God Has Stock in the Prosthetic Limb Industry
There’s a website called “Why won’t god heal amputees” that’s been around for a while. As you can guess, the central question is: if God can do anything, why are there no documented cases of human amputees regenerating limbs?
Religious people of all stripes see god and his miracles all over the place, whether it be an unexpected check that helps pay the rent or warming up the entire Vermont wilderness to keep an autistic teen safe.
That I’m aware of, there’s no doctrinal basis in any of the Abrahamic religions to suggest that god can’t regenerate limbs; indeed, if the author of the entire universe can’t put a leg back in place, he needs to get his money back from whatever community college he went to.
I had one friend tell me that god doesn’t heal amputees because “humans aren’t lizards”. Of course, this makes no sense. The Old Testament is full of miracles in which god overturns the laws of physics, including stopping the sun. He created Adam from dirt! How hard can it be for him to put a limb back onto a deserving individual? I see no reason to treat limb regeneration as any different than healing gunshot wounds or curing someone of rabies or cancer.
My guess is that most believers would doubt their faith if they actually sat down to pray in earnest for an amputee. More to the point, I’d guess that very few Christians would actually pray for an amputee, as they know that nothing will come of it. What use is prayer if god arbitrarily and automatically discards certain categories of it? What if you’re drowning on a Tuesday and that happens to be the day he doesn’t help drowning victims? Maybe Thursdays are the night he helps NBA players win games, so he ignores prayers asking for help saving your wife from being raped. Who knows?
Nowhere in the Bible does it say that god won’t heal amputees. Rather, it says repeatedly that prayer will be answered, and that through prayer, all things are possible. Once you start jotting down exceptions to the rule, don’t you have to throw away the entire promise?
Many people will probably say something like “god just hasn’t found a reason to heal an amputee yet.” Given that god has busted out billions of miracles since the start of the universe, isn’t there room to give one person back a limb?
Jesus says the following in Mathew:
I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.
Tell this to an Iraq war veteran with a missing leg, or an African who’s arm has been hacked off with a machete. I’m willing to bet both of them see a big asterisk on the end of that quote.
