Give Me Just ONE Certifiable Miracle!

Five million sick, crippled and desperate pilgrims visit Lourdes France each year seeking miraculous healing relief. But, in the past one hundred-fifty years, the Catholic Church has recognized only sixty-seven “miracle” healings. Sixty-seven out of millions upon millions of sick prayerful faithful! Interestingly, NOT ONE of those sixty-seven was an amputee. Why?

There are roughly 360 million amputees on Earth. 33% of the Earth’s population is Christian. Let’s broadly assume that approximately a third of those 360 million amputees are Christians. That’s roughly 120 million Christian amputees.

Out of those 120 million Christians alive today, forgetting the millions of Christian amputees who preceded them, how many of them at anytime in their lives prayed over and over to Jesus to have their amputated limbs miraculously restored? My guess is a lot. But, let’s be conservative in our estimate and say a third of them, 40 million, prayed for full restoration of their missing limb(s).

Yet, of those 40 million living Christian amputees who prayed for God to restore their missing appendages not one ... NOT ONE … has ever had that prayer answered in the affirmative.

How do I know this? Because spontaneous regeneration of a human limb, akin to a starfish sprouting a new arm, would be published in every reputable medical journal, headlined in every print media, be all over the internet, broadcast over every radio, TV, and shortwave frequency on the planet. Every doctor and scientist on the planet would be examining this special event with every known piece of technology at their disposal. The churches would be playing it up, praising the Lord till their crucifixes and prayer beads were rubbed to a nub. But no, not a single occurrence, ever.

So, once again the obvious questions remain:
- Why not a single limb regeneration in spite of Jesus’ promises that all prayers of the faithful will be answered?
- Were the prayers answered, but in the negative … EVERY TIME? If so, is it because God hates amputees?
- Or didn’t anyone of these 60 million prayerful Christians, and their predecessors, have enough faith to gain God’s favor and elicit Jesus’ merciful healing power?

Christians are quick to point to anecdotal instances of miraculous prayer healing of so and so’s hemorrhoids, or so and so’s back pain, or some relative’s cancer going into remission (as so many cancer patients undergoing treatment do). But this amputee thing is problematic for them. They actually get angry when it is posed to them.

The usual dodge is: “God doesn’t just dispense healing like a drink dispenser”; or “God is testing their faith.”; or “It’s God’s will, who are we to question it?”; or “God looks at things in ways we can’t comprehend.”; or “Being an amputee builds character.” (Evidently a raging case of hemorrhoids isn’t a character building infirmity.) Tired old platitudinous denials invoked to avoid confronting that fearful faith shattering reality they dare not confront.

Thus, they will go on making up excuses, referring to their apologetics sites, baaing their devotion, defending the indefensible, blaming atheists for this “ridiculous argument”, and refuse to deal with the problem head on, when all along the ugly truth is staring them in the face.