(September 4, 2012 at 7:07 pm)pocaracas Wrote:(September 4, 2012 at 5:23 pm)jacklegger Wrote: praying to God for healing from uterine cancer and having an apple-sized tumor "spontaneously disappear" overnight, confirmed by medical imaging by a non-religious physician (which happened to my mother, FWIW) is a basis for believing in God.It's amazing how god never ever is recorded history managed to grow arms and legs of people that prayed for it, but can switch your body to eliminate a foreign substance, as it's supposed to do. Our bodies kill defective cells every day, they just become out of hand when we lose that ability or the defect masks itself very well... Doctors don't understand well all the nuances in cancer... they just know statistics and try to group cancers in a way they can categorize them... but there's still so much to learn.
That's where the famous "god of the gaps" steps in. Doctors, the scientific experts in the field, are incapable of treating, but the problem gets fixed, hence god.
On the other hand, taking it from stimbo, why "hence god"?, why not "hence Gandalf"? or "hence allah", or "hence galadriel"?
Sorry, didn't read anything past this sentence...
Don't be silly. Of course God can't grow an amputated limb. That's something humans and nature can't do. Don't you see? We attribute to God things which happen naturally or which are done by doctors because God is a metaphor for goodness. When I narrowly miss getting knocked down by a lorry, I say "Thank God I'm safe" not because a God being saved me but it's just a figure of speech. To believe a God being like Superman swooping down to save me would be lunacy!
Of course not all Christians are enlightened and many are superstitious and sound a bit off but they'll get there in time.
