Scott Mayhew of Saratoga Springs Utah was in a real pickle. He was home
alone, out in his garage working on his SUV when suddenly the vehicle became
unstable and fell on him.
Crushed beneath the weight, with broken ribs and other internal injuries,
Mayhew somehow managed to call out for help - for over an hour, but to no
avail.
Then he tried prayer: "I just knew if I hung on long enough, my prayers would be answered and she would know to come home."
Miles away, Nicole, Scott's wife, was at work. She says had a gut
feeling, experienced a spirit warning her to go home and check on her husband.
She knew she must go check on her husband. By heeding her instinct she was able to save her husband's life.
Prayer answered! I do believe such things are possible. I have a real
problem with the idea of prayer as imploring an old man in the sky to grant our
wishes. Yet I can't help feeling that prayer somehow serves as a method of
tapping into the Divine Source.
I can't explain such things. Nevertheless, theory will never trump the
experience of these things - and I have experienced them in my own life.
Hi Doug, I'm curious, if you don't think it was a personal God (I presume that's what you mean by "an old man in the sky") answering that prayer, in what way do you think a less personal Divine Source lead to this outcome?
ReplyDeleteI don't necessarily think the Divine Source is not personal. But, as I suggested in my last post, the idea of an Anthropomorphic God is a crude way of picturing God. It is easily attacked and easily dismissed.
ReplyDeleteDoug, I'm interested to understand your words and the thoughts behind them. Do you think this is much difference between a personal God and an anthropomorphic God? Would the God of less fundamentalist christianity be anthropomorphic in your view (he would certainly be personal)?
DeleteIf God is a man in the sky only with superpowers, then I think Dawkins and his ilk are fully justified in asking "who made God?"
DeleteI suppose so, but few people these days think God is a man in the sky, though most probably give him some anthropomorphic characteristics.
DeleteOn another matter, I just wrote a comment to Robert and pressed the preview button and it disappeared, and I had to write it again. No big deal, but I thought you should know.
With all due respect, that is the orthodox view of Jesus: a man in the sky with superpowers (who happens to be God). But I think through such works of art as Blake's Ancient of Days and Michelangelo"s Creation of Adam, the depiction of God in human form is a popular conception of God, at least among the mass of believers. Of course theologians might think otherwise.
DeleteI'm sorry you had to retype your response to Robert; I know that was a pain because it was lengthy. I have no idea why that happened.
I'm not unopposed to the hypothesis that there may be some type of extrasensory connection between people who are extremely close/intimate that has yet to be explained. But that's still a long way from a divine intermediary that acts like a telephone operator to connect one person's needs with another person's availability to fulfill those needs.
ReplyDeleteThese could just be "gut feelings" based on intimate knowledge of the other person's routine and habits ... maybe the husband calls or texts his wife during the work day but failed to do so in this instance causing wife to have a unsettled feeling. It's certainly a more plausible explanation. Of course those that WANT to believe it's a prayer or miracle or some kind of divine intervention will conveniently omit or simply not observe these small details that could otherwise easily be overlooked in such an extreme circumstance - in other words, confirmation bias.
There always seems to be the initial presumption that something divine exists to start with but I've yet to see any foundation for the divine other than suggestions by old writings and personal will for it to be. From there, those that want/wish it to be so, evidence and foundation is irrelevant - faith is enough. I'm not closed to the possibility but I can't buy into an unfounded thing/entity - and something happens that defies explanation MUST mean the unfounded thing/entity MUST be the source/cause. ... but that's me ... ;)
The confirmation bias shoe fits the skeptic as comfortably as the believer.
DeleteI certainly agree, it can fit perfect for any situation for something someone believes and wants to prove, especially when there isn't an obvious answer or evidence for the thing they believe.
DeleteHi Robert, do you think there is NO evidence that a God exists? For example, if events similar to the story Doug recounts here happened a number of times, and if each time there was a prayer to God prior to the "answer", would that not indicate the likelihood that there might be a connection?
DeleteI'll grant you that the scenario of a "prayer" and something unexpected/improbable happening has, in fact, happened a "number" of times ... problem I have with that indicating a correlation of the existence of a god is that there has been a vastly greater number of times when someone has "prayed" and nothing or something negative happens. I'm fairly certain if there were honest polls or any type of testing done to determine if there is some outside force that responds when a prayer is uttered I think you'd find results to be consistent with what you'd expect from random chance/coincidence.
DeleteI'll concede that I don't have such data handy, nor have I done such testing beyond what would be considered anecdotal. But let's consider for a moment if such testing DID indicate some outside influence ... that STILL doesn't give you evidence for a god ... it just says there is "something" that happens ... what that "something" is remains unknown until further investigation can take place.
You just can't get "there" for "here" any more than I can claim aliens exist because we are mystified at how stone age humans could build things like the pyramids and Stonehenge.
Additionally, let me point out that in the scenario that Doug presents - the wife "answered" the husband's prayer so it would suggest better evidence for telepathy between humans. You can try to shoehorn a god into the story but at the end of the day we see the wife coming to the rescue ... not a god.
Then we have a whole other problem when we assume that prayer is answered by a particular god (in this case christian) ... there was a huge earthquake in Nepal and I'm quite sure there will be some dozens of stories of people praying and them or their loved ones being spared ... problem - most of these people are likely hindu praying to shiva or vishnu. Are we to use the same criteria to presume that the hindu god(s) also exist and answer prayers?Doesn't that contradict the christian assertion that they have a relationship with the one and only true god, the father of jesus?
At best, you can get to deism because you can just toss out every instance where someone "prays" to a non-christian god and they have a beneficial result. You MUST account for these, and pretty much however you do that, you're going to end up contradicting the god of the bible.
Correction/clarification:
DeleteThe last paragraph, first sentence:
... you can get to deism because you *CAN'T* just toss out...
Hi Robert, I think there is information that you may not have considered.
ReplyDelete1. based on extrapolation from surveys, it is estimated that more than 300 million people claim to have experienced or witnessed a healing miracle after prayer to the christian God. That doesn't prove any miracle happened, but it does show there is a phenomenon needing investigation.
2. Most of these don't have sufficient documentation to make a judgment, but quite a number have been documented, and they show that in many cases something highly unusual happened, quite contrary to medical expectations and statistics about recoveries. I have outlined a few of these in Healing miracles and God. You'll find there a reference to where I used bayesian probability analysis to estimate as best I was able what conclusion we could draw from this, and it showed that this amount of unexplained healings made the existence of God much more likely than not.
3. As these healings happened after prayer to the christian God, time and time again, it isn't unreasonable to draw the conclusion that he did it, but of course that isn't proof. But I think it is as close to good evidence as we are going to get.
4. I haven't seen much evidence of healings from other religions, but if you have any, I'm interested. But they only add to the evidence that God heals, we just then have to discuss who that God is.
So my view is that the evidence is there, and we have to decide if we will investigate it or not, and what we conclude. But it is there. Hope that helps.
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