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Even if you can't point to a specific decay you can predict how many atoms will decay, on average, for a given time frame. Your proposed god (if he exists) would be detectable by similar statistical means. If people god favors were cured at a higher rate than the non-religious then that could be shown. His purported miracles are all of the non-measurable kind - situations where the person could have gotten better on their own or were being treated medically. There are thousands of examples of this, like the tumor that Mother Teresa supposedly miraculously cured after her death. But the doctor actually treating the tumor said differently:

Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, who told the New York Times he had treated Besra, said that the cyst was caused by tuberculosis: "It was not a miracle ... She took medicines for nine months to one year."

Now, I have no idea if that is your flavor of religion and if you consider that act a miracle but EVERY reported miracle has similar circumstances. If they were actually happening they could be measured. Which brings us to the real point, why won't God heal amputees?

But measuring over the entire base of Christianity, in a year, there are miracles that happen, healing that occurs, people who are delivered from addiction, and a host of messages to individuals or groups or churches from Him.

Great, please provide the citations for these studies. I have seen several that came to the opposite conclusion but I would love to see your evidence.

Look, it doesn't make sense to believe that an entity exists that created a Universe whose visible extent is 28 billion light years across, whose inferable extent is perhaps ten times that (at least, there is no upper bound that can be established), that contains at least order of Avogadro's number of stars. On the basis of the available evidence, on the basis of our knowledge of things like information theory and the principles of causality and how "intelligence" works, the assertion is absurd in the extreme. So let's start with that.

However, I'm referring to the Standard Model of (Abrahamic) God:

http://whywontgodhealamputees....

or if you want a less polemic definition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Note that one standard attribute is omniscience. Of course, you are free to wrestle with the inconsistent concept any way you like to avoid the serious problems with consistency created by the standard model, but then you can hardly blame others if they brand you heretic and tie you to a metaphorical stake surrounded by kindling (or, in the case of modern Islam, cut your head off). It is not impossible to construct a moderately consistent picture of God -- Pandeism or Panendeism come very close -- but the problem with either one is sentience and theodicy. The Abrahamic faiths are explicitly dualistic, as well (although Vedantic Hinduism, fundamentally a monist pandeism, is not).

Dualism has serious problems -- and I mean mathematical, semantic, ontological, conceptual problems, problems that I do not think can be consistently resolved. One of the very simplest is the problem of "creation", something that we literally have never observed to occur (the physical law in question is "Conservation of Mass-Energy" in case you were wondering). All we have ever seen happen in the real world is for stuff to move around and change form. We never ever observe creation. The human concept of creation is itself an inconsistent myth without any evidence -- when we "make" something, we make it out of something else, invariably and without exception. A second problem is mere set theory. Suppose there is a God (set) and a disjoint Cosmos (set) where I use the term Cosmos to describe a spacetime continuum as distinct from "the Universe" a term I reserve for everything that has objective existence. The Universe, for example, could contain multiple Cosmi, and some theories of quantum mechanics suggest that it does, although personally I think that the evidence supporting this so far is weak in the extreme. But it could also be that our visible Cosmos exists, as does a Lord of the Rings Cosmos or a "Christopher Stascheff Cosmos", with potentially different physics or where magic works. God is supposedly unitary (or again, it Is Not God) in anything like a standard model religion, so clearly:

Universe = God U \sum Cosmi

Stating that "God created the Universe" all by itself is inconsistent -- this is the ontological argument run backwards. Since God (if God exists) logically must be a subset of all things that exist, God did not create all things that exist. If you imagine God and a disjoint Cosmos, the union of the two is strictly greater than God, so the God you have imagined is not God.

This is a small taste of the problems you encounter when you try to figure out how God can think, or how God can experience time or be sentient. Time in physics is a dimension. Experiential time, the time that orders your sentient thoughts, is strictly based on entropy. This is straight up stuff -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... quantifies it and sets limits. Combine this with information theory and encoding, since knowledge in the mind is a process derived from a (very!) imperfect encoding of realit

I personally know 3 religious people who have each had, at one time in their lives, a medically diagnosed condition which was being monitored carefully by their physician after discovery, and that spontaneously disappeared from existence after a period of time ranging from a few weeks to almost a year with absolutely no evident medical explanation

Are you sure they weren't raptured? ...Oh, you mean the *condition* disappeared! Silly me.

Just kidding. Were any of them amputees by any chance?

Why won't god heal amputees?

Hey I've prayed and seen unmistakable healing in backs and eyes.

That is fantastic. Naturally you can demonstrate that the healing would not have occurred anyway without prayer?

You obviously believe in a God who intervenes in the physical world. Nothing is impossible to him, so why won't God heal amputees ?

It would have been much more impressive (and much more headline-worthy), if she and her medical team had grown a replacement arm from an ear, or other pieces of her body. After all, not even $deity can do that.

I think someone needs to re-read Leviticus. Yahweh most certainly hates homosexuals.

And amputees. God hates amputees so much there has never been a miracle restoration of an amputated limb, no matter how much praying is done at Lourdes or other "miracle" sites. Not even an amputated finger or thumb has been restored. God probably also hates paraplegiacs, eunuchs, and a bunch of others, including those who merely lost their adult teeth.

What if we define omnipotence as "can do anything that is logically possible"? As in, not bound by physical laws, but still bound by logical laws?

Hooray! You have just taken the first step in apologetics: God is omnipotent, except for when He isn't - like when it comes to evil and sin. Next step is God is all-loving, except for when He isn't (lake of fire for Gandhi, anyone?), followed closely by God answers all prayers, except for when He doesn't. The list just gets more detailed from there, like zooming in on a fractal image.

Eventually, you end up with a God defined by a few absolutes and a long list of exceptions, to the point where you are effectively an atheist - we say "God does not exist", you say "God exists, except He is constrained in such a way that the universe we observe is equivalent to one in which He does not exist".

So yeah. You just keep on working that apologetics mojo and figuring things out in your head (e.g, why does God hate amputees?), I'll just take the shortcut to rationality.

I thought he just hated amputees.

Then you better check out http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ . It's intellectually unfair picking on religious people (kind of licking pushing around little kids), but I think we have to now days.

That's not really a straw man. There are atheists who actually use that point to argue against miracles. And, IMO, it's a good point. If you believe God heals people, why doesn't he heal amputees? I would be interested in hearing an honest argument why God seems to help people with, say, back pain and not amputees. Of course, these people aren't interested in honest arguments, so whatever.

Why Won't God Heal Amputees?

Proof enough for me!

http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/

Your post became irrelevant the moment you agreed with 'enlightened christians' who have somehow deemed themselves worthy to judge that parts of the bible are literal truth while other parts are not.

You've fallen into the same old dirty hole that all christians fall into. It pretty much defines your religion. You are accepting an obvious interpretation as truth because you happen to agree with it, and raise your nose at other christians with other interpretations (americans in this case).

The moment you decide that it's ok if some parts of the bible are not literal truth, and that it's ok for you to decide which parts are not literal truth, you admit that many interpretations and choices are possible and call into question the ENTIRE bible and destroy the foundations of your beliefs.

All religion is nothing more than our attempts to feel safe in the face of our own mortality, and a mechanism induced by evolution to form cohesive tribes for more successful procreation.

There are ancient cities far older than those built by Solomon that never had a christian, jew, or muslim set foot anywhere near. Using your reasoning, shouldn't we figure out what religions these ancient people followed and convert?

You are an Athiest of sorts and don't even realize it. You don't believe in any of the thousands of gods we worshipped long before the christian god was invented. Come on, take the last step! You are so close!

When the possibility of coincidence is removed, all supernatural happenings vanish.

Ask yourself this: Why won't god heal amputees?

http://www.whywontgodhealamputees.com/

"It has served us well, this myth of Christ" - Pope Leo 10th

But again what does this prove? That it's holy?

Like has been said before: the Christian God would be happy (based on the sort of other prayers the Christian God answers) to give someone their arm, or leg, back after it was amputated. But this has NEVER EVER happened. http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/

So the Christian God (or what you believe it to be) is willing to help your local football team win, but not give an arm back to a devote Christian.

Seems like chance to me.

Proof is for mathematics and not religion.

There is not one iota of evidence for any gods. I recommend everyone to read:
http://www.whywontgodhealamputees.com/
http://www.nobeliefs.com/exist.htm

Yeah? That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

maybe you should tell them to be nice too? Like not bombing abortion clinics, not killing abortion doctors, not attacking and killing gays..

There is nothing more vile than religion and it should be attacked just like we attack terrorists. And every religious person is in dire need of mental healthcare.. It's just 2000+ year old goat herder and camel driver scifi. You don't believe that the shows on the SciFi channel are real, do you? Religion has always been and will always be liars. Why? because it's the only way to promote their stupidity.

Don't believe me? Ask them why their god hates amputees. There is not a single case of an amputee having a limb regrown as a result of prayers. Not one. See http://www.whywontgodhealamputees.com/god5.htm

Baahh.. You are an atheist just like me, it's just that I believe in 1 less god than you do. You are atheist when it comes to every god except the christian god.

Maybe you can tell me why God hates amputees? There is not a single amputee who had had a limb regrown after prayer even though your bible says you can pray for anything and you will get it, ANYTHING!

Considering that even God apparently can't heal amputees.