Help. Christan using Faith Healing as evidence for God.

[atheist-teen]

A Christan kid at my high school is saying that people get healed at his church of things like cancer, diabetes, people that are stuck in wheel chairs walking, and various other illnesses AKA faith healing. How do I show him this is not evidence for God?

[Gawen]

http://www.skepdic.com/faithhealing.html

[ablprop]

The Babel Fish Argument for the Non-Existence of God
by Douglas Adams
  The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
  Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
  The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
  "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
  "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

I know you're not supposed to cut and paste, but this is really the only way of answering faith healing as evidence argument. Or at least the funniest.

[Matt]

That's not an argument against faith healing being evidence for God. There's nothing in the Bible that says God must not allow himself to be proven to exist.

[Thumpalumpacus]

A Christan kid at my high school is saying that people get healed at his church of things like cancer, diabetes, people that are stuck in wheel chairs walking, and various other illnesses AKA faith healing. How do I show him this is not evidence for God?

Ask him how many amputees have had their limbs regrown.

[ablprop]

That's not an argument against faith healing being evidence for God. There's nothing in the Bible that says God must not allow himself to be proven to exist.

Plus the Babel fish doesn't actually exist. I'm just having fun with the irony of faith and evidence being used together. If faith healing really worked, it wouldn't be faith healing. Get it?

[Croaker]

I would say to him simply that if it were true, then his church is doing a great disservice to the world by not sharing their amazing gift. I imagine the news stories would be quite thrilling - this would end up all over the media and people the world over would come to be healed.

I remember this one kid from middle school, way back in the day - he said the same sort of thing about a church he visited in Denver, but actually went so far as to say that the pastor prayed over him and he grew an inch.

We were all amazed then, but no one bothered to actually compare his height from before and after. Myself, I just figured the kid had some insecurity issues about his height - he was shortest in the class by a good foot or so.

But man, if it was true... thank God he's making short kids taller, and not bothering helping out in Haiti! Praise the Lord!

[Thumpalumpacus]

But man, if it was true... thank God he's making short kids taller, and not bothering helping out in Haiti! Praise the Lord!

Well, that's because those pesky slaves had the temerity to rise up against their Christian masters a couple of hundred years ago.

[McQ]

I'm surprised no one has suggested this yet. Ask him to prove it. You wrote that this kid said that this happens at his church. Tell him to provide you with specific examples of actual people that he can point to as having been healed. He'll, go there and ask him to point out someone who was healed.

Names, dates, what medical condition they had (which would have to be verified by an actual physician), etc. You'll find very quickly that he will not be able to provide you with anything more than, "Well, people told me that people were healed.". He will not show you or give you one documented case of healing that can be proven to have been caused by faith healing.

Remember, anyone can claim anything. It's the evidence that counts.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Ask him how many amputees have had their limbs regrown.

In essence, that is what this is: a request for obvious, visible, incontrovertible proof.

[Asmodean]

Ask him how many amputees have had their limbs regrown.

In essence, that is what this is: a request for obvious, visible, incontrovertible proof.

Cancers, they can like... Go away. Maybe because of a misdiagnosis (False cancer-positive. Benign tumor) or for a number of rational, explainable reasons which have nothing to do with gods og any denomination. Endorphins can ease chronic aches. A peg leg though... Turning that into living flesh, now that would take some serious magic