Why God Won’t Heal The Amputee
So after a somewhat safe political blog entry, I am for some unknown reason compelled to dive into the deep mysteries of life. I hope not to mire my (as of right now brand-new) readers in unsightly and numbingly philosophical musings too often, but the occasional side-path can be enlightening and insightful. If you are not in the mood to think right now, go here and come back when you’re ready - I’ll wait…
I have been ruminating quite a bit lately about the Nature Of Things™, and a good part of this process has been a reflection on the existence and nature of God. I have visited several websites decrying the existence of God many of which have some interesting things to say, but this post is directed at one particularly irksome site: http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ (WWGHA) which posits the question, “Why won’t God heal amputees?”
While I highly encourage direct dialog concerning religion and the supernatural, I have a hard time swallowing nonsense / irrelevant arguments from angst-filled individuals. After reading much of this website I get the impression that the author was either deeply hurt by a conservative religious up-bringing or extremely bitter from past experience(s) with “fundy religious nut-bags” (as a friend of mine once called them). While this site points out some interesting facets of a Christian world-view (the “optical illusion” argument for instance) which should be engaged and discussed thoroughly, the main line of argument used throughout the site is basically a subtle re-wording of the omnipotence paradox.
Let’s make this a little more clear. First, the basic paradox can be summed up in the following question, “Can an omnipotent being create a stone which is too large for the being to lift?” In creating the stone which cannot be lifted, the omnipotent being would then lose its omnipotence which then calls into question the initial omnipotence of said being. Hmmmm. That’s a Tuffy®. Fortunately a lot of really smart people throughout history have weighed in on the matter (more on this later).
The WWGHA website poses their problem in the following way: God is all-powerful (omnipotent), therefore regenerating a leg is trivial. God is perfect, all-knowing, all-loving and ready-and-willing to answer prayers. God has no reason to discriminate against amputees. If he answers prayers for people like Jeanna Giese, we have no reason to believe he won’t answer prayers for a deserving amputee. But he doesn’t, and won’t for the foresee-able future.
At first glance the argument is clever, but ultimately it says a big heaping pile of nothing. First of all, simply because science never definitively illuminated the ultimate reasons for Jeanna’s recovery doesn’t preclude an explanation rooted in natural processes. Furthermore, a natural explanation for Jeanna’s recovery wouldn’t read, even slightly, on the nature of God and his ability to answer prayer - the topics are unrelated. Second, the question, “why won’t God heal amputees” can be re-phrased to read, “why can’t God create a world with rules and natural laws, and then break those rules?” Huh, sounds like we’ve made it back to the omnipotence paradox and in that case it’s about time to call in the heavy-weights.
I’m not going to delineate the opposing sides of this paradox here. Instead, I’m going to encourage you to read the Wikipedia article, and do some homework on your own. What I do want to point out here is that what the WWGHA website seems to dismissively pass off as a straight-forward question with a simple answer (leading quickly to the seemingly logical conclusion that God is imaginary) is actually a discussion about nothing with underpinnings in a well-explored philosophical paradox. Just because we can formulate a question doesn’t mean it’s worth answering: “Why won’t Whole Foods buy me a new house?” To quote C.S. Lewis:
God’s omnipotence means [His] power to do all that is not intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, “God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it”, you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words “God can.” It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives — not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
Now there is some kool aid worth drinking.
Posted in Religion
October 27th, 2007 at 9:43 am
I was thinking about this last weekend. The shortest explanation for why God won’t heal an amputee is that some people want to cut off their arms. If you want to cut off your arm but know it will be regenerated, you’re not actually able to cut off your arm (a free will violation). What so often gets confused in discussions about God’s omnipotence and benevolence is that people want — or think a benevolent diety ought to give them — infinite unilinear regeneration, which is nonsensical. Aside from destroying any notion of free will, what would you be left with - people who never suffered and never died? Christianity already has a category for that; it’s called heaven. At any rate, the view that God has to right wrongs in all situations is a misunderstanding of benevolence. Benevolence doesn’t mean God must forcefully do right, but that He has a good will (hence, bene-volition).
At any rate, making cases against God based on amputeeism is a weak case. Philosophers who want to make an argument against God from evil will always find more ammunition in the Holocaust or other genocides, although the questioning of Christian doctrine in those situations isn’t about whether or not God is good but rather about how Christians can defend the doctrine of general revelation — perhaps one of the reasons that Karl Barth was so emphatic in his denial of it.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
While the Wikipedia entry on the omnipotence paradox made for some interesting lazy-Sunday-afternoon reading, I really don’t think that you have addressed the “WWGHA?” argument, or its implications, at all.
This is not a deep philosophical problem. The amputee experiment provides us with a way to test the promises allegedly made by Jesus regarding the power of prayer. This isn’t pie-in-the-sky philosophy; it’s straightforward, down-to-earth science.
When a person experiences a recovery from a serious illness, and the precise workings of said disease haven’t (yet) been illuminated by science (logic, reason and evidence), Christians are eager to credit the outcome to the intervention of “God”, and since these same Christians undoubtedly offered a substantial volume of prayers during the illness, they are keen to trumpet the outcome as a validation of Jesus’ promises.
However, the amputee test closes off the possibility of “God” hiding behind coincidence. The experiment is elegant in its simplicity: since amputated limbs do not regenerate (in humans, anyway), “God” actually answering prayers according to the clear promises of Jesus would be unambiguously detectable. Since these results are obviously not observed, the promises made about the efficacy of prayer are clearly false. “You will receive whatever you ask for in prayer” is a lie, and there’s no getting around this.
Why? Maybe Jesus was a con man who intentionally lied. Or maybe he had psychotic delusions of grandeur that led to such pronouncements. Maybe, as Family Guy once pointed out, the stories of his abilities have been exaggerated. Maybe the dude never even existed at all. Any way you slice it, the promises recorded in the Gospels can’t stand the bright light of evidence-based scrutiny.
Now, is this a definitive, overwhelming proof that there is no God and that Christianity is a delusion? I wouldn’t go that far.
However, this is one of the clearest examples we have that Christianity is incompatible with reality, and once you really allow yourself to accept the worldview-shattering fact that these promises of Jesus are demonstrably empty, you can begin to examine all of the other Christian claims with proper skepticism.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
To the author of comment #1:
I’m pretty sure that “God is imaginary” is a shorter explanation than “some people want to cut off their arms. If you want to cut off your arm but know it will be regenerated, you’re not actually able to cut off your arm (a free will violation)”.
Yes, I’m being somewhat smart-ass-y in that my explanation is byte-for-byte shorter than yours, but it’s also much “shorter” in the Occam’s Razor sense as well. As the WWGHA site points out, “[the] thing that is so appealing about this explanation is that there is no hand waving. There are no contradictions. It is completely fair. There is no paradox. This explanation makes complete sense in light of the evidence we see in our world.”
Furthermore, this isn’t an argument about omnibenevolence in general (although I’d be happy to have that debate another time), but rather about the specific, testable claims of Jesus about what he/God would do in response to prayer.
Finally, this is not an argument from evil. The authors are not arguing against the existence of God because he was a big meanie-face and let some people *become* amputated; rather, they’re saying that since amputees exist, we can use them to construct an experiment to test the power of prayer.
October 28th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
In writing this post I tried to look “under the covers” of the WWGHA website. On its face it does seem to be a simple, elegant and very scientific experiment. I did not mean to ignore this aspect of the website. What I was trying to get at is the intrinsically non-sensical premise of appendage regeneration. As you said yourself, limbs do not grow back in humans. Making a request for something which, on many levels, does not have a valid answer is equivalent to asking for a stone that God cannot lift. Hence the equation to the omnipotence paradox, and my annoyance with the website.
The site also seems to mix in the problem of a good God allowing humans to suffer (Rationalization #6) and an omnipotent God who is unable to restore an amputated leg (Rationalization #10). In short, I think that the site tries to gloss over a lot of issues in an attempt to simplify the situation. As C.S. Lewis aptly said, “Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…”
As much as I love science, it cannot be used to prove / validate everything that exists. A beautiful painting or musical composition cannot be proven to be scientifically beautiful. To be fair cognitive science and evolutionary psychology are attempting to understand why a particular culture or individual would label something beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, but it cannot assign or deterministically prove a thing is beautiful. Still I, and millions of other people, will tell you that Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” is beautiful. I am not advocating the abandoning of science when speaking of religion, but instead requesting its judicious use.
On a related note, this blog is definitely intended to be my personal soap-box, but it simultaneously and equally not intended to force my opinions on other people. Rather it is intended to give me a place to rationally defend my positions on different issues, encourage worthwhile dialog about meaningful issues, and make the occasional digital belch (everyone has some indigestion now and then).
Thanks for the comments - I appreciate them!
October 28th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
From the Life of an “Amputee”:
When I read “Why God Won’t Heal the Amputee?” all I could think of was a quote from John Sittser’s A Grace Disguised:
“But there is a different kind of loss that inevitably occurs in all of our lives, though less frequently and certainly less predictably. This kind of loss has more devastating results, and it is irreversible. Such loss includes terminal illness, disability, rape, emotional abuse, physical and sexual abuse, chronic unemployment, crushing disappointment, mental illness, and ultimately death. If normal, natural, reversible loss is like a broken limb, then catastrophic loss is like an amputation. The results are permanent, the impact incalculable, the consequences cumulative. Each new day forces one to face some new and devastating dimension of the loss. It creates a whole new context for one’s life.”
Metophorically speaking, I am an apumutee. My sister is gone and never coming back. I have experienced a loss that is not curable, a pain numbed because there is nothing to heal it. There is no bandage that can stop the bleeding, there isn’t even bleeding anymore, it’s just scar tissue, a mass of scar tissue trying to heal a piece of myself that has been torn away from my own flesh and bones.
We forget sometimes that amputees will from time to time imagine that they have a leg, that what was once theirs is theirs again. That they can walk, run, dance, celebrate and do everything with that leg that they did before. They imagine it’s real again. But it’s not.
I am and will always be an amputee. Can God heal me?
Prayers were very powerful for me during the time my sister went missing. I would say that most likely there were sorces of evil and sorces of good that revolved around prayers at this time. The spiritual world is very powerful.
Obviously we prayed and hoped that my sister would be okay, that she would come wandering out of the woods and that she would wonder what the big deal was. Why everyone looking for her and that sort of thing.
We also prayed for answers.
And the answers came, we were blessed by answers. Not necessarily the answers we wanted to hear, but we had answers.
One good friend of my sister thought that he could pray to bring her back, the amputee’s prayer. He had heard of stories that a man in this day and age had come back to life from death after believer’s prayers. He really believed he could bring her back, but he had a sudden and devastating realization that he couldn’t. He felt so strongly that God would bring her back that he didn’t understand why God didn’t answer his prayers. But he realized that maybe his motives were wrong, that instead of the plan he had predicted, that maybe God had a better plan for her in death than He did for her in life.
And he was right. Her death, her amputation, brought many people to God through prayer. People prayed. And I don’t mean just Christians prayed, I mean people prayed, whether or not they had ever talked to God before that time.
So we are back to prayer, the power of prayer and the wonder if God can heal me, the amputee?
I believe that He can heal me through prayer. I experienced an overwhelming amount of healing the first year after her death. And I know it was all with the power of God’s praying people. Even if I didn’t pray, other’s did and God put a shield of protection around me, scar tissue, to help heal the bleeding.
I can’t pray to have my sister back. I can imagine that she’s there. But she will never exist. In this life, I will always be an amputee.
I can pray that I will see her again. And Christian touched on that place called Heaven. I can pray that God will help me to live in such away that I may see His face someday, and also the face of my sister.
That is all I can do as an amputee. Otherwise there is no hope in this life, and for me no hope is not enough.
As for the website, I agree with Jeremy, about the argument being a pile of nothing. I don’t necessarily think that the author was “deeply hurt by a conservative religious up-bringing or extremely bitter from past experience(s) with “fundy religious nut-bags” ” because that seems just a little too deep. Could be, but I think the author just wanted to talk and use the Bible as a platform to make a useless point.
But regardless of that, it made for an interesting discussion, one on which I might have made far too many comments that had to do much more with me and my life situation than anything pertaining to the arguements. Thanks for listening.
October 29th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Why is it nonsensical to think that “God” should be able to regenerate an amputated limb? After all, he allegedly intelligently designed the human body, so what would be so difficult about swapping out one broken part?
We’re not asking for a logically-inconsistent paradox to occur, just a basic human-body health problem to be resolved according to the clear promises of Scripture.
Furthermore, the Bible says that strong faith (i.e. in God’s power) can move mountains, so causing an arm to re-grow should be child’s play by comparison. Imagine the impact upon the non-Christians of the world if prayer to the Christian “God” actually worked the way that Jesus promised it would - all these amputee healings would cause “en masse” conversions to your faith. (According to the Bible, obvious supernatural demonstrations were given all the time - the ten plagues, the Red Sea, Jesus’ miracles, etc. It’s quite convenient that these miracles no longer occur in the age of science, reason, and YouTube…)
We can debate the finer points of this until we’re blue in the face and achy in the carpal tunnels, but I posit that the bottom line is always going to be that the observable behavior of “God” clearly contradicts the promises made in the Bible.
According to the Bible, Jesus did not promise that “you shall receive whatever you ask for in prayer, so long as you ask in my name, and according to my plan, and what you ask for isn’t too strange, and I happen to feel like using my magic voodoo that day”.
Don’t get me wrong — I completely agree with you that the idea of an almighty God acting as a cosmic bubble-gum machine is ridiculous. That being said, I just think that Scripture should be held accountable for its failure to describe reality accurately.
Regarding your paragraph on the soapbox issue, I’m having trouble (boo Monday morning, pre-coffee) reading between the lines. If you are asking me to back off in my criticisms, at least within the scope of your blog, I would be glad to honor the request.
October 29th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
There was nothing intentionally placed between the lines in my soapbox statement
A blog which functions as my soapbox will necessarily need supporters, critics, nay-sayers, and fanboi (that’s “fan-bwah” in the pejorative sense, i.e. one who drinks my kool-aid). A world (and blog) full of myself would be boring.
It seems valuable both in the public record sense, and in the fair-and-balanced argument sense to have many sides of an issue present.
November 2nd, 2007 at 11:21 pm
that’s funny. at first glance, i thought that site was not clever at all but rather snide, hypothetical, and thoroughly unintelligent.
November 3rd, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Hmmmm. After thinking for a few days, I still fail to see the difference between these two questions:
1. Please God, replace the [arm|leg] of this amputee. You created and designed the human body, surely you can replace this loss - it’s simple, down-to-earth science.
2. Please God, create a ball of earth in my backyard so dense that not even you yourself can lift it. You created dirt and designed the laws of physics, surely you can compact the molecules that tight - it’s simple, down-to-earth science.
The old adage about there being no such thing as a dumb question is completely wrong. Neither of these questions really deserves an answer.
November 6th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
I fail to see how you can fail to see the difference.
Question 1 asks for something that is clearly in the realm of plausibility. There’s no logical contradiction in attaching a spare part to a broken machine.
Question 2 asks for something which is clearly a logical impossibility.
If you aren’t willing to confront the implications of the amputee question, feel free to substitute any conceivable prayer request in which “God” can’t hide behind coincidence.
The point of all this is that in light of clearly-observable evidence, it is (IMHO) impossible to defend the unambiguous promises of Jesus regarding the efficacy of prayer.
November 6th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Maybe in another post I will detail the story of Amanda’s sister Darcy. She was healed from a wheat gluten allergy by friends praying over her. I witnessed the change (she consumed huge amounts of pasta the next time she came over), but I can also put you in contact with several people who were with her when she was healed.
Perhaps the clearly-observable evidence you seek has been out of reach because you have been asking the wrong people
November 20th, 2007 at 7:58 am
So wait… the WWGHA people want God to spontaneously regenerate a limb (an event outside of the bounds of normal, observable phenomena) due to prayer? Wha- er… huh? I guess I haven’t read the site closely enough. That’s not elegantly crafted, it’s completely trite. Miracles are claimed to be super-natural, not paranormal. Being supernatural means that there’s something vaguely natural about the way in which they happen, such that a clear line to either the divine hand or to natural phenomenon can’t be drawn. Superimposing a limb on a stump wouldn’t be supernatural, though, because that clearly never happens; it would be paranormal. You might as well as why God doesn’t answer prayers to put eyes in the back of your head so tigers can’t sneak up on you if you live in the jungle.
Amanda, I so appreciated your comments in this thread. A splendid rejoinder and commentary on the entire argument.
November 20th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
1. This is yet another excuse. Scripture doesn’t say “anything you ask in my name, so long as it’s not in-your-face obvious”. Why is it so difficult to accept that this part of Scripture is clearly BS? From our discussions, I think it’s fair to say that you both (Jeremy and Christian) hold Genesis 1 to be nonsense, so why not this passage as well?
2. If you’re going to write off regeneration of an amputated limb as paranormal — too far outside the realm of normalcy to be reasonably expected to happen — then how do you explain pillars of fire in the sky, talking burning bushes, women spontaneously turning into salt, rivers turning to blood, frogs falling from the sky, parting of seas, walking on water, and, best of all, dead people coming back to life? It’s entirely fair to say that those things clearly never happen and would be paranormal, yet they are a part of your Scripture.
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Hardly nonsense. The Creation narrative in Genesis 1 and 2 is a foundational part of Scripture. You’re not reading it in an absolutely literal sense with not accepting it at all. Scripture is a narrative document full of all sorts of literature and genre. Hyperbole, drama, apocalypticism, romance — they’re all in there. There’s no more to explain the extraordinary parts of Scripture than any other narrative. Scripture is not, and has never been read by the Church as, a straight, chronological history. There has always been a hermeneutical method to reading Scripture (”for all its worth,” as one of my professors called it) that’s vitally important for understanding the work as a whole.
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:54 pm
That second sentence should read, “You’re _confusing_ not reading it in an absolutely literal sense with not accepting it at all.”
November 26th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Let’s dig into this a bit. Do you believe that Adam and Eve existed? If so, how do you square that with modern science? If not, how do you square that with the original sin / redemption narrative that forms the bedrock of Christianity?
If a talking snake didn’t convince a naked lady to eat some bad-voodoo fruit, how is it that we are all infected with her sin and therefore (somehow) deserve to be burned alive for all “eternity”?
The Bible is supposed to be the Word of God. Why should it be necessary for humans to come up with “a hermeneutical method” to figure out what an omni-everything God actually meant? Why isn’t the Bible the most straightforward, concise, precise, insightful book ever written? Why must theologians and other apologists construct a complex framework of rationalizations to deal with every question?
As much as I hate what the fundies are doing to our country, I have to give them credit for actually sticking to the text of their holy book. We can agree that their attitude (”The Bible says it happened in six days, so that’s what happened! Lalalalalala I can’t hear you.”) is mind-blowingly irrational, but you must concede that it is based upon simple, non-convoluted devotion to the Bible.
By contrast, I really can’t respect the way that liberal Christianity handles logical challenges. Any reason-based comments (e.g., but not limited to, science vs. Genesis and the false promises regarding prayer) are met with rationalizations: oh, that part isn’t literal, it’s metaphorical, you’re not interpreting it hermeneuticatastically, you need to understand the context of the culture, our minds are too limited, you need to be aligned with God’s plan, God works in mysterious ways, thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test, ask God when you get to heaven, blah blah, blah blah, freaking-A blah blah!
I have a lot of respect for both of you — you’re intelligent, educated, successful professional guys. I simply cannot figure out why you’re still clinging to a Bronze Age belief system designed to frighten and control primitive, superstitious people.
Regarding the original topic of prayer, I should have passed along this link before:
http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/prayer.html