Dr. Craig is a liar.

[Huggy Bear]

Nice explanation attempt but as the article I posted states "Scientists recognize that there are placebo effects but have trouble accounting for them.". would you mind posting your source that contradicts that statement?

You're talking about the dude's opinion piece in Psychology Today, the magazine?

The dude? You don't think that's just a little disrespectful?

Hailing from Ireland, Nigel Barber received his Ph.D. in Biopsychology from Hunter College, CUNY, and taught psychology at Bemidji State University and Birmingham Southern College.

Okay. I'll just skip around the fact that the dude offered no hard science, only the vague statement "have trouble accounting for them" (I'll get to that in a minute) and a couple of anecdotes, for his claim. I would agree with him that science "has trouble accounting for" faith healing.

What does it mean to "account for" something, in science? It means you propose a suspected mechanism, you eliminate all the variables which may contaminate your results, and you run a control group and an experimental group in order to test your hypothesis.

How would one do that, exactly, with "faith healing"? However, they are trying to nail down a definition of both, and to study the phenomenon. I'll give you a hint: no one is thinking that faith-healing is magical.

Here's a scientific article, with references, from the National Institutes of Health, if you want to have a fuller explanation of what exactly we do know, don't know, and why your Psychology Today sound-bite and your/his bizarre conclusions from it are worthless.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2814126/

Also your article offers no explanations either hence why it refers to the placebo effect as a "phenomenon".