Things that make me go hmmmmm .....

Through browsing, reading, and jumping around the 'net, I came across this website .... Why Won't God Heal Amputees? It was interesting enough to keep me reading for quite a while. I have pulled a small piece of it here for your reading pleasure:

The question, "Why won't God heal amputees?" probes into an extremely interesting aspect of prayer and exposes it for observation. This aspect of prayer has to do with ambiguity and coincidence.

Imagine that you pray for something -- It does not really matter what it is. Let's imagine that you have cancer, you pray to God to cure the cancer, and the cancer actually does go away. The interesting thing to recognize is that there is ambiguity in your cure. God might have miraculously cured the disease, as many people believe. But God might also be imaginary, and the chemotherapy drugs and surgery are the things that cured your cancer. Or your body might have cured the cancer itself. The human body does have a powerful immune system, and this immune system has the ability to eliminate cancer in many cases. When your tumor dissappeared, it might be a coincidence that you happened to pray. Drugs, an immune response or a combination of the two might have been the thing the cured you.

How can we determine whether it is God or coincidence that worked the cure? One way is to eliminate the ambiguity. In a non-ambiguous situation, there is no potential for coincidence. Because there is no ambiguity, we can actually know whether God is answering the prayer or not.

That is what we are doing when we look at amputees.

When we pray to God to restore an amputated limb, there is only one way for the limb to regenerate. God must exist and God must answer prayers. What we find is that whenever we create a non-ambiguous situation like this and look at the results of prayer, prayer never works. God never answers prayers if there is no possibility of coincidence.

The author has quite an extensive tome responding to the "usual" responses he gets when he poses this question to religious believers - responses ranging from we as humans cannot understand God's intent, or that God does "heal" amputees by giving scientists and doctors the ability to make artificial limbs, to pretty much every other response I could come up with.

It was quite thought-provoking. What's your initial response?