Dr. Craig is a liar.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

whether or not someone has a PhD matters not to me, but to you guys. Are you saying you'd accept the opinion of someone with less? I think not.

What I find interesting is that your were quick to give YOUR opinion on the mechanics of the placebo effect (despite how is works being unknown)while providing no references, yet when confront with the opinion of actual experts, you dismiss THEM out of hand, pretty hypocritical don't you think?

And I quote:

The Placebo Effect is what happens when a person thinks they're getting medicine, but in reality nothing is happening.

However, due to their brain's reaction to the "good news" of the cure they're getting, they produce fewer stress hormones and their immune system's reaction improves. They are thus "cured" (or improved) by absolutely nothing other than their own natural processes.

No, I summarized most of what I've read from the papers demonstrating the consensus ideas about how this works; for additional guidance, I linked you to the most definitive source of scientific information on that topic I could think of, the NIH's excellent database. What would be hypocritical would be to keep demanding references after a literal database of such references was just provided to you. That paper from the NIH contains quite literally hundreds of references, in a pages-long article, giving the most-full definition I could imagine outside of a technical journal for professionals in the field!

What I did not provide was a single Authority Figure, telling us "how it is", and it is to that, not to the presence (or absence) of a PhD, to which I objected. And continue to object. Your failure to figure out the difference is not my fault or my problem.

So because YOU don't understand how something works it must be magic? Even the bible doesn't attribute faith to "magic":

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. - Hebrews 11:1

What that scripture is saying, is that there are things at work which you cannot see, that is to say not readily apparent to the 5 senses.

Just because you can't see, taste, smell, hear, or feel something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, the senses are just tools to enable you to contact the physical world around you. Interesting enough even the world around you which you perceive as solid is 99.999999999999% empty space, and that the worlds population could be condensed into the size of a sugar cube if you removed all the empty space?

What if by chance that just maybe that space isn't so empty and that things exist (whether in a different dimension on on a different frequency) that we just cannot detect?

One day you guys, just may realize that everything simply cannot be known

We don't claim to know everything. No one does or can, and likely no one ever will. But neither will we deny what we do know, nor will we accept as true assertions which have no basis in anything other than the human imagination. I believe that people who say "we don't know everything, so I can insert my own imagination in here" or "we don't know everything, so that means we know nothing" are detriments to society.

You can quibble over the definition of faith if you like, but you're still proposing magic. I'm sorry you don't like that term, but when you're talking about supernatural powers, especially ones that can be wielded by human thought (such as prayer), and especially ones that have measurable effects on this world, you're talking about magic.

Yer a wizard, Huggy.

Sugar-pill coating it (geddit?) doesn't change the Placebo Effect into a magical effect, and it certainly doesn't mean that faith is a real power, even if it is capable of inducing humans to a placebo-like effect. Well, except for the kind of power we mean in a song by Huey Lewis and the News, "That's the POWER OF LOOOVE!"