Board index ‹ The Problem of Evil and Suffering

[Newbie]

I'd first like to establish my premises before forming my question.
1) The Christian God is the one true god.
2) God is omnipotent, omniscient, and possibly omnibenevolent (though this can be debated.
3) God has personally interceded in human history and human lives in the form of miracles.
4) God continues to intercede in human lives today in the form of miracles.
5) These miracles include, but are not limited to, healing the sick, protecting people from fatal accidents, healing the crippled, and healing the deaf and blind.
6) God has not in modern times healed an amputee.

The question: Why does God not heal amputees? Some possible answers and rebuttals:
1) God can not heal amputees. But isn't God omnipotent?
2) God only heals wounds that are fatal.But blindness or deafness aren't fatal, and God supposedly heals those.
3) God has some seemingly irrational grudge against amputees. This seems to contradict his omnibelevolence.
4) God does not perform miracles that contradict natural law.
A) Why did God choose to set down natural law in such a way that healing cripples is a contradiction?
B) Is God then limited to act in ways that conform to natural law? Doesn't that limitation restrict his omnipotence?
C) Many historical miracles contradict natural law.
5) Healing amputees is an extreme miracle, and God no longer performs extreme miracles because they would confirm his existence rationally, and he wants people to come to him through faith.
A) In the Bible and well into the medieval period, God seems perfectly fine using his miracles as proof of his existence.
B) If that's true, then shouldn't people stop using miracles to argue for God's existence?
C) If that's true, then what is the point of miracles? Are they just rewards for the faithful?
6) Amputees do not have enough faith to warrant God's intercession.
A) Why does healing amputation require more faith than bringing the dead back to life?
B) Why don't they have enough faith? Are all amputees incidentally faithless people, or is faith stored in your extremities?
7) In the future we will be able to regrow limbs, so God's miracle is making that medical technology possible.
A) God made cancer treatment possible, but that doesn't stop people from claiming that God healed them without them undergoing treatment.
B) God historically performed miracles that weren't medically possible at the time, so why is amputation different?
8) Ours is not to reason why.

[jimwalton]

This question has been around for a long time. Here are my answers to it:

The definition of a miracle is a very wide spectrum of possibilities, ranging all the way from a verifiable dead person coming back to life, to (flippant things such as) "I got a green light just when I needed one!"

The kind miracles where people are genuinely healed are quite rare. The truth is that God hardly ever interferes in the circumstances of our lives. As you read the Bible, you discover that God's normal m.o. is to let cause and effect run their course, and then he comes behind to redeem whatever it was that happened. Most of the work he does, by design, is inside of people, not messing with cause and effect. Which leads to my second observation:

Most of the prayers God answers are about inner things, not outer ones. A detailed study of the Bible reveals that almost all the prayers God answers in the Bible pertain to people's inner lives (courage, spiritual life, strength, spiritual insight, understanding, etc.) and not to circumstances. And while the Bible has stories of God manipulating circumstances, you'll read that most of the time he doesn't.

The primary piece of evidence (and rebuttal, I guess) is that God hardly ever heals. God is not so much in the business of healing. Aside from about 10 occurrences in ALL of Scripture (excluding Jesus), there are no recorded healings. He is not in the business of healing any more than he is in the business of making people float in the air. In the entire Old Testament, there are, what, maybe 4 people who ever got healed (the son of the Shunammite woman, Naaman, Hezekiah, and Miriam). That's four people over a period of 2000+ years. Of course, during Jesus there are hundreds, or thousands. Then after Jesus, only a handful.

God is in the business of healing souls. That's what his goal is. On (rare) occasion he heals a body miraculously. There is no record of Jesus restoring a limb or body part that was missing, but silence is no argument. He healed many people who were crippled in their legs, and many lepers, who often had lost body parts to injury. No specific mention is made of a restored missing body part, though for all we know that may have happened.

So, as you might guess, I don't go for any of your rebuttals. According to Scripture, God isn't in the business of healing (for the most part) and it's not something he does (generally, or even anything but remotely). God is in the business of souls.

[Matty]

Ok. That's a fair analysis. It seems like you reject a few of my premises.

"4) God continues to intercede in human lives today in the form of miracles.
5) These miracles include, but are not limited to, healing the sick, protecting people from fatal accidents, healing the crippled, and healing the deaf and blind."


So you would argue that the miracles of the type I list don't continue to happen in the modern day. Fair enough. However, I think your categorization of OT miracles might be a little off. He doesn't do a lot of healing, true. But he does do a whole lot of external miracles (floods, Sodom, wrestling with Jacob, Exodus, Jericho, sending wild bears to kill punk-ass kids, etc.)

[jimwalton]

Yeah, I would say that the Bible says that God NEVER did much of those kinds of miracles, except during the life of Jesus, which was obviously not a normative era by anyone's standards.

As far as the question of miracles in the OT, that's really a different discussion that I wasn't trying to address. Again, though, taken in the context of several thousand years, there aren't even many miracles in the OT, except during the time of the Exodus, which again, in the Bible, is not a normative era. The Exodus and the ministry of Jesus correlate and are somewhat parallel, and that's where we see almost all of the miracles of the Bible occurring. It was a time of God's vigorous activity. Other than that, I dunno, maybe 20 (I didn't really take time to count)? Over 2000+ years, that's not much—once a century, on average. We could talk about those, but it's a separate discussion than the one about healing.