UPDATE: Here’s what my primary-care physician, Dr. Alex Lickerman, says about the diagnosis of “glioma” below:
Glioma is a broad term used to delineate all types of primary brain tumors. The prognosis varies tremendously from type to type, with glioblastoma multiforme being the worst. You need a biopsy to determine which kind it is. Not being a radiologist, I don’t know how confident you can be in diagnosing tumor type purely on the basis of an MRI. If he truly does have only scar left, that suggests the original lesion was more inflammatory than anything. Again, without a biopsy, who the hell knows what this really was?
The New York Times applies stringent reportorial scrutiny to many claims: the value of vaccinations and mask mandates, the bogus argument that there’s no anthropogenic climate change, and so on, but there’s one thing it rarely scrutinizes—or at least applies a minimal level of scrutiny: the truth claims of religions. (As a matter of fact, the NYT loves all kinds of woo—especially channelers and dowsers.)
In a big “guest essay” by historian Molly Worthen, a piece which must have passed the editors, the paper claims to document lots of medical miracles as evidence for God. Against this hokum, she offers only one real skeptic, Michael Shermer, to contest miracle claims. Now I don’t know if Worthen, who writes a lot for the paper, is herself religious, but for all the passes she gives faith in this article, she might as well be.
It’s a very long “guest essay”, but I want to quote bits that support the view that there are real miracles of a religious nature, as well as the much smaller bits that question this.
Click below to read, or find it archived.
Worthen’s title question mentions two important issues. First is that of “proof”, which is really irrelevant to a scientist since we don’t think of empirical “proof” of God—or of anything. We speak of the strength of evidence, which, to me, is strong for the formula of a water molecule having two hydrogens and one oxygen, and far, far weaker for an omniscient and omnipotent being who cares for each one of us.
Nevertheless, we can in principle get empirical evidence for gods. In Faith Versus Fact (pp. 118-119), I consider (as did Darwin and Carl Sagan before me) what evidence would convince me that there was a God. Indeed, I lay out a scenario that would convince me that this God would be the God of Christianity, i.e., the father of/part of Jesus. Now this would be “provisional” convincing, for “absolute proof” is beyond the realm of science. But it would make me a believer. The scenario involves restoring the limbs of amputees and so on, and of course we don’t see that (see below).
Second, the question remains that if there are inexplicable cures, Worthen wants proof that those cures were effected by God. I presume she doesn’t mean Vishnu or John Frum, as she mentions only Abrahamic conceptions of God. There are of course medical remissions for which doctors have no clear explanation, but that still leaves us with either a naturalistic explanation we don’t understand, or God. Given the absence of evidence for God (see below again), and the prevalance of evidence that things once imputed to God (lightning, disease, evolution, etc. ) are now understood as naturalistic, I think the priors rest with naturalism.
On to the article. The centerpiece is the personal testimony of Josh Brown, director of neuroscience at Indiana University, and of his wife Candy, regarding Josh’s miracle “cure” of glioma, a form of brain cancer. It turns out, of course, that although the disease is almost invariably fatal, Brown got no official diagnosis or biopsy of glioma. (I should mention that the Browns are Christians.) Here is their story recounted by Worthen:
Candy Brown was nine months pregnant when her husband had a seizure in the middle of the night. “I went to bed, and when I woke up the next morning, I was in an ambulance,” he said. Two and a half weeks later, newborn in tow, they got his diagnosis: an apparent brain tumor called a glioma. (He provided The New York Times with medical records to support this account.) He was 30 years old. “Chemo, radiation and surgery don’t statistically prolong the life span with what I had. There was nothing to do but get ready to die, basically.” Doctors prescribed no treatment other than anticonvulsant medication to manage symptoms.
The Browns grew up in Christian families but not the sort that expected God to intervene ostentatiously in modern life. Still, he was desperate. He started traveling the country seeking out Christian healing revivals, dragging along his wife and baby daughter. “I needed to find out what was going on,” he said. “If there was any reality to it, I wanted a miracle.”
Candy Brown recalled more disturbing details: the morning after her husband’s diagnosis, they began to pray together, but mentioning the name of Jesus seemed to trigger a frightening physical response. “Josh shoots out of bed, starts turning somersaults,” she said. “I’d say, try worshiping Jesus, and he couldn’t say the name Jesus. I was thinking of the herd of pigs,” she said, recalling the unlucky swine run off a cliff by demon possession in the Gospels. “He was hoarse and exhausted. For that 45 minutes, there was such a palpably evil presence in that room that hated the name of Jesus. If I ever had doubted whether Jesus was real, I couldn’t now.”
Well, there’s your proof: not only God, but demons! I’m amazed he didn’t vomit pea soup. But Josh got better!
Josh Brown began traveling with healing missionaries. He told me he saw things he couldn’t explain — like a blind man on a street in Cuba who appeared to instantly regain his sight after missionaries prayed for him. Months later, after many sessions of prayer for healing and deliverance, an M.R.I. revealed that his tumor had turned into scar tissue.
He quickly volunteered to me that he never had a biopsy, but doctors often diagnose this type of tumor on the basis of M.R.I.s and the patient’s symptoms. “One way or another, the tumor went away,” he said. “I’ve been symptom-free for 19 years. The doctors said very little.” The Browns felt grateful — and perplexed. “At that point I wondered why, when I had seen so many things that seemed miraculous and difficult to explain, why was there so little careful investigation of these things?” he said.
I’ve asked my doctor to assess this claim about glioma, so either return in a few hours or check the comments.
Convinced that God and Jesus had healed him against the power of Satan, Josh got a Templeton Grant (of course) to travel the world “investigating healing claims” (he found many, of course), and he later founded the Global Medicine Research Institute, which publishes studies of cures for which there’s supposedly no naturalistic explanation.
Below I’ll show some of Worthen’s piece suggesting (with a few caveats that Worthen quickly knocks down) that miracles are real, God-given events. First, the events witnessed, with a bit of a caveat:
In 2009, on a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the Browns flew to Mozambique to investigate the healing claims of Global Awakening and Iris Global, two ministries focused on healing and revival. They brought audiometry equipment and eye charts to test people who requested prayer for deafness and blindness. The sample size was small — they tested 24 people — but they found statistically significant improvement beyond placebo effects and hypnosis.
“I was standing right there next to this woman who could not tell how many fingers were held up when you were a foot in front of her,” Candy Brown told me. “Then five minutes later, she’s reading an eye chart with a smile on her face.” She and her colleagues published the results in The Southern Medical Journal — not a prestigious publication but a respectable one with peer review — and she drew on the research for her 2012 book, “Testing Prayer.”
This is the kind of stuff that healing evangelists do all the time in the U.S., and of course it’s hokum.
Skeptics complained about the Browns’ methods and field conditions. They pointed out that the hearing tests were in a noisy setting, there was no control group and test subjects would naturally want to please those who prayed for them by showing results. “That simple trick explains why both hearing and sight appears to have dramatically improved among these poor, superstitious villagers,” one critic declared. (The study explained in detail how the researchers did their best to weed out false data.)
If you want to evaluate people’s experiences at a revival in rural Africa, you probably need to give up on double-blind studies in a perfectly controlled environment. But let’s imagine for a moment that researchers could meet such standards (and that an all-powerful deity humors us and submits to this scrutiny). They might persuade skeptics that something strange happened. But is there any evidence that would persuade a nonbeliever that God was behind it — that we do not live in a closed system in which all causation is a matter of natural laws?
And indeed there is such evidence! Medical histories! (My bolding):
Christians have sought to scientifically evaluate miracle claims at least since the 16th century, when the Council of Trent tightened up the verification process for canonizing saints. But the Christian God does not work in randomized, repeatable trials. He works in history. So maybe medical histories are a more appropriate approach. “Medical case reports rely on a different epistemology, which is more of a historical epistemology,” Josh Brown said. “It’s not something you can necessarily recreate, whatever the time course of a disease.”
In 2011 the Browns helped found the Global Medical Research Institute, which publishes case studies on the small number of inexplicable events that its staff members can scrupulously document — like a blind woman who, while praying one night with her husband, regained her sight and a teenage boy who depended on a feeding tube until his stomach suddenly healed itself during an encounter with a Pentecostal minister. “When we write these case reports, we’re not claiming these must have been a miracle of God, but these are the facts of the case,” Josh Brown told me.
The fact that you can’t use random repeatable trials to test God’s healing power is flat wrong. Of course you can, and it has been done—in another study, funded by Templeton, on the power of intercessory prayer in aiding recovery from heart surgery. Unfortunately, prayer didn’t work; in fact, those prayed for were marginally worse off than those who were not. No, medical histories themselves, unless the condition is NEVER known to show spontaneous remission, like amputated limbs, are insufficient. There are certainly ways to test religious healing, just as there are way to test antibiotics and other forms of naturalistic healing.
Next Worthen uses the large number of miracle-healing claims as evidence that it works (all bolding henceforth is mine):
But the Browns’ experiences and research — not to mention the abundance of healing testimony from other witnesses, especially outside the West — deserve serious consideration. Watertight proof of divine causation may be an impossible goal, but the search for it forces us to confront the assumptions that prop up our own worldviews — whether one is a devout believer or a committed skeptic.
. . .The Browns’ experiences are striking because they operate in one of the most antisupernaturalist subcultures in the modern world: secular academia. But in a global context — and we are in the midst of a worldwide Christian revival — stories of unexplained healing in response to prayer are common. (Although healing is central to Christianity, other religions claim their share. One Christian response is that God shows himself to non-Christians in partial ways, and some Christians I interviewed described non-Christian healings that, they claimed, later proved false.)
Scholars estimate that 80 percent of new Christians in Nepal come to the faith through an experience with healing or deliverance from demonic spirits. Perhaps as many as 90 percent of new converts who join a house church in China credit their conversion to faith healing. In Kenya, 71 percent of Christians say they have witnessed a divine healing, according to a 2006 Pew study. Even in the relatively skeptical United States, 29 percent of survey respondents claim they have seen one.
You can quarrel with the exact figures, but we are talking about millions of people who say something otherworldly happened to them. Yet most secular people — and even many religious believers — are oblivious to this or shrug off miracle stories on principle as motivated reasoning, hallucination or fraud.
If millions say it, well then it MUST be right!
But as Hume noted, the priors for “motivated reasoning, hallucination, or fraud” are higher than for the working of God, especially given that God hasn’t been able to regrow limbs or eyes or even make himself manifest in more obvious ways (Sagan mentions several, including God spelling out messages in the stars), and also that we know from investigations of American “miracle cure” preachers that they were simply committing fraud.
Worthen treats doubters as unreasonable skeptics, as if the evidence is so strong that she deems skepticism about religious miracle cures as a form of faith, dogmatism, and yes, even racist colonialism!
Western skeptics have disregarded witness testimony from places like Nigeria at least since David Hume complained in his 1748 essay on miracles that “they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations.” Such dismissal is more awkward for 21st-century secular liberals, who often say that Westerners should listen to people in the Global South and acknowledge the blindnesses of colonialism. “Some people claim that the best thing to do is to listen to people’s experiences and learn from them,” Dr. Chinedozi said. “Yet these people will be the first to find a way to disprove experiences in other cultures and contexts.”
Witness testimony in general has come in for a drubbing lately. Courts have overturned convictions when DNA proved that witnesses who sounded sure of themselves on the stand turned out to be horribly mistaken. Yet we rely on it all the time in the course of ordinary life. “If your epistemology is that eyewitness evidence doesn’t count, then there goes most historiography, journalism, even anthropology and sociology,” Craig Keener, a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, told me. (He included Dr. Chinedozi’s and Dr. Adewuya’s stories in his book “Miracles Today.”)
Among those who deny miracles, “the presuppositions are so strong,” Dr. Keener said. “There’s a dogmatism there, just like a religious dogmatism. It looks to me like it’s so ideologically driven — if you’re starting from the standpoint that a miracle claim is not true if we could possibly come up with another explanation and one of the explanations can be, ‘We don’t have an explanation now, but maybe someday we will.’” When I asked Dr. Shermer what he thought about this analogy, he objected. Belief in future scientific discovery “is not faith,” he said. “It’s confidence that the system works pretty well from experience.”
Yep, there we have it. What are you going to believe: science or “lived experience”? Especially when that lived experience comes from the “oppressed” people of the “Global South” whose oppressors are of course us “colonialists”. But Worthen is completely ignoring Hitchens’s Razor: “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” Claims of miracle healing by God is a strong assertion, and “lived experience” does not suffice. And, of course, the reason we need science is because a lot of our assumptions based on everyday experience are simply wrong.
Worthen’s piece goes on, ending with a bump as Bill Dembski, the doyen of Intellgent Design, is dragged onstage to say that he, too, believes in miracles, but that they “require scrutiny”.
What about the critics? Well, nearly all the tepid criticism offered by Worthen has already appeared in this post, but Michael Shermer is enlisted as the single Token Skeptic, only to be pulled offstage quickly:
Most professional scientists won’t go for this. “Case methods are fine as a way to start,” Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and a historian of science, told me. “But how do you shift from case studies to more experimental protocols that are the gold standard?”
Dr. Shermer sometimes asks believers about all the times prayer fails to heal. “Their answer is, ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ It’s just hand-waving,” he said. Divine mystery is central to Christian faith, but it creates problems for a scientific method premised on the assumption that the laws of cause and effect are uniform — and will yield up their mysterious ways if you test and measure again and again.
Earth to Ms. Worthen: there is no “laws of cause and effect” in science. But we’ll let that be and move on to the several questions I’d like to ask Worthen, questions that she really doesn’t answer.
1). How do you know it’s the Christian God (aka father of Jesus) who did the healing? Yes, it’s often done by Christian preachers, but is there a control for religious healing by Muslims or Hindus? I doubt it. Therefore, you have no strong evidence that your God is the best God, or whether there are multiple gods. (This is the least important question I’d pose.)
2). If God wanted to make himself known, why does he do it through a few paltry miracles instead of making Himself manifest in undeniable ways, ways that Sagan discusses in The Varieties of Scientific Experience (a book I heartily recommend)? Can’t he spell out “I AM WHAT I AM” in the stars?
3). As Shermer notes, why does God pick and choose whom He heals instead of healing everyone? Worthen attempts an answer, but it’s not convincing. She brings in Candy Brown, who just punts, arguing that those who aren’t cured aren’t sufficiently vulnerable or hopeful.
If God can heal, why does he do it so rarely? The world is full of suffering people who pray with no relief. “Even people who believe in miracles often don’t pray for them because they’re afraid of disappointment,” Candy Brown said. “I’ve had people die on my watch. It’s incredibly painful. You ask, ‘Is it my fault?’” She speculated that many Christians’ belief that miraculous healing ceased after New Testament times springs from “protection against pain, protection against feeling ill will toward God or other people. It takes hope and vulnerability to be open to healing.”
For Christians, it also takes spiritual maturity to remember that miracles are not the point. Miracles are signs meant to help humans see the greatest miracle of all, the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ— God’s ultimate intrusion into ordinary life, by which he eventually “shall wipe away all tears,” according to the Book of Revelation.
Well, maybe miracles aren’t the point, but they’re sure touted by Christians as proof of God’s existence. Absent evidence for God’s existence, there’s no reason at all to buy the stories of the New Testament.
4.) We saw a few days ago that one of the latest “miracle healings” at Lourdes was unconvincing, for, as my doctor said, the diagnosis was not believable. I think the same may be true of Josh’s glioma. But one thing would be convincing to many: the regrowing of lost limbs or missing eyes—things not known to happen naturally. So why doesn’t God prove His power by growing back an arm or a leg, or restoring a missing eye? It’s telling that only those maladies not known known to spontaneously disappear are the very ones that we don’t see at Lourdes or other Places of Miracles. That, to me, is telling. In fact, there’s a whole website devoted to this vital question, “Why won’t God heal amputees?” The answer, of course, is that God doesn’t heal anyone, because God doesn’t exist. (The faithful do have answers to the amputee question, but they’re laughable.)
In the end, Worthen comes off as just about as credulous as the Browns. Her vetting of the healing claims is laughable. Did she interview any skeptical doctors? And the New York Times comes off as even more credulous, because they actually published this stuff and offer no rebuttal save a few words from Shermer.
Why is the NYT engaged in so much faith-pushing? Could it be that it’s decided not to “follow the science” because the woke paper, like many woke people, believe in “other ways of knowing” or that “lived experience trumps data”? I would find that hard to buy, but if the New Yorker has gone down this route, so can the New York Times.
I can’t help thinking there’s nobody at the NYT who actually believes any of this. They publish it in the same way they publish, comics, horoscopes, and other fantasies. It broadens their customer base and increases income.
An excellent point. Or, as Lucretius said: “All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.” For politician, read newspaper publisher.
“But it would make me a believer.”
Actually, it wouldn’t make you a believer. As you’ve said many times, faith is belief without evidence. With evidence, it’s not belief, it’s just a conclusion based on observation. You don’t “believe” that the sun rises in the east or that gravity is real; you merely observe it. Incontrovertible evidence for miracles or the existence of God would not make you a believer; it would, in fact, deprive you of the possibility of being a believer.
It might not make me embrace “faith”, but it would convince me of God’s existence–tentatively. That’s what I’m talking about, and you KNOW that’s what I’m talking about.
I don’t want to believe without evidence; that would make me deluded.
And I don’t want to continue this argument since you know perfectly well what I mean.
Why is this any different from or worse than the conspiracy theories and paranoia clogging the internet today about Covid or space aliens or twitter or the FBI? And worse, some of it is now coming from people that seemed rational (Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, etc. with their logorrhea about Twitter and
Musk and everyone else). This is an epidemic and just as dangerous as Covid. It leads to mass hysteria like witch burning, cancel culture and all the other irrational diseases of the mind. But anyway thank you for exposing all of this. I pass it on to my own lists.
Isn’t the stuff about Twitter and the FBI just the making public of real, actual emails?
Why is this any different from or worse than the conspiracy theories and paranoia clogging the internet today about Covid or space aliens or twitter or the FBI?
The difference is that this woo is published in a leading newspaper that claims to take fact-checking seriously and that still believes (more woo, given the evidence) that it is a “newspaper of record”.
I think this gets coverage here primarily because it is part of our host’s interest and expertise.
I can give a second hand answer about aliens or their technologies being stored and studied at places like Area 51. My Dad was in charge of those bases for a while, and I asked him. He told me that he could not talk about anything like that, if they had them.
But he followed it up by telling me that he does not personally believe in UFOs from extraterrestrial origins.
The other subjects seem to be nefarious government operations, which the belief in might have been called conspiracy theories, except that the once hidden documents are being released, confirming them
Given the momentary hysteria not so long ago when the government supposedly declassified and released some radar and FLIR images of a few blurry objects supposedly doing impossible things, all easily accounted for, and with some testimony from some fighter pilots trying to sell books everyone and their monkey were preparing for an invasion. (Sort of).
That event leads me to believe the government may well just have a few convenient belief threads they perpetuate to help generate ‘beliefs’ that are distractions and may be used to lead people away or occupy their overactive imaginations.
I’ve heard “miracles are bunk” attributed to John Updike, but don’t have a source, so I’ll go with this, from Brian Aldiss: “There has always been a belief in miracles in the popular mind. As L. Sprague de Camp once said, the public would rather be bunked than debunked.”
I’m a retired newspaper editor and I can’t believe you claimed The New York Times “touts” anything. The article is plainly labeled a guest essay. When the Times expresses an opinion, it does so, like all newspapers, in an editorial. This is a column. I understand this is inside baseball for some, but there is a profound difference between an editorial and a column. Editorials are unsigned for a reason. Papers often print opinions they violently disagree with.
Yes, sir, but what I meant was that the paper probably invited and approved of that column. Now please be more civil in the future.
This is NOT, by the way, given the NYT’s history, and the plethora of religious columns (e.g. Tish Warren) over the complete absence of atheistic ones, expresses the paper’s own point of view, just as the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed section expresses an overwhelmingly right-wng point of view.
LJ, editors like yourself choose which opinions to publish. The NYT editors don’t publish all the opinions they disagree with, but chose to publish this one. At the very least, they’re endorsing this as a bad opinion they think readers should engage with (possibly just for clicks and ad dollars).
The NYT editors could have approach that June 3rd 2020 Tom Cotton opinion in the same spirit. But instead they disavowed it 2 days after it was published. They cited some inaccuracies or exaggerations by Cotton, and a bad choice of headline by the editors. What they didn’t cite but barely alluded to was the revolt by NYT staff who claimed that Cotton’s words put them in physical danger.
Why do some controversial opinions like Cotton’s get canceled by the mob (and get the editorial page editor fired), while others survive to infect readers with a mind virus that’s as dangerous as covid (according to Lorna @ 3)? One guess is that NYT staffers think of miracles at Xmas as a sort of mental candy cane for little people. Sweet & harmless in small doses, not worth objecting to.
That sounds like the most plausible explanation to me, Rick. I’ve been subscribing the NYTimes since 1998 and will continue to do so as it continues to publish many articles and opinion pieces I feel are worth reading and to me they outweigh the horrid pieces such as this one. I can understand the need to maintain as broad a readership as possible to maintain profitability and keep publishing and paying for mostly good reporting (and the occasional very bad, alas), particularly as many papers around the country are going out of business due to insufficient profits. A deplorable situation. I’d much rather they cease with the woo, of which there is far too much already. There were at least two other opinion pieces on Jesus, one on how he “knew what it’s like to be human” the other on how he loves New Yorkers too, just going by the headlines and brief descriptions — I didn’t bother to read them.
Meanwhile, The Atlantic, which I also subscribe to, had an article about how a growing number of Americans celebrate Christmas but no longer accept the nonsensical myths associated with it, the alleged “reason for the season”, with those who still subscribe to that down to a third of Americans (unfortunately they make up 2/3rds of the U.S. Supreme Court as well as a disproportionate part of our national Congress and federal judiciary.
I too subscribe to the NYT. Worth it for the good stuff.
If some people benefit from miracles and many more people don’t we have to ask why. It would seem to be the problem of theodicy (again) dressed up in an eye-catching suit.
To the question “What Evidence Would Demonstrate God Exists?” all you have to do is think consistently, rather than fall in to the type of special pleading used by the religious.
Generally speaking, we already have ways of discerning between, say, dreams/delusions and reality – “real” things tend to have empirical persistence and coherence, and can be examined by other people to be confirmed, and which fit in to a larger coherent framework which helps us understand and to a degree predict “reality.”
There is plenty of controversy over the existence of a God; virtually none over the existence of water, fire, or Donald Trump for that matter.
All we need for a God is the same type of evidence we use to determine anything else is real.
So if God wanted to show His existence, he can’t just show up in someone’s dream, or in someone’s fuzzy warm feeling, or peek through a cloud for a moment for some small group and disappear – all which could be explained by ticks in human psychology – or do spot-“miracles” around the world in circumstances which leave all the details and evidence fuzzy.
God would have to know that He would have to show up in the way “real things” do in our experience and perform miracles in a way that is not ephemeral, but which could pass our most rigorous tests, just as we do for anything else in science.
There are really countless ways which IMO could demonstrate God exists. God could show up as, say, a human form but 100 feet tall. That would immediately distinguish him from our normal experience. But instead of playing peek-a-boo God should stick around so He could be seen and examined by anyone, scientists included. Then He would at least satisfy our usual criteria for “something that clearly exists.”
Ok..so..but “is this being God?” Well, what kind of powers is God claimed to have?
He is The Creator Of The Universe for one thing, as well as being outside the laws of physics (yet being all powerful, able to manifest physically as well). So God could demonstrate He has such powers. He could turn ‘immaterial’ as he walks through buildings. He could manipulate the laws of physics for us. He could tell us things he did while making the universe ‘point your telescopes here and you’ll find this’ and ‘point your microscopes here and you’ll find this.’ He could create a new moon before our eyes, even entire new galaxies. Really, the possible demonstrations that He both has the powers suggesting physics bend to His will, and that he could be the creator of the universe, are many.
And rebuttals to such examples like “but He could be a Super Powerful Alien fooling us with superior technology, so what we think is happening isn’t really happening” will, at some point, become pure special pleading. Insofar as God would manifest both Himself and His miracles in a way that survives our normal modes of empirical verification, the more parsimonious explanation is that “this is what it seems to be.” Appeals to mass delusion or alien technology causing illusions would be no more warranted than they would as “alternative explanations” for things like the moon, the sun, or any other scientific observation.
Christians sometimes claim that if God revealed himself in ways that were utterly convincing and unambiguous then we would essentially be compelled to believe in his existence and God doesn’t want that; rather, he wants us to have a free choice (leaving aside the question of whether we actually have free choices). Even if everyone one earth admitted that the Christian God clearly existed, my guess is that many people would go on with their lives pretty much as before, without bothering to worship him, pray to him or generally organize their lives around his existence.
“Christians sometimes claim that if God revealed himself in ways that were utterly convincing and unambiguous then we would essentially be compelled to believe in his existence and God doesn’t want that; rather, he wants us to have a free choice”
Yeah that’s the common response.
It’s bogus on so many levels.
So, if God were to manifest in ways that convince us He is real, that would take away our free will (especially in regard to responding to Him).
I usually ask the Christian using this rebuttal: Have they not read their own bible? God is manifesting and doing miraculous demonstrations all over the place in the Old Testament. And in the New Testament, God manifested as Jesus and did miracles convincing those around him of his divinity. Since when do Christians tell us this took away anyone’s free will in their story? Were the Apostles robbed of their free will in relationship with God, becoming “robots,” once they witnessed the resurrection and “knew” Jesus to be God manifest? Nope.
Genesis itself tells us the story of Adam and Eve, who were directly created by God, and who had regular direct contact and conversations with God! God gave them direct commands, such as not to eat from the Tree Of Knowledge. And even then Adam and Eve were free to disobey God, as they did. In Christianity, the story of Adam and Eve, whether literal or figurative, is THE paradigmatic example of Free Will in action – Adam and Eve were the original example of free will in action – their free willed choice being responsible for The Fall. And all of it occurs in the context in which God is utterly manifest and unambiguously known.
This typical rebuttal is clearly ad hoc reasoning.
That Christian explanation about why God hides from view for most of us is clearly a case of turning a failure into a virtue.
This is why the Christian fetishism around “belief” is so bizarre. Why that measure?
By the way, “God” the character revealed itself in full in Heaven to the fallen angel who would become “Satan” and rebel against “God’s” rule on earth. “Satan” certainly *believed* in “God,” having witnessed his greatness.
But that did not stop “Satan” from, supposedly, hating “God” and rebelling, i.e. refusing to bow down to a superior deity (make no mistake, “Satan” is a deity, too).
In other words, if “God” weren’t so hung up on having belief as the idiotic standard for salvation, the above Christian argument would be rendered completely useless (and is, anyway, in my opinion). Believing in “God” does not force one to bow down and worship “God,” so this bit of sophistry is, as usual with Christian apologists, complete and utter bunkum, hokum, made-up baloney.
Yep, should actually be impossible to miss. It’s a God for God’s sake.
Again, it’s a marvel that “god cures” these people. Why is no one asking why god afflicted them? It begins to sounds like a protection racket.
” He told me he saw things he couldn’t explain — like a blind man on a street in Cuba who appeared to instantly regain his sight after missionaries prayed for him.” I’ve seen miracles like this myself. Once, I was standing before a vitrine in Paris to read the
shop notices when an individual with a white aveugle cane came by, put the cane
aside, and joined me in reading the notices.
The thing is, those who push this hokum will never need to prove a single miracle claim with a biopsy or double-blind experiment, or anything like that. All they need is to make it an “its your word against mine” story. That will be enough to keep the books selling, the readers reading, and the online browsers browsing.
When I realize, in frequent moments of horror, HOW MANY people actually believe in this kind of bs, I wonder how anything at all works in society.
D.A.
NYC
Totally. Christians always say to atheists “You don’t understand the bible; you are taking things out of context!” And then when they try to put things in context, it typically makes things worse. Sometimes when listening to Christians – especially seeing otherwise normal human beings try to justify hell – I fully expect to wake up screaming at any moment.
It occurred to me recently that ministers, priests, vicars etc must expend a lot of energy continuously preaching and peddling nonsense. Even if they believe it themselves, imagine the effort if must take to constantly make stuff up when questioned by doubting parishioners, or to explain to bereaved church members why it was that god didn’t answer the prayers for their sick relative; and to try and make it all consistent and logical. It must be exhausting.
Given that the number of unanswered prayers, in cases where devout believers desperately need God’s help, greatly outweighs the number of purported miracles, we should first give serious consideration to the hypothesis that God is not benevolent.
It’s the other way around. The other gods show up to Christians in partial ways. The lord of this world is Erwtphjd, not the fake Christian god. In fact, there is no such thing as a Christian god.
Good heavens! Demonic spirits exist too? Do they have supernatural powers as well? I suppose just being a demonic spirit is supernatural enough.
I know people who took on other religions for the same reason. They became devotees of shamans because of the miracles they performed. One such shaman told someone I knew that her father had died thousands of miles away. Perhaps the word ‘told’ is too strong; all she had was a statue of the shaman, but she knew how to read the signs. Some Mormons I met told me a similar story. You have to know how to read the divine signs.
The problem with those who go one about miracles is that they can speak and write. That is, they have enough facility in language to put words together to form sentences. But often, they form nonsensical sentences. This is the stuff of religious institutions that have made idiocy into a virtue.
But still, I prefer Tish Harrison Warren to twitter god. I think she is a wonderful woman and I hope she gets to write more. Words are what the masses need, not meaning. Words are what they deserve, not meaning.
’tis the season of newspapers publishing stuff in this vein. Would anyone expect to see something like this in mid-July?
There is a fellow known as Fred Hollows, an atheist, dead now, who personally saved the eyesight of thousands of people and through his foundation, millions.
He was mentored by missionary priest in the Northern Territory, Australia helping with the prevalence of eye disease among Aboriginal peoples. That missionary priest studied ophthalmology and devised materialistic means to help eye disease. Prayer had nothing to do with it.
There is actually a manufacturing facility in Nepal and Eritrea which manufacture millions of interocular.
That verses some gibbering confabulated personal recounting which could mean anything. Miracle’s eh? If there are miracles, I know which way I’m looking.
I despise these religious propagandizers and their ignorance, bias, enthrallment and basic brute stupidity. The world is a far worse place with them in it.
And for the religious who might think atheists do less good.
Check out atheist Fred and the amount of good he has done compared to any magical mumbo jumbo.
I do think Tim Minchin managed a pretty decent rebuttal here:
Thank You God https://g.co/kgs/AZzanQ
You beat me to it!
As a Christian, this response and subsequent comments to the NYT article made my day. Thanks. Love y’all. LOLOLOLOL