After all, do we know why or what directs the healing process. Yes, we do know the process of healing, but not the why. Do you claim healing is a scientific law or something. How can you understand miracles if you are filled with assumptions. Some wounds heal and others don’t. Your simplistic approach to healing will keep you from learning about the subject.
I know, healing just happens, right. We take it for granted like so much of our life. Our faith is extensive, yet we are not aware. I would write more, but why?
Fist Aid techniques have been thoroughly tested over time. We know how to make a lump go away and what will make a wound stop bleeding. The things the woman did in the story, not the praying part the other things, will bring about the outcome that happened.
As to the healing process, we know quite a bit about it and the why is that all living things strive to stay alive. So much so that our bodies have evolved natural healing processes to do that. It’s not a huge mystery. Saying God did it is by far more simplistic.
The real problem, to me, with assigning miracle status to this sort of event is that it makes God look bad.
Because guess what? Later, when that boy is shot and the mom prays and rubs a cloth on him and he doesn’t pull though, what will be the conclusion. Actually the mom will probably blame herself. That she didn’t pray hard enough or that she didn’t believe enough. But some people will see how God only heals minor scrapes and bruises. What? Is God Bactine now?
Which of course begs the question of what constitutes a miracle. If we use the word “miracle” to describe the quite ordinary things that happen to us on a day-to-day basis, then the word becomes meaningless.
I have asked myself this question since the trainwreck that was your NDE post.
Your ‘maybe all healing is miraculous’ is a silly statement. It stretches the definition of miracle to the point where it is meaningless (we had the same debate over ‘art’ a month or so ago).
We DO understand the mechanisms behind healing. That’s why we understand how to assist the body’s own processes. If you are looking for some sort of philosophical underpinning to the phenomenon, feel free to pin it on ‘God,’ so long as you get your kids the medical assistance they need when they need it.
Reading the paper, it makes me feel lucky to be an atheist. Not because I feel superior to theists (I admit that there is a very real chance I could be wrong in my conclusions), but because the more devout you are, the more likely it is that something terrible will happen to you. It seems like ‘miracles’ tend to happen to really devout folks that have generally shitty lives- like finding an unbroken picture in the ruins of your house after a tornado has come through. Yay God.
