Evidence For God (part 2)

Sorry I have not updated this blog for a while... I have been facing some persecution from my mother who literally thinks I am possessed by a demon and am doing the devil’s work by writing this blog... which caused me some discouragement. However I am now ready to wrap up this topic with a final post before moving on to write about world issues without bashing religion (lest I become subject to homelessness, exorcism or worse.)

So now, bravely or foolishly, I shall outline my experiences in looking for evidence for God - and particularly the truth of the Christian faith - once I had established that the simple existence or complexity of the universe was not sufficient reason to believe.

By asking a number of people I discovered that those who are willing to give a reason why they believe in God usually tell of some fortunate coincidence which they attribute to whichever God they believe in. These experiences seem to occur amongst people from various religions and therefore cannot be used as evidence for any particular God. They may or may not be things previously prayed for, but are rarely remarkable enough to convince anyone other than the individual that there must have been supernatural involvement.

Other reasons given include “faith healing” which is an area that certainly warrants investigation. Looking into the subject of faith healing I discovered some shocking facts. Unfortunately this was not that a large number of people have indeed been miraculously healed but rather that belief in supernatural healing has actually caused a great number of deaths! There have been cases where people have not sought actual medical treatment choosing instead to rely on the “power of prayer” and a number of parents have actually been convicted as responsible for their children’s deaths in these cases. Others, including some HIV patients, ceased taking their medications on church advice after being told they had been healed and subsequently died.

Faith healings are usually performed by a charismatic church leader in front of a large crowd of people. These gatherings are characterised by apparent miraculous healings including people in wheelchairs getting up and walking – but things are not always as they appear. An interesting article on the topic can be found here but I would like to highlight one paragraph in particular, simply because it shocked me:

“There are many, many similar reports where follow-up found the patients still just as sick or worse off. Patients who “get up and walk” may not be healed. In one unfortunate case a woman was encouraged to get up out of her wheelchair and discard her braces at church. The faith healer proclaimed her “healed.” Unfortunately her cancer of the spine had weakened her bones, and the activity caused bones in her spine to collapse; she died not long after. The faith healing hastened her death and caused her unnecessary agony. For the faith healer and the witnesses at church and for the patient herself that day, it appeared to be a miraculous healing: they couldn’t have been more wrong! Incidentally, many of the faith healing patients who get up out of a wheelchair and walk had actually walked into church and had been offered wheelchairs they didn’t really need.”

And another, which is almost amusing in a dark way:

”Many years ago the Journal of the American Medical Association used to have a regular feature where there would be a testimonial on one page describing how a patient was cured of cancer. On the opposite page, they would print the patient’s death certificate showing that he had died of that cancer shortly after providing the testimonial.”

Of course there are people who do benefit in some way from these “faith healings” but this can almost always be attributed to the placebo effect. These healings are usually limited to subjectively reported symptoms such as pain. It has frequently been pointed out that no amputee has ever re-grown a limb, and I am yet to find a case of “miraculous healing” which has been confirmed by a doctor. For anyone interested, a brilliant documentary on the subject can be found here.

Another possible line of “evidence” for the existence of “God” or at least the supernatural is the occurrence of NDEs (Near Death Experiences). Although rather surprisingly this is seldom used as an argument for the existence of God, I’m embarrassed to admit that this is the one thing that almost made me change my mind. NDEs usually occur when a patient is clinically dead for a period of time before being resuscitated – although some scientists claim they must actually occur as the patient is dying or as they “wake up,” believing these experiences to be creations of the mind, occurring within the patient’s brain. Although these experiences differ from person to person, there are several common features. These include life reviews (having your life “flash before your eyes”), out-of-body experiences (where one sees one’s body from an outside position – usually above), immense feelings of unconditional love and peace, movement towards a light or going through a tunnel, encountering “beings of light” and/or deceased relatives. I came across a few elaborate stories from people claiming to have had an encounter with God, Jesus or Satan and to have experienced Heaven and/or Hell during their NDE. While these accounts read much like dreams, the fact that they had supposedly been dead at the time had me teetering at “is this sh*t true after all??”

It wasn’t until someone pointed out to me that most of the people giving these accounts were trying to sell their books that it occurred to me that people might lie about such things. It seems that people who have NDEs almost always have experiences which are in line with their expectations or cultural beliefs about the afterlife, making the possibility that they are indeed generated by the brain seem much more likely. In fact, scientists have discovered that they can generate these same experiences by applying electrical stimulation to the temporal lobe of the brain in human subjects – and religious subjects would often have “religious” experiences in this setting. While the subject is still not fully understood, I think it is far from “proving” the existence of a spiritual realm, and even less so the truth of Christian doctrine.

Some people try to claim proof of Christianity comes in the form of fulfilled prophesies in the Bible, particularly concerning Old Testament prophesies fulfilled by Jesus. This claim ignores the fact that the Gospels were written several decades after the death of Jesus, by people who never met him and that they were largely embellished to make it seem as though he had fulfilled the Old Testament prophesies. For example, most historians agree that Jesus was not, in fact, born in Bethlehem. Similarly, when listing so called “prophesies” which Jesus apparently fulfilled, Christians will often list passages of the Old Testament they were not intended to be prophesies at all, for example passages from the book of Psalms. I would actually like to do a whole entry looking at this topic, but... well, maybe one day.

Finally there are people who claim to have been converted to Christianity by a religious experience or vision... interestingly enough, most of these people seems to be ex-drug-addicts...

If anyone has any lines of evidence I have not considered in my search for the truth, please let me know... but for now I remain thoroughly unconvinced.