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.
