Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?

In keeping with Gene’s recent theme on Triablogue about reasons why we’re not Arminians, I’m going to add another one. I was looking at YouTube today (it was Saint & Sinner’s fault for providing the link to the Machine Video) and happened to stumble upon Ten Questions That Every Intelligent Christian Must Answer. It was put forth by http://whywontgodhealamputees.com. After the philosophical naivety that led off the video wherein we are told how wonderful our college education is and how it enables us all to think wonderfully (I really must wonder what this guy would do if he ran into a nihilist, let alone an empirical skeptic), we finally get to the questions which are, indeed, rather devastating.

If you’re an Arminian.

But for Calvinists there’s not a single problem with any of the questions posed by the video. In fact, the basic gist of the argument can be defused by one simple point: sin is real.

Arminians do understand this to some extent (thankfully), but it does take a Calvinist to understand just how bad sin is. We have this built in with the doctrine of Total Depravity. Sin is serious, and as a result a sinful world gets what a sinful world deserves.

Despite the fact that atheists will use it as an excuse that I’m avoiding the other “hard” questions, I’m only going to look at the main question, as found here. Why won’t God heal amputees?

The claim is made:

Does God answer prayers? According to believers, the answer is certainly yes.

For example, at any Christian bookstore you can find hundreds of books about the power of prayer. On the Internet you can find thousands of testimonials to the many ways that God works in our lives today. Even large city newspapers and national magazines run stories about answered prayers. God seems to be interacting with our world and answering millions of prayers on planet Earth every day.

It is indeed true that God answers prayers. However, I must point out from the start that most of the claims of answered prayers in the world are not true. That’s right, all those Internet testimonials and national news magazines…Christians shouldn’t put any more stock in them than atheists do.

In fact, God most certainly does not seem to be “interacting with our world and answering millions of prayers on planet Earth every day.” And logically no Christian should assume this is the case. After all, God has never promised to answer the prayers of the non-believer.

And this brings up another point. In the video, the last question asked was “Why do Christians divorce at the same rate as non-Christians?” The answer to this question is relevant here: they don’t. Instead, what you have is professed Christians divorcing at the same rate as non-professing Christians. If you instead correlate the divorce rate to how mature a Christian is in his or her faith (as evidenced by Church attendance, reading of the Bible, etc.) the divorce rate is far less. But given the fact that every American is de facto a Christian, this will automatically skew the data since everyone is a “Christian” even when they only attended Church once in 6th grade.

So already we see the question is posited on a false understanding of why God would answer prayers in the first place. The site continues, giving the example of Jeanna Giese, the first (known) person ever to recover from rabies without a vaccine. We’re told:

According to the article, a global prayer circle helped Jeanna survive. Once she got sick, Jeanna’s father called friends and asked them to pray for Jeanna. People around the world heard about her story through the press and by word of mouth. They prayed. They sent emails. They passed the word along. Millions of people heard about Jeanna’s plight and they said prayers for her.

And the prayer circle worked. Through the power of God, Jeanna recovered. Jeanna was the first human to survive rabies without the vaccine.

Of course, the “global prayer circle” didn’t work. Whether God was active in healing Jeanna or not is irrelevant to the number of people who were praying for her. God either did or did not heal Jeanna for His own purposes, which He is under no obligation to inform us about.

Now I do not blame the atheists for thinking that Christians believe the above. If I went by the tripe that was published in the Christian book stores and by those same articles on the Internet I’d come to the same conclusion that this is what Christians believe. Thankfully, however, I get my prayer theology from the Bible and not from Family Christian Bookstore. As a result, the proposed experiment that Why Won’t God Heal Amputees? proposes doesn’t phase me. The experiment is this:

For this experiment, we need to find a deserving person who has had both of his legs amputated. For example, find a sincere, devout veteran of the Iraqi war, or a person who was involved in a tragic automobile accident.

Now create a prayer circle like the one created for Jeanna Giese. The job of this prayer circle is simple: pray to God to restore the amputated legs of this deserving person. I do not mean to pray for a team of renowned surgeons to somehow graft the legs of a cadaver onto the soldier, nor for a team of renowned scientists to craft mechanical legs for him. Pray that God spontaneously and miraculously restores the soldier’s legs overnight, in the same way that God spontaneously and miraculously cured Jeanna Giese and Marilyn Hickey’s mother.

If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a single miracle for this one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch.

Now the first problem with this experiment is of course the fact that it is a logical fallacy to assume that because God does one thing one time that means that He must do the same thing another time. This is the same problem that we find in The Prayer of Jabez (just because God answered Jabez doesn’t mean He’ll answer you in the same way), so again the atheists can be excused for their misunderstanding. The experiment is flawed because it doesn’t treat God as an agent, but instead as a scientific law. That is, the experiment is predicated on the belief that God must be mechanistic and must respond to all prayers in the same way at the same time.

But think about people instead of laws. Suppose that you were told, “I e-mailed Bill Gates and asked for $100 and he gave it to me.” You say: “I don’t believe you. And I’ll prove you’re wrong by e-mailing Bill Gates and asking for $100 and showing he won’t give it to me.” You then e-mail Bill Gates and he does not give you $100. Does that prove Bill Gates did not give the other person $100?

Of course not. So the logic of the experiment is already flawed. But there is a deeper problem that Calvinists can immediately spot. The experiment is based on finding “a deserving person” for the healing. Now we’re dealing not only with groups of non-Christians whom God has never promised to answer, but we’re also dealing with a non-existent entity in a “deserving person.”

No one deserves healing from God. The fact of the matter is that the wages of sin is death, and part of death is the decay of our bodies in illness. A whole and complete body is not owed to anyone. God does not have to heal anyone at any time. If He does, it’s because of His mercy. But if He does not, He has not done any injustice. In fact, by simply using illnesses to slowly kill us, God is already acting mercifully by not instantly doling out justice. Instead, He is patient and slow, such that no one has an excuse for continuing in evil.

And it is this fact that healing is not owed to anyone wherein the atheist has made his largest mistake:

God has no reason to discriminate against amputees. If he is answering millions of other prayers like Jeanna’s every day, God should be answering the prayers of amputees too.

God should be answering the prayers of amputees too? Such language is grating on the nerves of the Calvinist!

So we see yet another reason why it’s a good thing to not be an Arminian.