsay here and there, but anyone can resort to hearsay. This lack of evidence for prayer is a philosophical objection, really, although one based on logical statistical principles. The juxtaposition of hundreds of millions of Christians with a tiny handful of healings simply does not mesh. Even if one discounts, say, 9 out of 10 professing Christians as spiritual weaklings, that still leaves tens of millions of faithful on a global scale... and an alarming paucity of miracles shared among them. One could also ask, as I did above, why the faithful here in America have been denied... why the faithful in your own church are regularly denied. Would you call them heathen? If tragedy struck a loved one in your own life, and you prayed and nothing came of it, would you question the validity of your own faith? Or simply chalk it up to God's will and move on? There seems no way to falsify the faith question. If a faithful believer prays for intercession and does not get it, he either leans on God's mysterious will or wonders if he has failed in his faith. At no point does a real assessment of the evidence come in -- evidence suggesting there are just too many folks getting 'no' for an answer for the phenomena to be credible.
Well, I respect the way you state the case. However, I am not sure that you are being fair. While there are many charlatans and overly eager "believers" out there who claim everything is a miracle, there are many reports of miracles and answered prayers out there that come from credible and humble people. Yet if we are going on 'what everyone says' or 'what everyone does not say' as a basis for evidence, then you really have to use the same standard. You point to the preponderance of the "absence" of miracle reports, but I have been hesitant to point to all the anecdotal reports and hearsay because of the attempted empirical approach of this thread. If you were to walk in the circles I walk in, the reports of answered prayers and miraculous healings are not as missing as you experience. These are stories from people I know, whose character is sound, and who have nothing to gain from me financially. They aren't relaying them to impress me, but speak of it rather matter of factly. Yet, even then, they are not every day occurrences. So, I gave you links to rigorously documented miracles narrowly defined. That is the minimum set, which shows that these things are possible if not common. If they happen at all, it belies the major premise that prayers are never answered and miracles never happen. Why they are not MORE common is a good question and one over which I constantly struggle. I cannot account for all the experiences of every denomination. However, I do know whole denominations who believe by their doctrine that healing is not for today but only for the apostolic age, and ergo, any miracle today would be evidence of demonic activity and deception. I would say they are not "open." I also don't know how much our western scientific mindset blocks our expectations like it did for those in Nazareth. If we don't actually expect God to act or do miracles, that may have an influence of the social experience. Apparently, it isn't quite so true in poorer countries, where they don't and cannot rely upon medicines because there aren't any. I have a friend named Rick Sessoms, who was a missionary in S.E. Asia for the CMA denomination, who did not believe that miracles were for today, but he changed his mind after preaching in foreign lands and seeing miracles happen anyway. I have a friend in Erie who has seen a man dying in the hospital of kidney failure, but after he led the man in prayers of forgiveness towards others who had abused him, he was completely healed. So, the fact that it is not happening everywhere, does not mean it is not happening anywhere. The approach of your comment sounds a little like the guy who claims to love all of humanity but "it's just people I can't stand." I don't mean that you do think that way, but you are projecting a generalization of failure upon all humanity or the entire 'Church,' yet you dismiss our discount the possibility that these thousands of other Christians might actually have experiences which do corroborate the existence of supernatural effects. I am also reminded of why doctor's may not be so eager to report these occurrences in the face of the skepticism of their other colleagues - knowing what it may do to their reputations and their incomes. I have a friend who is a pilot, who saw a UFO while flying for USAIR. He would not report it because he knew he would have his license pulled. I told him that what he way was most likely the Timberwind project: atomic powered aircraft that fly out of Nevada. NBC showed these "supernatural" aircraft taking off from the desert and doing very odd behaviors of unbelievable speed at the start of the Gulf War. However, how many doctors are going to go around admitting "I opened up this person and what I saw as a solid mass on X-ray and could feel as a lump had totally vanished!" Finally, when someone is sick, I never blame them for their lack of faith. Jesus never did that either. But I know there is something in the nature of things that makes faith uncommon and difficult, rather than easy and ordinary. I wish it were otherwise; and perhaps someday it will be. But the only people Jesus rebuked for their lack of faith were his disciples, who, by their experiences next to him, ought to have known better. For the rest of us mere mortals, it is an uphill climb. Which reminds me of one of my favorite movies. It is from the Little Big Man.