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Debunking
the Arguments of Christian Fundamentalists and Evangelists
Argument # 11: The
miracles / answered prayers argument.
Some Christians like to tout
the widely reported occurrences of supernatural phenomenon such as miracles and
answered prayers give credence to their faith. There are countless
stories and testimonies (both published and unpublished) of people experiencing
miracles happen, faith healing, or answered prayers in such a convincing way
that it could only have been God or some force out there doing it. Many
of them are from people who are very honest and sincere too.
So do these stories, even if
true, count as evidence that Christianity is true? Well my answer
is yes and no. I will explain why later, but first of all, I’d like to
say that just as in the previous section, again Christians NEVER seem to
acknowledge the fact that miracles and answered prayers also happen in OTHER
RELIGIONS too! Yet they never count that as evidence for those other
religions. (Nice double standard) Instead, the only explanation they will
offer is that Satan and his demons used their supernatural powers to perform
miracles and answer prayers in other religions, because they aren’t of the true
God, so that’s the only explanation. Yeah right. Again, it’s a
copout to cheaply rationalize away what they don’t wish to acknowledge or
understand.
Now, let me deal with the
other side for a moment.
Analysis of the Atheist
explanation for miracles
The usual Atheist explanation
for miracles is that they either 1) don’t happen, or 2) are the result of spontaneous
remission, or the body’s ability to sometimes cure itself spontaneous of an
ailment. They feel that they are impossible because they defy everything
we know about science and anatomy.
This claim is based on an a
priori assumption that our known physical laws are all there is.
After all, the Atheist has no right to say what is and isn’t possible in this
area, and it would be very closed minded to reject out of hand something that
doesn’t fit into their world view. How would they know all that is
possible and impossible? Our natural laws are our interpretation of how
the universe works. These laws are subject to change as new discoveries
are made, which is how science has always been. Current scientific
principles only reflect the current knowledge that has been tested and
replicated, not all that is or can be. In fact, what is considered to be
miraculous or supernatural at first has often turned out to be natural once
it’s understood. Dean Radin elaborates on this
in his book The
Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic
Phenomena: (page 19)
“But
a few hundred years ago virtually all natural phenomena were thought to be manifestations
of supernatural agencies and spirits. Through years of systematic
investigation, many of these phenomena are now understood in quite ordinary
terms. Thus, it is entirely reasonable to expect that so-called miracles
are simply indicators of our present ignorance. Any such events may be
more properly labeled first as paranormal, then as normal once we have
developed an acceptable scientific explanation. As astronaut Edgar
Mitchell put it: “There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomena, only very
large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural, particularly regarding
relatively rare occurrences.””
History has shown that those
who use the word "impossible" are usually proven wrong one way or
another. Many things that were said to be impossible at one point were
later proved to be possible such as flight, travel into space, relativity,
quantum theory, etc. As Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the communications
satellite and author of 2001:
A Space Odyssey, states:
“When
a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is
almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he
is very probably wrong.”
-
Arthur C. Clarke's First Law
In either case, miracles do
happen. Many doctors and nurses can attest to this. The question
is, and skeptics like to point this out too, in how you define a miracle.
Skeptics will usually accept miracles such as the miracle of life and science,
or miracles due to flukes and rare chance occurrences such as spontaneous
remission, but not if they involve supernatural forces or divine
intervention. Several possible explanations of miracles are supernatural
forces, divine intervention, psychic abilities, unknown powers and healing
abilities of the mind, spontaneous remission of illness, chance, or natural
causes not yet understood. Whatever the case, the “miracles are impossible”
argument is illogical because miracles have happened already.
There is ample evidence of this both from anecdotals
and hard evidence from X-Rays of the affected region of the patient’s body that
were taken before and after the miracle.
In fact, according to a
Newsweek poll, described in the
One famous documented case of
a miracle is the case of Vittorio Michelli.
Michael Talbot in his book The
Holographic Universe describes the case:
“Perhaps
the most powerful types of beliefs of all are those we express through
spiritual faith. In
Over
the course of the next month he felt such an increasing sense of well-being he
insisted his doctors X-ray him again. They discovered his tumor was
smaller. They were so intrigued they documented every step in his
improvement. It was a good thing because after Michelli's
tumor disappeared, his bone began to regenerate, and the medical community
generally view this as an impossibility. Within two months he was up and
walking again, and over the course of the next several years his bone
completely reconstructed itself (see fig. 12).
A
dossier on Michelli's case was sent to the Vatican's
Medical Commission, an international panel of doctors set up to investigate
such matters, and after examining the evidence the commission decided Michelli had indeed experienced a miracle. As the
commission stated in its official report, "A remarkable reconstruction of
the iliac bone and cavity has taken place. The X rays made in 1964, 1965,
1968 and 1969 confirm categorically and without doubt that an unforeseen and
even overwhelming bone reconstruction has taken place of a type unknown in the
annals of world medicine." (O'Reagan, Special
Report, p. 9.)”
Some skeptics claim that
miraculous healings are due to flukes in the probability curve. Their
reasoning goes like this:
“Most
people who are seriously ill are prayed for or seek divine intervention.
The ones that don’t make it are considered tragedies and forgotten cases.
The few cases that result in a sudden complete recovery or go into spontaneous
remission are then noticed and attributed to prayer or divine
intervention. These cases of course, are the ones that get media
attention.”
However, this explanation is
a lot like saying that anything we don’t understand must be due to
chance. Sure spontaneous remission happens as well, even to those who are
Atheists and those that haven’t been prayed for. But even so, who’s to
say that spontaneous remission is solely the result of chance and luck?
The bottom line is that miracles do happen, that is a fact. How we
interpret them is the issue.
Analysis of the Atheist
explanation for answered prayers
Now, the explanation for answered
prayer given by Atheists, debunkers, and scientific materialists is the
psychological theory of selective memory and perception. It
basically means that prayers are answered by coincidences or events that would
have happened anyway, but the believer’s mind only remembers and focuses on the
prayers that were seemingly answered, while forgetting or ignoring the times
when prayers weren’t answered. While this theory may be true in some
cases, it does not explain every account of answered prayer. Just because
skeptics can’t see how a God could exist or how thought intentions could affect
external reality doesn’t mean that any claim of answered prayer is merely the
result of chance. There are several counter-arguments to this and
compelling evidence that prayer works as well. I will also give my own
theory on how prayer works.
1) First of all, we don't even know what a
coincidence really is or even if it really exists. It’s just a term to
define something that behaves unpredictably or doesn't behave according to a
pattern that we can see. According to physicist David Bohm,
there may be two kinds of order in the universe, implicit and explicit. (See
his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order) Things that appear
random may in fact contain a higher degree of order that we can't perceive.
2) Second, as I heard one preacher said “If
answered prayer is coincidence, then there sure are many more coincidences that
come up when I pray than when I don't pray.” For spiritual or religious
people, praying results in a higher rate of coincidences that help manifest the
desire or wish, often higher than by ordinary chance. Of course, there
are countless anecdotal accounts of prayer answered in miraculous or sometimes
humorous ways. As Theology Professor Greg Boyd of
“My
wife prayed that God would honor a "deal" with her about who she
would marry (this deal included her future husband saying a certain
particularly unusual phrase), and despite all my frustration with knowing she
had made such a deal, I said what was "included" in her deal with God
without ever actually knowing what the phrase was, not only that, it was the
last thing I said to her, several times, immediately before I distinctly felt
God leading me to propose to her.”
“The
phrase was "It's good to be alive." This seems like a fairly unusual
thing to say since it is so obvious at one level. Anyway, it is not something
that I would be likely to say on an average day. On the day of our
"engagement" I said it several times at just the right moment (during
a prayer about our relationship) and actually the prayer (we were praying
together) immediately followed a longish conversation about why I didn't
believe in engagement periods at all. It seems God has quite a sense of humor
at times.”
Amazingly,
there are those who get almost every prayer answered because their motives come
from a pure heart that is in tune with the values of their faith. What
this means is that Christian prayers seem to get answered a lot more when they
ask for things that a Christian is supposed to want. Same with prayers
from those of other religions. This has been the case in my own
experience as well. When I was a devout Christian at 14, I was the only
Christian in my family and had no one else to share my faith with or go to
church with. I felt lonely and incomplete about this. So one night
I prayed and asked God to send me some Christian friends. Two nights
later, I got a call from an old friend that I hadn’t spoken to in over a
year. He’s not the type of person to make phone calls either, so neither
of us knew why he just decided to call me. After talking a few times, we
got to the subject of church and religion. We were surprised to find out
that we were both devout Christians! When I explained to him that I had
no Christian friends or church to go to, he warmly invited me to an outing with
his Church Youth Group which he attended on a regular basis. That Friday
night, we went to his Youth Group for an all night outing. We went
haystack riding, played miniature golf, cherades, Pictionary, kick-the-can and had a lot of fun. I
liked the people in his Youth Group, they were sincere and didn’t have
attitudes or pre-judgments. I felt very comfortable around them.
From that point on, I started attending the Youth Group regularly. Now a
skeptic could argue that the friend called me out of coincidence, but I don’t
buy that because it was strange how this friend I hadn’t talked to in over a
year suddenly out of nowhere kept calling me a few times. Not even he
knew why he did that. Yet it led to my prayer for Christian fellowship
being answered.
3) Third, based on conversations with some
Christian friends of mine, I have found that God doesn’t just answer prayer
through coincidences. There is a more amazing type of answered
prayer. Often, as in my own case above, a prayer is answered with the
help of other people who themselves don’t know why they are doing what they’re
doing. (as if they’re hypnotized) Nick, a Christian friend of mine,
related to me a fascinating faith-transforming account in his life. After
turning away from his Christian faith for years, one day his fishing boat went
down in deep waters and nothing he and professional divers did could get it
out. After months of failed attempts, he and the divers gave up.
Then a friend of his told him “You will get your boat back. God will see
to it.” Soon after, some stranger called Nick and offered to help raise
his boat for free. This guy said that he heard that Nick needed help and
went to great lengths to find Nick’s phone number to contact him. As we
all know, strangers don’t tend to go to great lengths to find you just to help
you out for free and for no reason! That does not seem like an ordinary
coincidence. This stranger even offered to pay all the expenses of
lifting the boat out! (I’ve heard of random acts of kindness, but this is
phenomenal!) It turns out that he barely got it out and it almost sank
again after it was lifted, but the rescuer saved it just in time. The
next day, a short story about his boat (the boat’s name was mentioned in the
headline) being “resurrected” from the sea appeared at the top of the front
page headline, even above the story of Pope John Paul’s arrival in town!
Astonished, Nick called the newspaper to find out how his trivial story
appeared on the front page headline since it was not a significant event to the
public. However, no one there seemed to know why it was there or how it
got there. (Very strange!) This served was such a powerful sign from God
and testament of faith to Nick, that from then on he led a faith-based life in
God. Many other Christians have personal accounts of answered prayer
similar to this of course. It would seem that God somehow hypnotizes
people (for lack of a better word) into answering someone else’s prayer, since
these people don’t know themselves why they’re doing something that results in
another’s answered prayer. But this happens nevertheless, and my own
example in the above paragraph attests to this as well.
4) Fourth, recent studies on prayer done by
“In
a feasibility study conducted by the
While
we don’t know for sure whether God himself is answering these prayers, or if
they are being answered by the psychic abilities of those praying, the bottom
line is that prayer does seem to work in ways that ordinary coincidences can’t
explain.
5) Fifth, In my experience with prayers, it
seems that prayers from a selfish nature tend to get answered less than when
they come from a desire for what is right and best for all. One
metaphysical explanation for this that I’ve heard is that when desires come
from an altruistic motive, they reach the energy from higher astral planes or
levels of consciousness. These higher planes are supposedly where more
advanced spiritual beings reside, including Gods, Jesus, Buddha, etc.
Perhaps prayers of a selfish nature cause a separation from you and your higher
self that is attuned to the higher planes. This inner separation leads
you to down the path of ego and illusion rather than unification and
wholeness. After all, a divided kingdom falls, even if it’s an inner
kingdom. This theory is subjective and can't be proven scientifically at
this point, but it's one possibility to consider which would explain why purer
altruistic motives for prayer tend to result in a higher rate of success.
My own theory on how and
why prayer works
Now, you may be wondering how
prayers and miracles could be real supernatural phenomena, yet the religions
behind them not be true. How could you harmonize that? Well there are
other explanations that theoretically harmonize them.
I have a theory which I call metaphysical
societies. A Canadian colleague I had in
Here is how it goes. As
we all know, in New Age quantum theory, "thought creates reality" in
a universal sense, even though in our dimension, this principle is reflected
much more weakly and slowly than in other dimensions. Therefore, when a
group of people gather for a single purpose, they create a certain energy field
between them that makes their power stronger. And that's especially true
with organized religion. And in Christianity's case, with a billion
followers, that energy field would be very powerful indeed. Therefore,
when one is indoctrinated into Christianity, he/she also becomes part of this
massive group energy field, and is governed by its principles, values and
beliefs. As a result, when that person lives according to the values of
this energy field, that energy field works to help that person in many ways,
including answering its prayers. That is why, when I was a Christian, I
found that when I prayed for things that I was SUPPOSED to pray for, that a
good Christian should want and desire, it had a very high probability of
manifesting and coming true, smoothly and easily. However, when I prayed
and asked for things of a purely selfish nature, it had a very low probability
of manifesting. I noticed this pattern. And when prayers came true,
whether for me or others, it would obviously not be ordinary day to day
coincidences or selective perception and memory, because the answered prayers
would come about my seemingly impossible odds of things that never happen, all
SYNCHRONIZED to manifest the result. Sometimes, in manifesting the
prayer, people would be involved who did odd things and later claimed that they
had no idea why they even did it, but what they did brought about the answered
prayer. These kind of things tell anyone that it was a real answered
prayer, and not coincidence or selective memory.
This same "metaphysical
society" effect happens in other religions as well, since people in other
religions get prayers answered as well, as long as they are in accordance with
the values of their metaphysical society. I have even heard that with Wiccans, when they make a pledge to a goddess and then
break it without asking permission of that goddess, they often reap bad or
disastrous consequences, until they go back and ask permission of the goddess
to leave. Perhaps, these goddess that Wiccans
pledge to are also metaphysically created, either in some other dimension or
the mind of the believers, so that they do exist in a metaphysical sense,
having power and influence in our lives, physical world and dimension.
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