Hot Water Bottle Miracle – Truth or Fiction?

You’ve got to love those email forwards that you get with those little stories about the mysterious ways that God works, and the miracles, like a gallon of milk showing up at a house with a hungry baby just in time.  Most of those stories are likely made up whole cloth, and they can never be tracked back to an original source.  Every now and then you come across one of these stories where you can trace it back to it’s source, but just because you can trace something to a source, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true.  Here is the story as told by Christian Missionary Helen Roseveare, which was included in her book Living Faith, …

One night, in Central Africa, I had worked hard to help a mother in the labor ward; but in spite of all that we could do, she died leaving us with a tiny, premature baby and a crying, two-year-old daughter.

We would have difficulty keeping the baby alive. We had no incubator. We had no electricity to run an incubator, and no special feeding facilities. Although we lived on the equator, nights were often chilly with treacherous drafts.

A student-midwife went for the box we had for such babies and for the cotton wool that the baby would be wrapped in. Another went to stoke up the fire and fill a hot water bottle. She came back shortly, in distress, to tell me that in filling the bottle, it had burst. Rubber perishes easily in tropical climates. “…and it is our last hot water bottle!” she exclaimed. As in the West, it is no good crying over spilled milk; so, in Central Africa it might be considered no good crying over a burst water bottle. They do not grow on trees, and there are no drugstores down forest pathways. All right,” I said, “Put the baby as near the fire as you safely can; sleep between the baby and the door to keep it free from drafts. Your job is to keep the baby warm.”

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Derren Brown: Messiah

I’ve quickly become a fan of Derren Brown’s work, and this special that originally aired in 2005 is no exception.  Someone on Wikipedia was nice enough to lay out a synopsis, so rather than re-inventing the wheel — here it is:

“Shown on 7 January 2005, Brown travelled to the United States to try to convince five leading figures that he had powers in their particular field of expertise: Christian evangelism, alien abduction, psychic powers, New Age theories and contacting the dead.

Using a false name each time, he succeeded in convincing all of the “experts” that he had powers, and four openly endorsed him as a true practitioner. The fifth expert, the Christian evangelist Curt Nordhielm, whilst impressed by Brown’s performance, asked to meet him again before giving an endorsement. The concept of the show was to highlight the power of suggestion with regard to beliefs and people’s abilities, and failure to question them. Brown made it quite clear with each experiment that if any of the subjects accused him of trickery he would immediately come clean about the whole thing, a rule similar to one of the self-imposed rules of the perpetrators of the Project Alpha hoax. His conclusion was that people tend to hear only things that support their own ideas and ignore contradictory evidence; this is known in psychology as confirmation bias. During the section concerned with religious belief, he ‘converted’ people to Christian belief with a touch. Afterwards, he ‘deprogrammed’ them of any such belief.”

Here is part 1 of 8.  Part two is queued up to play next at the conclusion of part 1, and so on and so forth.

In the day and age we live, with the knowledge of the world and the universe that we have, people can and do believe in things that are purported to be miracles, and yet are nothing more that tricks.  If people in this day and age are so ready to believe tricks are miracles, how much more so were the people in an era where knowledge was in short supply, and superstition was at a fever pitch?

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Cancer – Healed By The Power of Allah?

Every now and then you will run across a believer who  says, “I know Jesus Christ is real and that the message of the Christianity is true because Jesus healed me.”  So if the personal experience of the healing is to be considered proof that the message of Christianity is true, does that mean that this claimed healing of cancer is proof that the message of Allah and his prophet Muhammed is true?  Or is this story of cancer being healed by practicing Falun Gong proof of its validity?

People will often look to spontaneous remission of cancer as proof of the power of prayer, miracle, etc.  However, when you look at the number of people who are “healed” of cancer when prayed for, compared to the number who are not healed — the claim that prayer or superstitious rituals heals cancer is simply unfounded.  If anything, the exact opposite is shown to be the case as was seen in the study that was conducted by the Templeton Foundation, and reported here by the New York Times.

There is of course a much more simple and reasonable explanation for these claimed cancer healings.  Because there will be a certain number of cancers that will naturally go into remission in a given year throughout the world, a certain percentage of those remissions will happen to people of varying beliefs, with differing religious and spiritual backgrounds.  Each of those people will interpret the occurrence according to their religious traditions, or attribute the remission to some behavior or decision they engaged in mistaking correlation for causation.  Such was the case of the gentleman I saw on television as a kid, who attributed his cancer healing to eating rancid and rotting meat.

Despite the simpler explanation, people will still cling to the more extraordinary claim that they were touched by some supernatural force.  This explanation might have a little more standing if the purported supernatural force began to heal amputees.   To the people who claim that there is power in prayer, and the people who claim healing is proof that it works, I would ask this question: “What evidence or criteria would you suggest, that would serve as proof that prayer does not work?”

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Derren Brown: Faith Healers

Here is Derren Brown’s UK Special on Faith Healers.  This is a MUST SEE!

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Miracle Claim: Prophetic Dream

Theists love anecdotal “evidence” of God, which usually involves some sort of situation or “miracle” that they share in an effort to convince you to come back into the fold.  The problem with this evidence that they present is that they are so loaded with confirmation bias that there is no way they are willing to look at it as having a natural explanation.  “How could that happen without God?” they say.  If you can explain just how it could happen, and that it really is not that impressive at all, it never ends up being the case that your natural explanation is the most plausible, but instead you are “blinded by the devil”,  “your heart has been hardened”, or “you’re not looking at it through the eyes of faith”.  We’ll look at one such example now that initially may seem impressive until you look at it from a different perspective, and discover that it would be odd if that scenario didn’t happen on a regular basis.

The story as it was told to me was that a woman’s mother had a dream about her adult son (this was the adult sister of the son telling the story) in which he was carrying the limp, lifeless body of one of his younger children up from out of his swimming pool.  She awoke from the dream and felt that it had been a warning from God, and so she shared the dream with him.  Some time later (whether it was a period of weeks or months I don’t recall) the son was doing dishes and realized he had not heard one of his younger children in quite a while.  His mind immediately went to the dream that his mother had, and he rushed outside to find the child face down in the pool.  He carried him up out of the pool, and resuscitated him with mouth to mouth.  The whole family praised God for the wonderful thing he had done by sparing the child.  At first glance this story may seem pretty impressive, but upon further examination we would find it odd if this type of story didn’t happen often.  To unpack the natural explanation of this “miracle,” we first need to look at some numbers.

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