My wife was asthmatic, then she wen to a healing retreat, aka, doctor, who performed acupuncture on her.... she still says she's asthmatic, but hasn't had any sort of attack for over 15 years.
There's an actual physical malady that got "cured" in a non-orthodox manner which worked.
Many physical maladies can be cured by the power of wishful thinking, the power of positive thinking, the power of laughter. Is that proof of god's existence? I don't think so.
Prayer can boost one of these powers and, through the well known placebo effect, heal someone.... Of course, no arms were ever regrown in this manner, no kidneys, no livers, no legs, no lungs.... at most, you get some cancer remissing against the odds... Odds are a funny thing. there's a statistics theorem that states that for a large enough population, you can approximate any distribution to a gaussian. A gaussian looks like this:
![[Image: images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR3LV6klFOFsBZ7YLe6nqw...hLhmqPVNSy]](https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR3LV6klFOFsBZ7YLe6nqwhn37Cf-pFnbq_XfngaJhLhmqPVNSy)
The center μ is the average, or the most expected outcome of this distribution.
Then, you have the tails... these go to zero on infinity. Anything more than 3σ away from μ is considered highly unlikely.... it's only 0.2% of the population. 0.2%, almost nothing, right? When normal doctors provide you with a diagnosis, they rely on this 3σ: most ~99.8% of patients have outcome X. That doesn't mean that the remaining 0.2% are god's domain. It just means doctors can't explain it, because it's not the norm.
Transistors in your computer work on some rather unlikely events, like quantum mechanic's tunneling effect. It has a well defined probability, although unlikely, but works every single time, because it relies on many many electrons being present (you know Avogadro's number, right? ~10^24), and only the few unlikely ones actually getting past the gate.
Now, for something else on the tail of the distribution: there are people who are born naturally HIV resistant... wouldn't it be great if we could harness this ability and spread it for all? People are working on it.... and they don't assume "goddidit".
There's an actual physical malady that got "cured" in a non-orthodox manner which worked.
Many physical maladies can be cured by the power of wishful thinking, the power of positive thinking, the power of laughter. Is that proof of god's existence? I don't think so.
Prayer can boost one of these powers and, through the well known placebo effect, heal someone.... Of course, no arms were ever regrown in this manner, no kidneys, no livers, no legs, no lungs.... at most, you get some cancer remissing against the odds... Odds are a funny thing. there's a statistics theorem that states that for a large enough population, you can approximate any distribution to a gaussian. A gaussian looks like this:
The center μ is the average, or the most expected outcome of this distribution.
Then, you have the tails... these go to zero on infinity. Anything more than 3σ away from μ is considered highly unlikely.... it's only 0.2% of the population. 0.2%, almost nothing, right? When normal doctors provide you with a diagnosis, they rely on this 3σ: most ~99.8% of patients have outcome X. That doesn't mean that the remaining 0.2% are god's domain. It just means doctors can't explain it, because it's not the norm.
Transistors in your computer work on some rather unlikely events, like quantum mechanic's tunneling effect. It has a well defined probability, although unlikely, but works every single time, because it relies on many many electrons being present (you know Avogadro's number, right? ~10^24), and only the few unlikely ones actually getting past the gate.
Now, for something else on the tail of the distribution: there are people who are born naturally HIV resistant... wouldn't it be great if we could harness this ability and spread it for all? People are working on it.... and they don't assume "goddidit".
