how to explain supernatural(gift of healing)

[neonray88]

Hello.
I have been struggling with believing in God and not believing in it for some time.
Because of the contradictions of science with the Bible and other issues.
But I am still struggling and researching.
long story...
I don't know whether to call myself a skeptic or an atheist...

Anyway…

I have a friend who grew up in a Christian family. He is a good and honest man and I have known him for a long time.
A few years ago, he was injured in a car accident in the forehead and spinal cord.doctors had no hope for his recovery. But after his friends and acquaintances became aware and began to pray for health, after some time he miraculously not only can walked again but was able to speak again. Because a part of his forehead was damaged and he could not speak and also he could not recognize anyone even his family members. However, He was almost completely healed... except for one hand. His right hand was still paralyzed.
He traveled to another country for treatment, and after 3 months, both he and his doctor were disappointed.
He says he doubted God for the first time.
But just a few days before he returns home in despair, an unknown Christian couple who had the gift of healing come to his hotel and tell him that last night the spirit told us in a dream to come here and pray for you. . They put their hands on his paralyzed hand and prayed and left there.
So my friend goes to sleep and wakes up in the morning to find that his paralyzed hand is completely healed.
He says that in this way, God showed himself once again in his life and gave him another lesson on the path of faith.
I cannot understand this happening. I cannot explain this with atheism. I ran into an obstacle.
Some of you may think this is a funny story and a lie from a crazy Christian.
It doesn't matter, I can understand
This is my problem, I seriously doubt my faith, but I can't explain these unnatural things.
If there is no God behind this world, then how did this happen?
Thanks.

[Inkubus]

It didn't/thread/

[no one]

Yesterday I was armless, legless, homeless and completely illiterate. Then, I found a magic meatball, I prayed to it. Now, I have all of my limbs, I'm the richest person in the galaxy, I have 329 degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and Halle Berry asked me to my her.

Now I will be the first to admit, my faith was a little shaky, but if there isn't any Flying Spaghetti Monster, how do you explain this?

[Inkubus]

Was there a beer fountain/slew of strippers, close to Halle Berry when she asked you to marry her? If not, it wasn't Lord Hicarb.

Sorry.

[no one]

Fountain of top notch tequila. They were already stripped.

[Dānu]

Do not pass go. Do not collect your Nobel prize.

[Rahn127]

It's easy to explain when you realize that people can make up stories.

Did you hear about the doctor who broke his sons leg and didn't treat the injury for several days ?
He was waiting to see if any supernatural healing would take place. His son was in horrible pain.

He finally took his son to the hospital to have them tend to his injuries. He told them that his son had fallen from a tree.
The son was treated, but years later still walked with a limp.

Despite how made up this story is, every part of it is possible. Not one part of the story involves anything that could be considered unexplainable.

If I wanted to, I could add some unexplainable aspects to it, things that defied natural laws or something that generally can't or doesn't ever happen, like spontaneous healing of broken limbs.

Imagine if I had said that the doctor broken his sons leg 10 times, causing him horrible pain, but every time the leg healed instantly.
Well now, that's hard to believe isn't it ?

It's obvious that the son made a pact with the devil or did an angel heal the boy?
Perhaps God himself healed the young boy each time, but not once did he stop to heal the boys father from the mental defect that caused him to break his own sons leg time and time again.

We can all invent stories, but we all don't have to believe them, especially when they are so far outside of the realm of possibility that they become unbelievable.

[Minimalist]

I have a friend who grew up in a Christian family.

I had a friend who grew up in a Xtian family.  He stepped on a landmine in Vietnam and was blown to shit.  He's still dead.

[Reltzik]

Hello.
I have been struggling with believing in God and not believing in it for some time.
Because of the contradictions of science with the Bible and other issues.
But I am still struggling and researching.
long story...
I don't know whether to call myself a skeptic or an atheist...

Anyway…

I have a friend who grew up in a Christian family. He is a good and honest man and I have known him for a long time.
A few years ago, he was injured in a car accident in the forehead and spinal cord.doctors had no hope for his recovery. But after his friends and acquaintances became aware and began to pray for health, after some time he miraculously not only can walked again but was able to speak again. Because a part of his forehead was damaged and he could not speak and also he could not recognize anyone even his family members. However, He was almost completely healed... except for one hand. His right hand was still paralyzed.
He traveled to another country for treatment, and after 3 months, both he and his doctor were disappointed.
He says he doubted God for the first time.
But just a few days before he returns home in despair, an unknown Christian couple who had the gift of healing come to his hotel and tell him that last night the spirit told us in a dream to come here and pray for you. . They put their hands on his paralyzed hand and prayed and left there.
So my friend goes to sleep and wakes up in the morning to find that his paralyzed hand is completely healed.
He says that in this way, God showed himself once again in his life and gave him another lesson on the path of faith.
I cannot understand this happening. I cannot explain this with atheism. I ran into an obstacle.
Some of you may think this is a funny story and a lie from a crazy Christian.
It doesn't matter, I can understand
This is my problem, I seriously doubt my faith, but I can't explain these unnatural things.
If there is no God behind this world, then how did this happen?
Thanks.

We hear a lot of... well, bullshit stories of miracle healing coming out of religion, usually completely unaccompanied by any sort of verifiable documentation.  Often these stories are provable frauds.  Experience has us distrusting most such stories by reflex. Look at Holy Koolaid's YouTube playlist on faith healing for some of the more egregious examples, if you want to understand this reaction.

But purely for the sake of argument, let's say this story you're relaying is true.

(For the record, I'm not an expert nor even an amateur enthusiast on the subject of medicine, and even if I was I couldn't comment intelligibly on a case relayed in vague and brief terms via internet post.  My goal here is to lay out a plausible explanation to show that there's potential non-God interpretation, not to say definitively what did or didn't happen.)

There's some pretty impressive stories out there about the natural healing ability of the nervous system.  Treatments to boost the healing process can provide major benefits in the long term without showing immediate effects, and doctors are still learning the full extent of how much the human body can heal.  It used to be thought that, after a certain point in development, the human body couldn't generate new neurons and so couldn't heal brain damage.  Now the medical profession knows that traumatic brain injury can reverse itself over the course of weeks, months, or years, and replacement neurons do happen.  Your friend's recovery time of several months while also undergoing medical treatments seems about right, and doctors will often give pessimistic prognoses when faced with something that's still not fully understood.

This sort of healing can occur with patients who are believers and non-believers.  Patients who are praying and patients who aren't.  Patients who have people praying for them and patients who don't.  And when prayer's involved, apparently which religion's god(s) the prayers are offered up to make little to no difference at all.

What's more, prayer-healing has all sorts of features that leads it to seem to work far more frequently than it does.  Failed attempts can be dismissed as it not being God's will or the patient not being sufficiently faithful or the like, while (apparent) successes get touted as unquestionably miraculous even when there are non-supernatural explanations.  This practice of counting the hits and ignoring the misses makes prayer healing seem far more effective than it actually is (and, so far as I can tell, its actual efficacy is indistinguishable from zero).  To actually measure its efficacy, you need a controlled study, not a bunch of enthusiastic anecdotes from proponents of faith.  One such study, from about 20 years ago, asked a church to pray for various patients to recover from surgery with no complications.  One group of patients had the prayers said for them but didn't know they were being prayed for, and a second group (the control) had no prayers said for them.  This group of patients being prayed for had pretty much the same rate of complications as the control group.  There was also a third group of patients, who were prayed for and were told they were being prayed for, in hopes of measuring the degree to which knowing they were prayed for had a positive psychological benefit for recovering patients.  This group had somewhat worse outcomes than the other two.  The researchers speculated that this was the result of stress from a sort of performance anxiety, where the patients now felt pressured to heal faster because they knew divine intercession had been invoked.

Another aspect of this case you're describing is that it's brain damage.  Brain damage isn't visible the way that, say, a broken leg or amputated hand is visible.  It's a lot easier for faith healers to claim success for healing invisible afflictions, and there's a reason that God doesn't "heal" amputees.  What's more, neurology gets into the realm of psychology.  The two aren't entirely distinct, and when you combine neural damage with psychological damage sorting out which is to blame for this or that particular symptom is a gray matter.  This is a problem because a lot of faith healing "works" through psychology.  A believer suffering from extreme pain who receives attention from a faith healer might in the high of that moment of ecstatic religious fervor block out the pain... for a while... and announce that they've been healed.  (For some reason, the faith healers never follow up to see if the pain came back after a few hours, which it usually does.)  This isn't the result of an actual miracle of healing... it's just the power of the mind to ignore pain under the right circumstances.

So, to bring this together into a plausible, naturalistic, scenario...

Your friend gets into his accident and suffers severe brain injury, plus some damage to the spinal cord.  The brain damage interferes with his ability to speak, remember family members, etc.  He begins healing naturally and benefits from medical treatments.  Over the course of several months of treatment, most of his symptoms heal but his hand remains paralyzed.  Through this entire time, his Christian family has been praying for his recovery, often during visits and in his presence.  None of these prayers help his hand.  What's actually going on (in this scenario -- again, I'm not saying this is what really happened) is that your friend has developed a psychological block regarding his hand.  The accident caused him a sensation of extreme agony, seemingly localized in the hand but in actuality caused by injury to his spinal cord that kept sending false pain signals to his brain.  The trauma of the accident, of the intense pain that followed, and the terror of his experience of not being able to walk, speak, or remember his family caused him to develop a dissociative disorder where his mind subconsciously refused to feel or move the hand.  The nerves and body healed and eventually functioned perfectly, but his mind refused to use them because it associated that hand with the past trauma and was afraid to process it in the present.  When the faith healers come in, your friend, who's been wavering on his faith, gets a sudden burst of hope.  These will be special prayers, after all, and they're supposed to be better than the prayers that haven't been working up until now.  As the faith healing happens, your friend gets caught up in the fervor and ritual of the moment, and his mind unblocks a bit.  No divine intervention, just the human brain being the mundane (if, in this case, abnormal) kluge that it always is.  His subconscious mind recognizes that his hand is no longer in agony and that the dissociation is no longer necessary.  After he sleeps (a time when the brain processes the experiences of the day), his mind completely unblocks his hand, and he is able to feel it and use it as normal.  No god required.

Now, does me spinning out this scenario prove that no god exists, or even that no god intervened?  No.  Of course not.  Hopefully it demonstrates that an alternative explanation might exist, and that's it.  But let's take a look back and ask, to what degree does your friend's recovery indicate that a god does exist?

He's injured.  Doctors are pessimistic.  He mostly recovers.  Okay, he beat the bell curve.  That happens.  Statistically speaking, for everyone who does better than the median of the bell curve, there's someone who does worse.  That's what a median is.  Do the people who have unexpectedly bad count as proof that there isn't a god in the same way that the people who have unexpectedly good outcomes count as proof that there is one?  Why not?

Of the several patients that have good outcomes, some have people praying for them and some don't.  Of those who have bad outcomes, some have people praying for them and some don't.  When the ones who don't have prayers said for them recover, do the faith healers point them out and say that yeah, healing can happen without prayer and not happen with prayer?  Or do they only call attention to the cases that glorify them, leaving out both the inconvenient success and the inconvenient failures?

Your friend almost certainly had a whole bunch of other prayers said for him by his family.  (Yes, I'm assuming, but it's a reasonable assumption and it's more to illustrate a hole in this reasoning process than as a cornerstone to disprove anything.)  How often was that done?  Were they praying for him every week?  Every day?  Was there ever a point in his healing process when, had his hand healed at that moment, there would not have been a recent prayer for his recovery that could be pointed to and hailed as being what healed him?  All the other prayers that didn't get answered don't seem to matter, do they?  Again, it's ignoring the misses and counting the hits... or at least the things that seem like hits if you squint at them and want to believe that they're hits.  If I'm to keep an open mind here and not arbitrarily declare that the cause wasn't the prayer... that still leaves the question of why I would arbitrarily declare that the cause was the prayer.

So, yeah.  The story you tell can have a fairly plausible explanation under purely naturalistic forces.  Not "this is ordinary" levels of plausible, but "this extraordinary case is the sort of 1-in-a-100 thing that you'd expect in 1% of cases" levels of plausible.

In closing, I'd also point out that nearly everything I said here could have been said by a Christian.  An unusually self-aware and skeptical one, for sure, but nothing I said outright contradicts any key point of the Christian faith.  There's even grounds within the Christian system of beliefs for exactly that skepticism.  If your friend healed naturally, then that's something he did himself.  His own work, even if it wasn't something he consciously and intentionally did.  Hailing that work of a man as the work of God would then border on blasphemy.  It would make plenty of sense for Christians to be extremely reluctant to call it a miracle if they were thinking in those terms... and it always baffles me that so few Christians seem to think in those terms.  Might I ask why you don't seem to be thinking that way?








(And, yes, that stealth pun in there was completely intentional.)

[Gwaithmir]

"If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” (John 15:7)

"And Jesus answered them, 'Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea,' it will happen.” (Matthew 21:21)

“Therefore, I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:24)

“If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.” (John 14:14)

“And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.” (Matthew 21:22)

“Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified by the Son.” (John 14:13)

My youngest brother was born in the early 1950's. He suffered brain damage at birth, the result of a massive hemorrhage my mother suffered during the birth. This left him mentally retarded. My parents took him to the best brain specialists in the country, but none were able to help. My mother was, and still is, a pious woman, who then resorted to faith healing. For years, the family would get together every evening and pray for my brother's cure. Being a naive Catholic boy who took the Bible seriously, I actually expected to see a miracle.  Nothing happened. My brother is now a 69-year-old patient in a state mental hospital. He has the mentality of a 1-year-old and must be attended by male nurses every day. He spends his hours sitting at a window, watching the cars go by. Don't try to tell me about miracles or the efficacy of prayer.

[Paleophyte]

A few years ago, he was injured in a car accident in the forehead and spinal cord.

Ask your Christian friend why his god found it necessary to stave in his skull and sever his spinal cord.

[TheGentlemanBastard]

A few years ago, he was injured in a car accident in the forehead and spinal cord.

Ask your Christian friend why his god found it necessary to stave in his skull and sever his spinal cord.

Mysterious ways/lesson learned through suffering/punishment for (undefined) sins/etc...

There are a million excuses to let gawd off the hook, but no reason for it's cruelty (as described in the buy-bull and it's worshippers).

[Astreja]

If there is no God behind this world, then how did this happen?

I don't think it happened at all.

[mordant]

But after his friends and acquaintances became aware and began to pray for health, after some time he miraculously not only can walked again but was able to speak again.

(This person spent 15 minutes doing one post and hasn't been back, so it's probably a drive-by proselytization effort, however, for the sake of completeness, let's address it).

If god is to be an explanation for anything, it must be asked if god is the necessary, only, AND most likely explanation.

As others pointed out, neurological injury can sometimes heal better than expected on its own. There's no way to determine if it would not have happened without prayer. But we know that VERY often, prayer isn't remotely effective, and this has been confirmed in double-blind studies. So it is unlikely that prayer was involved, other than by chronological proximity to his recovery.

However, He was almost completely healed... except for one hand. His right hand was still paralyzed.

Odd that the miraculous intervention was selective and incomplete, if it was in fact a benevolent supernatural intervention.

He traveled to another country for treatment, and after 3 months, both he and his doctor were disappointed.
He says he doubted God for the first time.
But just a few days before he returns home in despair, an unknown Christian couple who had the gift of healing come to his hotel and tell him that last night the spirit told us in a dream to come here and pray for you. . They put their hands on his paralyzed hand and prayed and left there.
So my friend goes to sleep and wakes up in the morning to find that his paralyzed hand is completely healed.
He says that in this way, God showed himself once again in his life and gave him another lesson on the path of faith.

What sort of lesson would that be? That God might heal you or might not? It certainly can't be that god won't heal you unless you have enough faith or are pious enough ... he was starting to doubt, after all.

I cannot understand this happening. I cannot explain this with atheism. I ran into an obstacle.
Some of you may think this is a funny story and a lie from a crazy Christian.
It doesn't matter, I can understand
This is my problem, I seriously doubt my faith, but I can't explain these unnatural things.
If there is no God behind this world, then how did this happen?

There is more than one question to unpack here. "I cannot understand / explain this" is an argument from incredulity.

"How did this happen without god" is begging the question and a false dichotomy -- as if god or no god are the only 2 alternatives, or are even connected or relevant.

"If there is no god, how did this happen" is another way of asking the same thing, and again ... Good and bad things happen all the time without anyone striving or asking for them to happen. Life is a series of things happening. Some of them we like, some we don't. Some we understand the cause, some we don't. But the inexplicable does not either indicate or prove a single and rather fantastical "explanation" or idea of how it happened.

If all your faith requires is an occasional account of a miracle as a basis, then go ahead and believe in your faith. I won't mind. Personally though I need reproducibility. I need interactivity. I do not find third-hand campfire stories and allegations persuasive in this regard. If you do, then act accordingly.

We also need to address the elephant in the room, which is confirmation bias.

I've been godless for 30 years now. My profession is software development. Recently I was irrationally released from a dream contract by a large multinational corporation after 13 years for stupid policy reasons. The VERY next day, the CEO of a small startup contacted me wondering if I wanted to work for them, for more money, as many hours as I want to work, with full architectural and creative control, to build the same type of system for the third time in my career.

I am sure that somewhere on this planet, there's a god-believer who will say, see, that proves that god is moving on your behalf. It's not just a coincidence. You are arrogant and bad for not giving god the glory for this wonderful development. You should repent your unbelief and return to god.

Except that this wasn't a coincidence. It was a result of decades of diligent effort and relationship and reputation building by yours truly, so that this person knew who to reach out to if they wanted this particular type of system built. The timing was very fortunate, to be sure, but here again, god is not necessary to explain it and I did not for a hot second wonder if he was involved. There were other times I needed his help and asked for it, and people suffered and died anyway. And here I don't ask for a boon, and it happens anyway. If this is proof of anything it's proof that life is random and lacking in guarantees or unambiguous cause and effect.

That this is just another random event in my life doesn't subtract from my enjoyment of it. Being indebted to a capricious supreme being for maybe or maybe not tipping the scales in my favor WOULD subtract from it, frankly, as I'd be back where I was before I left the faith -- at the mercy of his whims. I would be back to the dysfunction of anthropomorphizing random happenstance and then being all angsty about the situations that don't fit my bizarre theory of reality. No thanks; I'm a much happier person without all that pointless cruft.

[neonray88]

I'm sorry for thinking that my post is for religious preaching. If you pay attention, you will see that I liked the answers. So if I didn't answer, it doesn't mean that I'm not back.
I read the answers and they were very useful
Thank you friends for taking the time
I don't understand the hasty fronting of some atheists
The conditions in which each of us are born and grow are different. I have been walking on a new path for some time and I am trying to continue the path with research and questions.
What I mentioned in this forum was only because of my inability to question my mind. Nothing else
I don't see the need to waste my life with lies and fantasizing on the internet
Thanks again to all the friends who read my post and replied
Especially (Reltzik).

[isbelldl]

I'm sorry for thinking that my post is for religious preaching. If you pay attention, you will see that I liked the answers. So if I didn't answer, it doesn't mean that I'm not back.
I read the answers and they were very useful
Thank you friends for taking the time
I don't understand the hasty fronting of some atheists
The conditions in which each of us are born and grow are different. I have been walking on a new path for some time and I am trying to continue the path with research and questions.
What I mentioned in this forum was only because of my inability to question my mind. Nothing else
I don't see the need to waste my life with lies and fantasizing on the internet
Thanks again to all the friends who read my post and replied
Especially (Reltzik).

I'm glad to see you're still here and interested in discussion. Don't take it personally. We get a lot of people here and elsewhere only interested in preaching/conversion, so many just don't have the patience to wait and see that we once did.

I think in general, mordant answered your questions about as well as any of us could without more in-depth knowledge of the situations you asked about.

I'm an ex-Christian myself, stopped believing at 30 years old. My own experience with these types of questions kept me hanging on long after I should have stopped. I had back pain when I was a kid (roughly 10 if I remember right, my memory is not the greatest). My mom took me to my family doctor. He diagnosed me with scoliosis. Apparently when I bent over forward, the sideways curve in my spine was clearly visible. He sent me to a specialist. My mom & I prayed about it on the way there. My memory was all this being same day, but that doesn't sound very American healthcare, so again, questioning my memory a bit. Regardless, when the specialist looked at my back, there was no abnormal curvature. I haven't had back pain since. Mom supposedly kept x-rays, but I haven't seen them since childhood & have no memory. But yeah, back pain before, no back pain after. I never received physical treatment. Today, I still don't know what was the cause. Of course, at the time we attributed it to a miracle from God. Today, I've recognized that "I don't know" is appropriate unless I actually know the answer.

The Bible was the only source I had to support a belief in the Christian god. It was sitting down & trying to read and understand the bible as an adult that ultimately lead me to stop believing. I already knew that I couldn't take it as a 100% literally true book. We know that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. We know that humans evolved from earlier primates. We know that Earth wasn't completely flooded with water at any time that humans existed. This alone is enough to know that at least portions of the bible cannot be literally true, & honestly even makes some metaphorical explanations problematic. Even knowing this before starting, just the start of Genesis was surprisingly bad. The writers genuinely thought that plants were created before the sun. Genesis was a rough read, but I brushed off most of my complaints.

The exodus story really finished off any belief I still held onto. In the story, God hardens Pharaoh's heart so that he won't free the people of Israel. He then repeatedly plagues Egypt, culminating in the decision to kill innocent children for the actions of their parents to scare the person who's heart he hardened so that he will finally release slaves. Some supposed all-powerful, all-loving being chose to harden the heart of someone instead of softening their heart so that  he could make people miserable & kill children for the same final outcome. I was already struggling to reconcile the claims of Christianity with the reality of nature. Recognizing that the deity character was a horrific monster on top of that was the final straw. There was nothing left to save.

If the stories were true, you wouldn't need faith. If the deity was loving, we wouldn't have to make excuses for it. If you're like me, realizing that hell cannot be real will be extremely comforting and freeing.

[Aegon]

No offense ma'am but I take this story about as seriously as this:

[rocinantexyz]

They put their hands on his paralyzed hand and prayed and left there.
So my friend goes to sleep and wakes up in the morning to find that his paralyzed hand is completely healed.

I don't believe that for a second. That could be easily explained by just a single person telling a lie; something we all see happen every day. IMO: we should never attribute something to magic; if it can be explained by human stupidity, human laziness, or human dishonesty; because those exist in abundance.

If you believe that is what happened, it is because you want to believe that is what happened. If you want to believe in magic so badly; what is stopping you? Just go with it, reality be damned!
___
eta: On a related note: I recommend dealing with bureaucracies with a similar concept. If possible: you should manipulate the situation so that you get the result you want if no one does anything. Simply because in general, people are lazy, so by structuring the situation in that configuration, you are likely to get what you want. Put that human laziness to "work' for you!

[Thumpalumpacus]

I'm still waiting for the whole regenerated-limbs thing. A good god who can do everything can do anything, yet still we see suffering.

[airportkid]

What is routinely and persistently missed whenever somebody says a god is the only explanation for something they can't explain is this:

1.  The "somebody" is virtually always a nobody with no fluency or education in the factors relevant to the circumstance, couldn't identify what factors would be relevant to the circumstance, and whose knowledge of the circumstance is shallow and incomplete.  It's like a third grader in a nuclear power station control room seeing a squiggle on a readout shaped like a unicorn head and assuming that only a god could have made such a squiggle.

2.  No "somebody" in the entire history of humanity who is actually a "somebody" in fields relevant to the circumstance has ever ended an inquiry into the circumstance by saying a god must've done it.  Of all the reasons disproving divine interventions, this last is the most powerful.