Tony, in a weird way I kind of agree with most of what you're saying. I believe that prayer and healing (notions thereof) has been abused by many claiming to be performing works in the name of God. I know that and I can't defend it.
Equally, I fully agree with the concept of a placebo effect; again this is accepted on my part as a likely explanation for some "prayer answering".
I think it is healthy for me to be up front about this, and I genuinely don't mind doing saying these things.
But, the flip side is that I do believe that there are many good and rational reasons to believe in the theistic Christian God. There are a number of deductive reasons philosophically, and for me personally I hold the bible to be His revelation. I therefore know what God is like and what He is capable of doing. Answering prayer is one of these things.
I've raised a query against this before to you - and another one you didn't respond to - why bother to bring this healing incident up as evidence for a particular conclusion then if you already believe the conclusion in the first place? It's not going to conclusively prove it to someone without those priors. Ok, so it's dependent on your experiences and assumptions but those are experiences and assumptions we don't share. Most of those in disagreement with you have given their reasons for thinking why prayer doesn't work in general, and why this case doesn't hold up.
Basically, we're expected to take your assumptions as valid, but you won't hold our conclusions to the same standard. Any time someone has tried to bring in more data to the situation, you just dismiss it unreasonably.
Given that this is a premise based on a variety of good and rational reasons, it follows for me that it is good enough and rational to believe that some prayers can be answered. Not all prayers are answered, and some are answered in a way that might not be obvious to us.
Of course some prayers can be answered, but if we grant that and your cherry-picking of this one case, no-one has then claimed that it definitely ISN'T God causing it. All that's been said is it's inconclusive. You're making an extrapolation from the general to the specific without any specific and conclusive evidence.
Given those priors, it's POSSIBLE it was a miraculous healing, sure - again, no-one has claimed otherwise. But without conclusive evidence, the best answer is "we don't know what caused this".
Neither of you have said why this answer is less preferable than having to have a definite claim of causation.
Given all of this, I hold the view that Danny's healing was an answer to prayer because of the reasons I given throughout this thread. I am perfectly aware of the fake claims of miracle healings, and actually this saddens me because it takes away from this true and honest account that Danny has provided.
But that's precisely why your account has been questioned, and no mere notion of automatic respect will do for a skeptic on this matter.
You've both basically admitted that we're right to distrust healing claims at large, but suddenly two exceptions to a very long rule of quackery have come along, and it just happens to be you two? Sorry, not buying it.
The fact that there is so much faith healing quackery out there just raises the level of proof you need to be convincing - and that's not our fault. Get angry at those in your own house who have given this healing method such a bad reputation, if it really does indeed heal. At best one can conclude that you are honestly mistaken - that's not an insult, it happens to all of us.
I believe that there are several good reasons to believe that Danny's account is as described in terms of it's explanation, but of course they all hinge on establishing the existence of the God we claim to believe in. I also think there are good reasons to reject some of the alternative explanations that offered - but I do this with respect for people putting these suggestions forward.
Again, your opinions are not automatically afforded respect just because your egos/credibility are being questioned - and frankly, I think that's why you expect us to believe you and your tiny-sample-sized correlation against the mountain of evidence against faith healing being anything other than charlatanry - because it's you and your story - and you don't like being thought of as wrong or mistaken.
