Can an atheist scientificly explain this?

Question

A person at my church had a type of cancer that was considered by doctors incurable Sickness while she was in the hopspitle we prayed for her and she didnt even no that we prayed for her e becuse she was in the hospitle and she came back like a month later and said that the doctors said that the cancer was gone

and it was not misdiagnosed because the cancer was in here body there were pics and everthinf to prove it and that was the only Time someone had a maor sickness
and also there was a time when we were in a small house and that was our church and we were having a new one build the news said it was going to rain and 5:30 and if it were to raint then they would not be able to do the construction and the time that they would come was 5:30 and it did not rain till they were dont with the contruction

Lois_the_Apo you hae a valik point but god does not play faveriots yes there are plenty of people that died and yes there parents prayed over them but god has the choice to say yes or no he may say no simply because it is your time to go or you have a genreatiol curse on your family and when you say that why did she go to the hospitle in the first place well god could have did that to prove himself and convince athiest to belive

Answer 1

The power of prayer is alive and well. Enjoy the healthy response to this disease. Many such things have been and continue to be recorded.

Answer 2

There are some instances of cancerous tumors spontaneously disappearing. If she was in the hospital, however, I must assume she was there for chemo and radiations treatments, which you don't mention. Cancer is never cured, it simply goes into remission. This means that your friend's cancer could return next month, or two years from now, or ten years from now. If she is very lucky, it won't come back at all. Unfortunately, she will spend the rest of her life never knowing one way or the other--that is the nature of living with cancer.

God does not heal anyone, hon. If he did, your friend would not have needed to go to the hospital in the first place! If miraculous healings were true, then there would be no hospitals, because people could just go to a Christian and get healed. The cemetaries are filled with children who died of disease, accident, or birth defect. Their parents surely prayed over them, with tears and pleadings and much faith, yet their children are now dead. Why does God play favorites? Why would he heal an adult member of your church--who has already had a chance at life--but ignore thousands of children with so much potential? Anyone who believes in miraculous healings is simply counting the hits and ignoring the misses...and you can see all the misses in your local cemetary or hospital.

Answer 3

I can only assume that in your church there have been a number of sick people who have been prayed for just in the same way, but have NOT recovered.


a phenomenon can be explained scientifically only if it is looked at through scientific method. If you had two people (or better two random groups of people) at your church who were sick. One was prayed for and the other was not. If there was a difference between the two, we could say that there was some relationship (not cause though) between recovery and prayer.



Actually there have been some scientific studies (I really should give the source but I dont have the time to be bothered honestly... sorry) doing what I just described. Prayer by others has no statistically significant effect, over a large group. Interestingly, prayer by an individual for their own recovery does seem to have a positive effect, with prayers healing faster than non-prayers.

Does that help you see the "scientific explanation"?

Answer 4

What you have described is, though hardly commonplace, certainly not unheard of. There is clearly a mechanism at work that sometimes cures even advanced cases of cancer. However, it is not god. We don't know what happens in cases like this, but again, it is not god.

How can I be so sure? Well, there are plenty of people afflicted with many awful conditions. Most of them pray. Some of them get better. Most of them die. However, people afflicted by certain conditions (ie, the loss of their legs) are *never* healed, ever.

Now, you point out that "god does not play faveriots," but it seems like when people are praying for certain things he does.

How do you explain this? Why does god *never* step in in these cases?

I think it's entirely possible that sometimes cancer is dealt with by the human immune system (or something else unknown within the body,) but god? I don't think so.

Answer 5

When a doctor says "incurable," he's talking from a medical standpoint. This doesn't mean that the cancer will never be overcome.

There are certain cases in which an infection (usually a viral one) will compete with the cancer and overcome it, only to be overcome by the person. (Sometimes cancer cells even compete with themselves!)

It's a dumb analogy, but think of it as real life Rock, Paper, Scissors where rock = cancer, paper = virus, and scissors = the host. The cancer can beat the host, the virus can beat cancer, and the host can beat the virus.

Yes, this is a rare occurrence and you can attribute it to whatever you want, but this is probably what happened inside her.

Answer 6

A few monthsa ago, I saw on T.V. a study that showed that people who were prayed for after heart surgery were not any more likely to heal than people not prayed for. (Both groups had about a 55% chance of having problems. This amazed me not because it disproved the effectiveness of prayer, but it also showed how bad our country's doctors are at treating heart conditions.) My explanation for your specific case would be that the prayer was irrelevant. Had you not prayed for her, what explanation would you use for what happened to the cancer? That would be the same explanation to use in the situation that actually happened.

Here's an analogy: I carry a rock with me. SInce I've carried the rock in my pocket, no lions have tried to eat me. Therefore, the rock stops lions.
You can obviously see the flawed logic here.

In short, my whole point is that you have no reason to believe that the prayer caused the change. The events were independent of one another.

Answer 7

I am no atheist but I can give you their standard answer to this question: "It is possible for cancers to experience sudden and complete remission. In this case, the cancer tumor(s) are attacked and defeated by the body's immune system and then flushed out like other body waste."

Personally, I believe in miracles of this sort. Just because God uses a 'natural' process to provide a miracle doesn't mean He didn't have a hand in it.

Answer 8

Doctors are wrong lots of times. There are thousands of children born with defects and parents are told they won't live to be such an such age, they are constantly proved wrong. Doctors do ultrasounds and tests on pregnant women and are told their child has a disease, but is born perfectly healthy.
This happens to people who pray and people who don't. Studies have proven that people who are prayed for do not have better health than those who aren't.
It is simply a coincidence.

Answer 9

I can give a partial explanation:

We live in a litigeous age where nobody is willing to take cultibility or responsibility for anything for fear of being sued.

Doctors now-a-days tend to give "worse case" diagnosises. In olden days, they used to give "best case" diagnosises because they understood that hope was a very important factor in curing any disease. These days, they give bad news because if they don't, and something goes wrong, the family of the patient are well within their rights to sue.

It's a stupid rule but it's what we got.

Answer 10

Cancer misdiagnosis, and cancer remission are nopt unusual. There's no way to know what happened, but it certainly need not be miraculous.

Perhaps you'd like to explain why no amount of prayer ever results in a missing limb regrowing, or a cure of a chromosomal anomaly.

Answer 11

Hospital