Well, it’s that time of year again. Regular church attendees are going to have to share their pews with people who have finally decided to make it out for their second service of the year. Their belief that Jesus bled and died so they can gain eternal salvation might be unshakable, but it apparently isn’t all that motivating, considering how little these believers seem to do in response. Nevertheless, they can at least be counted on to show up for a retelling of Jesus’s miraculous birth.
But what version will they hear? More than likely, they’ll hear a “Hollywood” version of the tale that incorporates the most exciting elements of the two versions that we read about in Matthew and Luke. A quick Google search turned up this one, which illustrates my point perfectly. But what if someone tried to tell the full version? A version that included every detail that both Matthew and Luke provide?
Honestly, it just can’t be done. I had wanted to attempt it here, but there’s just no practical way to do it. For example, the version I linked to above goes like this:
The Standard Tale
- Mary’s visited by an angel who tells her about the pregnancy (Luke)
- She and Joseph live in Nazareth of Galilee, but are forced to travel to Bethlehem in Judea for a census commanded by the Roman authorities (Luke)
- They’re unable to find normal accommodations and are forced to room in an area intended for livestock. Mary gives birth there and is visited by local shepherds (Luke)
- Wise men far to the east see a star that somehow signifies the birth of the Jewish Messiah (Matthew)
- They travel for an unspecified period until they reach Jerusalem, where they inquire about the child (Matthew)
- These inquiries reach Herod, the ruler of the region, and he asks the wise men to send back word to him once they find the child, so Herod himself can also pay his respects (Matthew)
- The wise men make their way to Bethlehem, find the family, bestow their gifts, and return home via a different route (Matthew)
- An angel tells Joseph to hightail it out of Bethlehem, because Herod’s sending a posse to wipe out all the children 2 years old and under in an effort to stamp out Jesus (Matthew)
- Joseph and his family flee to Egypt and remain there until an angel tells him it’s safe to return, because Herod has died (Matthew)
- Joseph intends to go back toward Bethlehem, but after finding out that Herod’s son is in charge, he takes the family to Nazareth in Galilee (Matthew)
So what’s wrong with this story? I mean, it’s very cohesive, and it makes for a compelling tale. What’s not to like? Its only real problem is that the very books of the Bible that provide its details, contradict its overall narrative.
Two Very Different Stories
Let’s go back to Luke’s version. After Jesus’s birth and the visit from the shepherds, we don’t read about wise men or Herod’s animosity. Instead, Luke 2:22 says that after the days of Mary’s purification were over, the family went to Jerusalem. The “days of purification” are referring to Leviticus 12:1-4, where the Law of Moses stated that a woman was to be considered “unclean” for 40 days after giving birth to a male child. So when Jesus was about 40 days old, Luke claims that they all traveled to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices as thanks for his birth. While there, two elderly people see Jesus and begin proclaiming praise and prophecies concerning Jesus. And there’s no indication that an effort was made to keep any of this quiet, which is very different in tone to what we read in Matthew. Finally, in Luke 2:39, we read “And when they had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.” We’ll come back to this point in a moment.
The synopsis we looked at earlier incorporated most of Matthew’s version of the story. As we just read, his story ends very differently from Luke’s. However, it’s also significant to note that Matthew gives no indication that Joseph and Mary are from Nazareth. Matt 1:18 through the end of the chapter talks about Mary’s pregnancy, even though she and Joseph had never slept together, but it never specifies where they’re living. Chapter 2 begins with the sentence “Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?'” Of course, it’s possible that Matthew still knew they were originally from Nazareth and just doesn’t bother to tell us that or divulge how they got to Bethlehem in the first place. But there are three context clues that point against such a possibility. First of all, regardless of how far the wise men had to journey, it likely took them quite a while to make the trip. When Matthew says “the east” he certainly doesn’t mean “east Jersualem,” and travel being what it was back then, any journey would have taken considerable time. The second clue is that Herod supposedly kills all the male children of Bethlehem who are 2 and under. So it’s unlikely that we’re supposed to still be thinking of Jesus as a newborn. Finally, Matthew says that when the family was able to leave Egypt, Joseph wanted to go back to Judea (where Bethlehem is). But after finding out Herod’s son was ruling, he became afraid and “went and lived in a city called Nazareth” (Matt 2:23). This is a very strange way to refer to Nazareth, if it’s where Joseph and Mary were already living.
So Matthew gives no indication that Joseph and Mary were just visiting Bethlehem. He never mentions a manger; instead, he references a house that they were staying in. He never talks about the shepherds from the fields, but has wise men who visit the child. He includes a story about Herod slaughtering a town’s children, though no other historical or biblical source ever mentions this. He claims that the family flees to Egypt until Herod’s death, that they want to return to Bethlehem, but finally settle in “a city called Nazareth.”
Luke, on the other hand, says that Nazareth is their home town, and they’re only visiting Bethlehem. He has no story about wise men, but does talk about shepherds from the fields that visit the newborn Jesus. Instead of Herod attempting to hunt them down and a subsequent flight to Egypt, the family travels straight to Jerusalem, where Herod lives. And there’s no effort to keep Jesus’s identity secret while they’re there, as two elderly prophets begin proclaiming who he is. And after making their sacrifices, the family simply goes back home to Nazareth, far from Herod’s reach (not that Luke indicates Herod’s even interested).
Can These Stories Be Put Together?
The main sticking points between the stories are the flight to Egypt and the trip to Jerusalem. On the one hand, Luke is very clear about his timeline: Jesus was only about 40 days old when they went to Jerusalem and then went home to Nazareth. Matthew doesn’t give specifics on how old Jesus was when the family was forced to flee to Egypt, except that it must have occurred before he was 2 years old.
Could the trip to Egypt have happened before the trip to Jerusalem?
No. First of all, considering all the details Luke provides, why would he have left out such an important event? Secondly, this means Herod would have needed to die within the 40 day purification period, but Matthew tells us that this still wouldn’t have been good enough, because Joseph was determined to avoid all of Judea while Herod’s son was reigning. There’s simply no way he would have felt safe enough to travel directly into Jerusalem. That just makes no sense.
Could the trip to Egypt have happened after the trip to Jerusalem?
No. Luke 2:39 is clear that the family went straight back to Nazareth after their trip to Jerusalem. And considering Luke claimed that Nazareth was already their home, why would they have needed to go back to Bethlehem anyway?
In fact, Luke’s claim that the family was from Nazareth creates a lot of problems for Matthew’s account. Nazareth was far outside of Herod’s reach. So if Herod really had hunted Jesus in Bethlehem, the family could have simply gone back to Nazareth rather than flee to Egypt. But this isn’t a consideration in Matthew’s account, because for him, the family has never been to Nazareth until they simply can’t go back to Bethlehem anymore, even after Herod’s death (Matt 2:23).
Additional Problems
I don’t want to spend too much time here, but for completeness sake, I need to mention a couple of historical issues. Both Matthew and Luke say that Jesus is born during the reign of Herod the Great. Historians usually place his death in 4 BCE, which means Jesus would have been born sometime before that. However, Luke says that Mary and Joseph had traveled to Bethlehem, because Quirinius, the governor of Syria, had commanded a census. However, Quirinius didn’t become governor of Syria until 6 CE — 10 years after Herod’s death. You can find additional resources about these two issues here.
Finally, Luke’s claim is that this census required Joseph to travel back to his ancestral home of Bethlehem, since he was of King David’s lineage. But David would have lived some 1000 years before Joseph. It’s ludicrous to think that the Romans would have cared about such a thing, or that they would have wanted their empire to be so disrupted by having people move around like that for a census. It would have been an impossible feat and would have made for a highly inaccurate, and therefore useless, census.
What Do We Make of All This?
The easiest way to understand why these accounts have such major differences in detail is to understand why either writer bothered with a story about Jesus’s birth at all. You have to remember that the writers of Matthew and Luke didn’t know one another and didn’t know that they were both working on the same material. They certainly didn’t know that their books would one day show up in the same collection. Both of them were working with two basic facts: Micah 5:2 seemed to prophesy that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem; Jesus came from Nazareth (John 1:45-46).
Since those two facts were at odds with one another, it’s easy to see how both writers would have been compelled to explain how Jesus could be from Nazareth but still be from Bethlehem. Unfortunately for them, close comparison shows that both versions simply can’t be true.
How would people react if they showed up for church this weekend and were presented with the full details from both of these stories? I like to think it would spur many of them into deeper study. That it would possibly make them question some of the things they’ve been taking for granted. But 2016 has been pretty demoralizing when it comes to the number of people who seem concerned about what’s true, and I’m not sure how many of them would see this information as a call to action. I know there are people who can be changed by facts. Perhaps there aren’t as many of them as I once thought, but I know they’re out there. And with the way information spreads these days, I’m sure they’ll eventually find the facts they’re looking for.
Finding Truth 
Hi Sirius, I guess you are new to the discussion, but I’ll repeat what I said earlier. The comments you raise are not relevant to the point I am making. Yes Kathryn Kuhlman was a very strange lady and I have no doubt many fakes can be counted among the healing claims. That would be relevant if I was arguing that she had a good ratio of “successes”, or that the majority of people who are prayed for are healed.
But I’m not. I accept that many claims are fake and many others impossible to judge. All I am arguing is that there are some apparent healings that have good medical evidence and are unlikely on medical grounds, and they may be evidence of something beyond the natural. The number of fakes is totally irrelevant to that.
Much detail on Lourdes, including details of the cases, is easily found on the web and it is quite clear. A small minority of cases investigated had sufficient documentation and sufficient evidence of an unusual recovery to warrant inclusion.
I researched the rates of spontaneous remission a while back, and it differs a lot according to condition, as you’d expect. I think 1 in 100,000 would be true of some conditions, but others are much more frequent than that. For some analysis that I did, I used 1 in 10,000 to err on the side of overstating the natural remissions. It took me a while to dig it out, but Google is your friend.
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To some readers reading this thread it may seem very reasonable for Christians to ask medical researchers to expend the money and time to investigate some of the more remarkable Christian miracle healing claims. Why not, you ask? Why not investigate these claims instead of forcing Christians to submit to standardized double-blind, controlled trials?
Well, the problem is that Christians are not the only ones claiming miracle cures! Not only do members of many other religions claim that prayers to their god or gods produce miracle healings, but there are tens of thousands of alleged “holistic potions, tonics, and juices” sold all over the globe that allegedly cure every ailment under the sun including terminal cancer. And each one of these tens of thousands of miracle cures has its own fantastical stories of people whose healing by product X “defied all the medical experts”.
That is why medical and scientific experts do not chase after anecdotal claims of cures. It would be an impossible task. Medical experts and scientists insist upon controlled trials to prove cause and effect. Most purveyors of miracle cures don’t want to submit their “cures” to this type of analysis. They find every excuse possible to avoid this type of scrutiny. They would much rather stick to promoting their cures with anecdotal evidence; evidence that no one can ever disprove!
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I am not saying that all Christians know that prayer for healing is a con job ( but I do think that most faith healers know that faith healing is a con job).
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It seems so real. So genuine. So wonderful. Until you suddenly realize it isn’t.
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Unklee wants to believe so desperately he will frame his argument in any way he is able to ensure everyone but him is seen as close-minded.
He tries to emphasize he he not trying to draw a causal link between Christianity/christian prayer and spontaneous healing yet …. he is a christian and appears to be focusing on doctors who are christian, and supposed healing at places like Lourdes etc.
Yet, he completely ignores the comprehensive, controlled study by the Templeton Foundation, a Christian organisation whose apparent ultimate goal appears to be to demonstrate that the Christian god is behind pretty much everything.
And yet they failed to show any evidence of this. In fact, in certain cases the opposite effect was realised.
So, for some unfathomable reason, unklee isn’t happy with this evidence and will tell you in a firm, but certainly ‘not close-minded manner at all … honestly’,that this is not the case he is pleading. It is other /em> types of healing that just might have involve a smidgen of a Christian element.
Good grief!
Yes, spontaneous healing does occur.
On a planet of 7 billion individuals if such phenomena did not occur it would be odd.
We see strange phenomena all the time, right across the human and animal spectrum, so why is this such a major surprise?
And of course we also see a lot of fraudulent piggy-backing by charlatans, many of whom are Christian ( Wow! And what a surprise that is, right? )
The really serious problems arise when the credulous and gullible and willfully ignorant fall prey (pray?) to the disingenuous nature of some people .
Christianity is a perfect example. Remember, we are all born sinners…(” Christianity offers to solve the problem of its own making” (Dan Barker)
When considered in this light is it really any surprise we have someone like unklee, a devout Christian who believes in miracles, accepts the supernatural, will twist and turn and postulate any argument he can to get you to the point where he can haul out the old : ”Aha! See! Told you so!”
And Unklee said …
”Sceptics often say that there is no evidence for miraculous healing. But of course there will never be any evidence if you unfairly dismiss studies that attempt to gather it. ”
The Templeton Foundation did exactly that: attempted to gather evidence, and you simply unfairly dismissed it; hand waving it away by not even mentioning it.
And if all else fails … we get a response such as this.
or this …
All of which could also be translated as:
”I’m not playing any more ‘cos you’re just mean an’ nasty an’ won’t accept my rules.”
Ho hum….
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Hey UnkleE, there’s a couple things I’d like to respond to.
(1) “[T]hey [referring to what you labeled as ‘apparent healings’] may be evidence of something beyond the natural.”
I actually addressed that in my comment. I am saying that they cannot be evidence of something supernatural as you or others have alleged them to be. You have not alleged any facts which link a supernatural cause to the effects you have described. That these healings exist or are uncommon or medically unexplained do not bootstrap the claim of supernatural causation to the fore.
(2) “For some analysis that I did, I used 1 in 10,000 to err on the side of overstating the natural remissions.”
The Wikipedia page I found my number on stated that the number of spontaneous remissions could be higher as you’ve said. However, I used the 1 in 100,000 number because I wanted to err on the side of fairness to the point I was making. If spontaneous remission is a more common phenomenon, it actually hurts the claim of supernatural causation more.
Higher rates of spontaneous remission would put an additional hindrance on your claim of possible supernatural causation. You would need to allege facts which render spontaneous remission as a supernatural effect rather than a natural one. Otherwise, any instance spontaneous remission could just as easily be explained as a natural one rather than the product of a supernatural occurrence.
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@unkleE,
In this discussion, you’ve been saying (if I understand you correctly) that these events are not necessarily miraculous — just that we shouldn’t rule out the possibility. To me, this suggests that it’s most prudent to just take an “I don’t know” approach to these issues, which I’m okay with. But didn’t we start this conversation because you mentioned healings like these as a reason to believe in God? That’s not a rhetorical question — it’s a really long conversation thread, and I just don’t remember exactly how we got on this topic. So I’m not trying to put words in your mouth; just looking for some clarification. Do you think these kinds of events should lead someone to believe in God and/or the supernatural?
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I should note that some common types of cancer have much, much higher spontaneous remission or regression rates.
https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/93/14/1047/2906229/Spontaneous-Regression-of-Melanoma-May-Offer
http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/spring09/html/disc_remission.php
Of course, there are also false cancer diagnoses. If I am inaccurately diagnosed with cancer, then a follow-up test shows me to be cancer free, that would appear to be a spontaneous cure. It would not be a spontaneous cure, but it would certainly look like a miraculous, unexplainable cure to people inclined to see such things as miracles.
I remain open to the possibility, but the evidential bar must be a lot higher than hearsay and knowledge gaps.
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Considering the way evolution works, I don’t guess it should be surprising that some members of the population may have immune systems that are able to fight off cancers and other diseases that most of us would succumb to.
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@ Nate
Exactly!
Out of a global population of 7.3 billion you could probably make a case for spontaneous remission simply by waving a magic wand and saying ”Abracadabra”
And this is why any attempt to try to insinuate that intercessory prayer and notably in this case Christian intercessory prayer (which is, after all, what we are really discussing here …. if we are being completely honest) – which can be shown to be a valid hypothesis to consider, especially in light of studies such as the one conducted by Templeton should, quite frankly, be treated with the contempt it deserves.
And not least because to tacitly suggest it may have genuine merit simply encourages the type of ludicrous behaviour where certain religious people deny their kids medical help because they have ”God on their side”.
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Let’s just admit the truth. The truth is that the majority of the medical community and the majority of scientists are atheists. They hate God and hate Christianity. They know that prayer often works to heal disease, they just don’t want to admit it. They have concocted a conspiracy against prayer. And not just prayer. They have concocted a conspiracy against natural, God-given treatments that cost pennies for people to use. They want to keep you hooked on their expensive medicines and procedures. Just read this damning evidence against doctors and scientists:
http://www.naturalnews.com/042688_natural_medicine_cancer_cures_government_agencies.html
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If the kinds of miracles recorded in the Bible happened today, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
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Certainly not with unklee, as meek and mild Jesus, bless his smelly sandals, would likely have made sure were were all nice and super-moral and ethical and raising pet dinosaurs and the English would never have dumped criminals at Botany Bay.
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Prayer to Jesus is not the only miracle cure. There is also…Cayenne Pepper! Read this testimonial from the website I linked above:
“9 1/2 years ago I was diagnosed with stage 4 terminal prostate cancer. My PSA 3,230 [normal is less than 4] confirmed what the bone scan showed, over a hundred tumors already in my bones causing extremely high levels of pain. The oncologists gave me max 3 months left to live if I was “lucky”. They said there wasn’t anything they could do for me other than giving me large doses of OxyContin to help relieve my pain. I took cayenne pepper in capsules (up to 8/day) for 8 weeks. Waited 2 months to let my stomach and my intestines recuperate from the high levels of cayenne pepper. Then I took the capsules for 8 weeks again. I DIDN’T DIE in 3 months. I’m STILL ALIVE after 9 1/2 years. And my PSA IS SO LOW IT’S UNDETECTABLE!! Less than 0.05 = <0.05. My oncologist said I don't need to see her anymore and my urologist thinks this is fantastic. He's not allowed to officially recommend doing what I did."
Gary: Wow! If this story is true, every doctor on the planet should be giving their prostate cancer patients high doses of Cayenne Pepper! We should be shoveling it down their throats. It must work, right? It worked for this guy so it should work in all other cases, right? Wrong! That is not how you would want your doctor to practice medicine.
There are MILLIONS of such anecdotal cases of miracle cures attributed to tonics, herbs, juices, oxygenated water, and…JESUS!
It's called…RANDOM CHANCE!
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With all due respect, Gary, I would put more faith(sic) in herbal tonics than Preying for Jesus … oops, I’m sorry, I mean, Praying to Jesus, of course.
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Hi Sirius,
“You have not alleged any facts which link a supernatural cause to the effects you have described.”
I think there is. Obviously we don’t have, and probably can’t have, controlled experimental data on this. For a start, we have remission figures, but we don’t know if any of them, or all of them, were people who were prayed for. And we don’t have a piece of string that connects prayer to result – causation is always difficult to establish.
But this is the case in many things in life. Many social science studies can establish correlation but not causation. When I worked as an environmental manager, I came across farmers (graziers) using small paddock rotational grazing and claiming enormous improvements in productivity. But when I discussed this with agricultural scientists, they were unable to support this practice because, they said, there were too many variables of geology and land use, climate and a whole range of different farming practices, that it was almost impossible to set up an experiment that could isolate the other factors and measure the effects of rotational grazing. But the smart farmers were using the practice based on sensible evidence, and making much larger profits.
So we have a choice – to either ignore interesting information, or investigate it as best we are able. I am saying that there are a suspicious number of cases where someone was prayed for directly and they experienced a remarkable recovery which is difficult to explain medically. And I am suggesting that it makes sense to consider this information, and to consider how likely it is due to coincidence, and whether coincidence is even possible. Or whether there is sufficient correlation to infer possible causation, just like the smart farmers. We can choose to allow this information to challenge our viewpoints, or not.
Thanks.
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“But the smart farmers were using the practice based on sensible evidence, and making much larger profits.”
Why didn’t you suggest to the farmers they stop using small paddock rotational grazing, and pray instead ? How much money would they make then ?
Again, you’re not comparing apples to apples in your example.
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Hi Nate,
“Do you think these kinds of events should lead someone to believe in God and/or the supernatural?”
I think that is a fair question you are asking, and I am glad of the opportunity to clarify.
In all my discussions and thinking, I try to distinguish between fact and opinion (though I know there is a blurry line between them). And in most discussions, I try to focus on facts, and if asked about my opinions, to make less definite claims about them. I feel that most people here still don’t understand or appreciate what I am doing, so let me explain a little more.
Facts are the data we should all start from. (1) Some facts we know from personal experience and expertise, but most facts we only know from reading experts, because we have limited knowledge and expertise. That is why I am always referencing scholars and experts, and why I am critical of those who refuse to accept expert evidence. (2) We know facts from evidence. Unfortunately evidence is often unclear, sometimes even conflicting. We should try to consider all the evidence but often we’ll have to make judgments between conflicting evidence. Again, we should be guided by experts who can make these judgments with far more knowledge than we can.
Once we have a reasonable understanding of the relevant facts, we are in a position to form a conclusion or express an opinion. This will be more subjective and relies far less on experts. For example, in deciding who to vote for, I may read experts on economics to understand the facts, but I won’t necessarily follow who the experts would vote for because there are other personal values involved.
So, in this matter, there are facts and opinions. The facts include: there are many claims of miraculous healings, some have been documented, some are difficult/impossible to explain medically, some occurred after people prayed for healing, some are fakes or urban myths, some we can’t say because we have insufficient information. I think those are all facts, and I have been drawing attention to some of those facts and saying they should make us think. I have also expressed my opinion, based on those facts, that divine healing occurs. But I haven’t been pushing that opinion hard, because I have a different worldview to the rest of you and so my conclusions will obviously differ. So I simply say that the facts as we have them are a challenge to your worldview, and I encourage you all to accept that challenge.
Does that explain where I’m at? Thanks.
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Or better yet, “(v. 37) Jacob, however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches.
(v. 38) Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink,
(v. 39) they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted.
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Placing peeled branches in watering troughs is just as effective as prayer.
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Thanks for the clarification, unkleE. 🙂
I think I agree with everything you laid out in your supporting paragraphs, so I’ll just get down to the question, or point, you had for us:
I agree that the facts form a challenge, because they’re currently unexplained. Personally, I’m not bothered enough to question my current position of atheism, but I’m certainly interested in whether or not we ever get satisfactory answers to these things. I think my position is probably much like yours, in that your concerns with the hiddenness of God, the problem of evil and suffering, and why miracles (if that’s what these claims are) aren’t more obvious doesn’t cause you to stop being a Christian (if I’ve misrepresented your position on any of those things, please correct me).
Do you view that as a fair comparison, or have I missed something?
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Hi Nate, I pretty much agree with your summary, and feel very happy we are able to understand each other in this way.
I think there are many evidences relevant to God’s existence – the hiddenness of God, the problem of evil and suffering, and why miracles aren’t more obvious, etc as evidence against as you say, and the existence & design of the universe, miracles and other experiences of the supernatural, rationality, consciousness and ethics, etc, as evidence for.
My judgment is that the ‘for’ arguments are greater in number and in force than the ‘against’ arguments, but I understand other people such as you see things differently. My strongest disagreement is with those, on both sides, who refuse or are unable to see that there are arguments on the other side, even if they don’t rate them as highly.
Thanks. I think this may be a good time for me to ease out of this discussion.
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Hey UnkleE,
My contention is not with the information itself. Indeed, I am suggesting that by the facts as the articles alleged them, there is still not enough information to indicate something “suspicious” is going on. All we have are rare instances of people being cured of something. The rarity does not in itself point to one conclusion over another. The gap of human knowledge also does not in itself point to one conclusion over another.
To use your analogy of farmers, it would be as if they swore by rotational grazing even when they didn’t have increased productivity. If we made it more in line with the linked articles, we would need only 68 out of 200 million to actually have increased productivity. The rest would swear by it and either not have proof of increased productivity or just not have it at all.
I must stress that the implications of what I’m saying is that nothing can be assumed from the facts as they were alleged. All we have are spontaneous healings, prayers or other rituals were around some of them, but also nothing happened on a consistent basis. To infer anything extra is not warranted by these facts.
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I think what those of us on the other side of this issue have tried to point out (over and over again) is that just because two events have a close proximity in time with one another does not necessarily indicate a correlation/causation.
If just prior to hitting a bases-loaded home run, the batter, who had never hit a home run in his career, for the first time in his life, ate a chili-cheese dog, this in no way proves that the chili-cheese dog had anything whatsoever to do with hitting the home run.
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And this caveat: If prayers to Jesus were the only “miracle cure” on the market that had amazing stories of cure attached to it, I would suggest we investigate them. But there are a gazillion “miracle cures” with a gazillion stories of amazing cures for each one of them.
I say, let’s trust science and medical experts, not “faith”.
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