Alpha Course - Day Nine

So the course trundled into the penultimate session, entitled "Does God Heal Today?". A sparse attendance seemed to indicate a general disinterest or exhaustion with things. At one point, at around 7.20pm, there seemed a genuine danger that I would be the only person present, among eight or so, that wasn't affiliated to the church in any way. I was starting to feel that things would be boiled down to the bare essentials - the combined arms of the Christian soldiers trained on me, the sole "disbeliever". All of the paraphenalia of creating an inclusive and politely moderated "discussion" would be abandoned and we'd just grapple and flail wildly, smashing eachother other the head with bibles and "The Origin of the Species". I don't know what conclusion I can draw from the attendance dropping off - attrition was always anticipated I think.

The course clearly hasn't been designed purely for me, but if I'm the only one left, then everything that happens is essentially for my benefit only. Fortunately a few more familiar faces attended a few minutes later which allayed these fears for the time being, but next week perhaps it really will be a case of me vs. the Christians. An enormous panel interview for a job I don't want.

This was a controversial week. The conviction was that God can heal, does heal, and moreover does it in some kind of demonstrable way. Yet again, the issue I found difficult was the fact that people's "experiences" of these things are generally meaningless in a wider context. This was an intensely difficult week in which to articulate these feelings in front of an audience with an overwhelmingly opposite view. People were there awash with first-hand experiences which were both entirely real to them and which they essentially considered hard evidence that God's healing worked. Moreover, they had an emotional investment in believing it - family and friends had been "healed" and they maintained that they had witnessed this power directly, with their own eyes.

In a similar way to the "trilemma" of CS Lewis (see Week One), these experiences and "testimonies" left us only three options according to the speaker - that he was a liar, that he was insane or that he was telling the truth. This was again hugely disingenuous I think. There are many more options than this - that he could be deceived through no fault of his own, that he could be mistaken, that he could be witnessing nothing more than a coincidence, that the power of suggestion and not the power of God was at work, that the "placebo effect" could be the underlying reason, that the person who claimed to be ill was actually nothing of the sort - there are many factors that could be at work here, and the tactic of compartmentalising my approach for me (the inference that I am either calling him insane, a liar or therefore in a tortured leap of false logic have to accept he's telling the truth) was actually quite irritating. I wondered how often on other courses, people who were more inclined to surrender or suspend their disbelief had simply ended up "going along with it" for fear of upsetting people.

For me, the key point to this is that reality is a point of view. My reality is mine alone - the other attendees inhabited their own. There's no "bridging" possible with experiences that weren't shared. That's not to suggest the others were in a "dream world" or living a lie, any more than I am applying that diagnosis to myself - it's merely accepting the fact that you can't adequately recreate the circumstances which led you to believe something, or ask anyone else to believe those things, based on your own experiences alone. Bridging those realities, however eloquent and poetic you might be as a speaker, is always going to be problematic with something as "mysterious" as faith. Even a persausive speaker cannot convince someone (or more pertinently me) that these are real things. No doubt there's a stock Christian answer to this - that we can't individually prove "air" is there, or as someone said in a previous week, we can't directly prove that we have a "brain" (the idea being that there's no visible evidence of either and that we "choose to believe it", ergo we should apply this "leap of faith" to God as well).

It's entirely true that we can't, in isolation, prove these things without a great deal of equipment and expertise. But we have a system of logic, pure, cold logic called science which operates on a series of basically accepted assumptions, which stand up to scrutiny. Science welcomes being tested. It thrives on it and loves it. God doesn't. The comparison ends there.

In any case, I'm getting slightly ahead of myself here. The speaker was a young, trendily dressed guy called Liam with cool hair and who was as thin as a rake. Essentially he was just like me. Jealousy aside, he was enthusiastic, clear and unperturbed by the usual Costa obstacles that hinder the "talks" at this venue. He started with a bit of background - how he had been brought up a Christian in a Salvation Army household, how he had found another calling at the Kerith church and how he had followed that instead. He talked us through, in by-now familiar fashion, how he had become a Christian, recounting his experience at a summer camp at 13, how he had been "weirded out" by some of the more evangelical aspects, but how he had felt a "physical presence" sit next to him and then physically embrace him, which had cemented his future as a Christian. He felt he was called to be a "youth pastor for life" and that this triggered an absolute certainty that God loved him. This set up his credentials for the rest of the speech, which was basically a list of his experiences of "God healing people". Having established previously in this entry my issues with these testimonies, this was nothing more than a long list of things I couldn't believe or relate to. They ranged from Liam praying for the healing of a man with a lazy eye, someone with a broken finger, people with athsma and a person with an injured knee from falling off a skateboard. He went on to say that sometimes his prayers weren't answered, and gave the example of the time he had unsuccessfully prayed for someone with an abnormal curvature in their spine.

In retrospect I don't just find this unbelievable, I find it slightly insulting. The idea that God will intervene and help someone out with a broken finger in Bracknell because someone prays for it, but the prayers of people who are simply starving to death in the third world go un-answered as a consequence of "free will".

Also, Liam made a link between his own "healing rate" and how well he lived his life and emulated Jesus (whose healing rate was naturally 100%). He stated that everything Jesus did in the bible is "repeatable" by someone with the same amount of faith or the same "relationship with God", but that we all fall short of that "gold standard". I find this insistence that we're all imperfect tiresome. I know I'm not perfect. I don't see that as a motivator to embrace something with no evidence. The Christian God demands something that is clearly unrealistic. Not satisfied with us throwing ourselves at his feet now and again, he also demands of his creation levels of behaviour which we are clearly not designed to be able to meet. And as the argument goes that God himself created us, then he turned out a faulty product. A product that wasn't fit for purpose. That pocket-watch in the middle of the desert analogy, so beloved of creationists? Well it strikes me there's an extension to it.

If you did find that pocket-watch, and it was broken, or it told the wrong time consistently, or it fell to pieces when dropped - whose fault would that be? If you wanted to bring someone to account for such unsatisfactory performance would you take the cogs and workings and flywheels to court, or would you sue the manufacturer? Who has the final authority and therefore the final responsibility? The answer is God. So it seems to me that we're constantly having to make amends for his shoddy workmanship, if you accept that he exists.

In terms of the biblical support for such healing, Liam stated that Jesus only performed healing which was in-tune and synchronised with God's wishes (using the example from John where the invalid was commanded to take up his bed and walk). I think this was supposed to indicate that the idea of healing should always be linked back to God's will, and that neatly explains why some people aren't healed - God simply didn't 'will' it that way. As such, those that can commune most closely with God and identify his will most effectively are those that would superficially appear to be blessed with the ability to heal others; the "healers" are merely channelling the will of God.

Furthermore, the key text seems to come from Matthew 10:8, where the disciples were given the command to "Go out and heal the sick". As context is so often stated to be so important when reading the bible, it's tempting to conclude this was an order given specifically by Jesus purely to the disciples rather than a generalised order to every Christian forever from that point onward. If we're to take this as the way things should be, then why is the first part of that command "Do not go out among the Gentiles" ignored? Is only part of it supposed to be applicable to everyone? On the face of it, chapter 10 as a whole looks like a very specific instruction to go out and do something at that particular time, interspersed with some general indications about conduct. As a slight digression, at one stage of chapter 10, the words command us to love Jesus more than our own mother or father, and more than our own children. At another, the town that refuses to welcome the disciples is said to be destined to suffer a worse fate than befell Sodom and Gomorrah (e.g. total summary destruction). These again are not words of love to me. In the first instance, the emphasis is on some kind of blind loyalty over and above your own family, where you should be prepared to betray or sacrifice them to appease God if necessary, and the second is purely an expression of revenge. I personally cannot reconcile either with the idea of a loving God.

The speech ended with Liam re-iterating his absolute faith that God's healing both existed and worked, and we split into loose groups, with Liam initially joining the other group for their discussion. Yet again, I was volunteered for the duties of speaking first, this time by the "wavering" lady I had mentioned previously. With genuine reluctance I stated that I felt that God was always the simplest, easiest, most straightforward response to any and all "odd occurrences", mainly because you can't contradict it/him. You just end up in a situation with one person asserting it was evidence of God, and another asserting it wasn't. That's not a solution, or proof, it's simply the absence of both - an odd kind of vacuum which precludes you from really looking at other reasons. I stated that Liam's experiences and recollections weren't enough for me to throw my hands in the air and cry that I believed them. I stated that humans are inquisitive, and they want to discover the root cause of things by their very nature (the nature that God presumably created). In a roundabout way, I alluded to the idea that something "external" like God suffices as an explanation where none is immediately apparent. That we pin all sorts of stuff on God that we can't adequately explain ourselves, because we always need an explanation or a pattern or something comprehensible in those terms - even if the explanation is that it's the intervention of an invisible deity. We can still compartmentalise that and tick our investigative boxes. The unexplained holds a mystery, but there's no particular joy in that mystery - it simply engages us to try and solve it - the mystery itself is only compelling because it invites a solution.

The response to my observations was to come back with even more examples of things I wasn't present at, can't be confirmed or scrutinized and rely totally on subjective interpretation. The various tales were offered forth, some of which I had heard before, and I listened patiently as usual. I asked what the point of prayer was if everything was pre-ordained in God's plan. The response was that "some things could change". I stated that this wasn't free will in that case - if God could change plans in response to things like prayer, then who knows how that would affect other people.

I asked if God could heal gunshot wounds - he can "heal anything" was the response.

I asked where the free will was of the person pulling the trigger - he had decided by his free will that the other person should die, only for God to then compromise this expression of free will and heal the person who had been shot.

Incidentally, this free will was given as the exact reason that God WON'T intervene in cases where entire countries are racked by civil war or are starving to death. We're told that there's a complex network of free will at work - that those in charge have decided the fate of their countries in that way and that it's not God's fault. However, if he can heal completely, seemingly at random, or according to his own agenda, where does that leave free will? Every action has a reaction - there's an intricate series of repercussions from even small things we do in life. Crucially, it would seem that the freedom of our will does not extend to freedom from interference from God himself, which makes it far from "free" by any normal definition.

We were also told that demons could empower people with the ability to heal - this was new to me, but Lee stated there were passages in the bible where these "false healers" - people who were not Christian but could heal the sick - were exorcised by the disciples. So it would seem that healing isn't even exclusively a "Godly" thing, that non-Christians can be healed, that it doesn't work all the time, and it can't be measured or proven. This seems to me essentially a description of Father Christmas.

I asked if there had been occasions when prayer hadn't worked. Liam stated that there were many - that he fell short of the "100% success rate" of Jesus himself.

I used the comparison of a dice roll, stating that if I rolled ten 6's in a row, it wouldn't mean that I was magical in any way, that this was just a demonstration of the nature of chance.

If I stood next to 100 ill people and flipped a coin each time, the correlation between those who were going to get better (heads) and not get better (tails) wouldn't be too different to someone praying for them I asserted. The conclusion being that no-one has built an altar to a coin.

It was put to me as things wound down that I valued empirical fact and needed to be satisfied intellectually before any "sensation" or "experience" counted. In some ways that's true. The only way I could embrace Christianity would be through a combination of suspending disbelief, and ignoring the parts I find totally abhorrent. Then I am only lying to myself, and any 'embrace' would be hollow.

Lee and the wavering lady then exchanged a short conversation, in which it was implied that some prohetic words were spoken between them. This was interesting but felt a bit like eavesdropping to be honest; from what I could tell, Lee had said something to her at the away day that was startlingly accurate or prescient. The lady had taken this image away with her, and it had caused a great deal of tension for her at home, up until the point her husband had returned from going out for a walk and said quite unexpectedly "I feel like I need God right now". Resisting the temptation to make a joke here, and knowing a little bit about her, this seemed genuinely uncanny. No-one pried, and as such, I sat back and listened to them talk with no real insight as to what had happened - it all seemed rather cryptic. On some levels I was jealous that I hadn't had any prophetic words. No-one had told me that the colour purple and the number 6 were going to be important in the coming week. Slightly flippant, but all the same I couldn't help but speculate as to the nature of this message.

It was an interesting coda to a good, if slightly frustrating session. I'd give this one an 8/10 as we ramp up for the grand finale.