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Better men than myself have gone up against the edifice of materialist science, spent whole careers showing strong effects and getting nowhere, like Rupert Sheldrake and plenty of others. I don't trust the scientific apparatus to test things like prayer in a valid way, and the replication crisis, Covid, and other issues, to my mind, have born out that skepticism.
I'll also leave a link to this article on angels and demons I quoted below.
If faith healing actually worked it would be easy to prove. That you would shy away from it confirms the weakness of your position.
Some religious people will even say things like god won’t respond to tests or took back the holy relic because otherwise we wouldn’t need faith.
Whining about the replication crisis getting in the way of proving the Power of God is such a funny cope that is classic Motte.
If religion were so potent then heretics like me should be getting blown out of the water with evidence and/or burned by heavenly fire, like back in the biblical days.
Easier or harder than proving that masks were effective at reducing the spread of COVID?
I say this as someone who does not believe in faith healing, and who enjoys a prior that any claim of miraculous healing is almost certainly false.
Wait aren't you a Christian? I am new to this whole thing but I figured most Christians believed in some forms of faith healing.
Maybe I've got your faith wrong though, if so, apologies.
Hell, I believed in faith healing as a Buddhist from reading so many accounts of yogis and other wise men healing others.
My understanding of "Faith Healing" is people claiming they can heal the sick or injured miraculously. I've seen a lot of people claim to be able to do that, and all the ones I've seen have been frauds. My understanding of miracles is that God used them in specific times for specific reasons, and those reasons no longer obtain. I'm open to being proven wrong, but I don't expect it anytime soon.
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If your god can’t outperform masks what’s the point.
The medical interventions done in the Bible are not subtle.
Neither is the food replication.
But nowadays it’s just so hard to find a real miracle.
You are asking for the supernatural to be proven under a naturalist framework. I am asking you to demonstrate that the natural can be proven under a naturalist framework. This does not seem to be an unreasonable request to me.
And again, this is not an endorsement of supernatural claims. If someone tells me they have done or seen a miracle, I assume that they are mistaken or lying for what seems to me to be very solid reasons. What I am arguing against, what I will always argue against, is the idea that beliefs are a deterministic product of evidence. They are generally not, and ironically this belief is one of the few which can actually be proven pretty solidly with strong evidence, only it doesn't matter because beliefs are not formed by proof.
I don’t know what you mean by “demonstrate that the natural can be proven under a naturalist framework” when I’m asking for evidence of the mere existence of some claimed phenomenon. “Supernatural vs. natural” is a red herring because the claim is that there is an effect on the material world. Calling “can I see evidence of it” a “naturalist framework” is not even wrong. It’s just common sense to not merely take someone’s word for it.
We have used science to discover tiny things and invisible forces by extending our powers of observation. We’ve had theories make predictions that we can later observe to be true as technology improved. We may not have a full understanding of say quantum physics, but we have experiments that allow us to observe the effects.
If the supernatural touches the natural, we should be able to observe evidence of the interaction. Holy books are full of accounts of such interactions. People today often claim such interactions happen.
And yet, we just can’t quite seem to get good evidence such things happen.
I’m not sure if I’m parsing the meaning of your last paragraph correctly, but if it’s something along the lines of “people don’t form their beliefs logically” then, logically, I can’t change your mind. Obviously, humans are not consistently rational in their epistemology. Religious beliefs are sacred/anchor beliefs married to trapped priors and most people are immune to contradictory evidence. But not all.
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Faith healing would only be easy to prove if it wasn't a miracle: as in, if it was a natural process that repeats itself given the necessary conditions. But nobody claims it's that: the claim is that God directly intervenes. Think about what would happen if you tried to test it: you watch as a faith healer prays to God to heal someone. If nothing happens the faith healer can always say that God chose not to heal her: and if she gets better, the skeptic can always say that she would have gotten better anyway! There are countless testimonies of miraculous healing out there. Even journal articles backed by medical evidence: but the skeptic can always say that something else must have caused it.
If God's interventions can be predicted to happen even slightly more often in some conditions than others, then we would be able to derive those conditions, isolate them, replicate them and see if there really is an intelligence behind those events that resists being tested. If it doesn't resist being tested, cool, more reliable miracle healings for us. One might wonder, of course, if perfectly predictable faith healings are "interventions", rather than being as much mundane facts of the world as things falling down.
If God intervenes completely randomly or in a way that's indistinguishable from being random, then we again run into the "why call it God" question.
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The classic response here is “why does god hate amputees?”
“Miracle” is a red herring. Can an actual effect be observed even if the mechanism isn’t understood?
If a claimed effect can’t ever be separated out from other causes then it sounds made up.
“Testimonies” of a phenomenon are a starting point for investigation, not strong evidence by themselves. The paper you linked to is about one lady.
If the power of god via the laying on of hands or prayer is so unreliable that it can’t be distinguished from other causes then that’s normally something we would judge to be made up. Faith healers will go on TV and touch people but no one’s showing studies over time where say, inexplicably, those people have a 35% better chance of outcomes relative to average. Or say Christian hospitals consistently outperforming secular ones. Or Muslim surgeons outperforming secular ones.
Robust studies showing consistent effects would signal there was something going on, even if we couldn’t directly detect the mechanism.
If the power was real and as effective as adherents claim the evidence would not be so shy about being observed. Biblically, the power of god gets demonstrated quite strongly but we can’t seem to get that to happen nowadays. The simplest explanation consistent with human behavior and the laws of physics is that it was just made up.
“I do a wishful thinking and sometimes magic happens that can’t be measured/observed by others” is not a strong approach to reality regardless of whether it’s associated with religion or not.
The user above you cited a specific “miracle,” restoration of eyesight, and you cited a lack of a different category of miracle, regrowth of a removed limb. You wouldn’t claim Viagra doesn’t work because boners could have other causes but it doesn’t make bald people grow hair.
Even disregarding the categorical error, there’s another point to be made. Instead of claiming your null result negates and dismisses the documentation of a positive result as a single anecdote instead of data, come up with a different falsifiable hypothesis rather than jumping to the null hypothesis. If there is a fully material way to restore macular degeneration, the world needs to know it to relieve much suffering.
It seems that in the cited restoration of sight, the person knew they were being prayed for. We also know that yogis can perform incredible feats of biofeedback manipulation through meditative states and/or self-hypnosis. The accounts of Jesus at least once have Him saying, “Go, your faith has healed you.” Perhaps there is a method of hypnosis which can cure certain types of blindness. Come up with an experiment to falsify that hypothesis, changing no factors from the cited anecdote.
It’s not a categorical error to:
The null hypothesis is that lots of health outcomes happen for reasons we don’t understand the murky details of, because the human body is simultaneously wondrous and a dumpster fire, and there’s no reason to go claiming miracles from god when a positive outcome happens. That’s just picking hits and ignoring misses.
If faith healing happened commonly, as many claim it does, then there ought to be a way to show that systematically. Not one offs.
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