Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

The hot tea melts the chocolate that the teapot is made of, and I get too much melted chocolate in my tea.

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

One should distinguish between two claims.

Claim one: The child was bitten by a snake, became unconscious, and recovered after being prayed for by an evangelist.

Evidence: Mother's statement substantially corroborated by evangelist. (Strictly speaking mother claimed that child claimed that she was bitten by snake, evangelist claimed that mother claimed that child's unconscious state was due to snake bite.) However this is prima-facie basically reliable and corroborated eyewitness evidence.

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

Claim two: The child stopped breathing after being bitten and did not breath again until prayed for by evangelist roughly three hours afterwards.

Evidence: Only mother's statement (evangelist at most could only corroborate that mother claimed at the time that child had not been breathing for three hours but I suspect that the claim that the child had not been breathing for three hours only took its present form when the mother was telling the story to Keener many years later. Note how Keener has to ask mother how long between child stopping breathing and child reaching evangelist and after thought mother guesses three hours.)

Accepting FTSOA that mother at the time believed that her child had stopped breathing for some considerable time. The mother's testimony is prima-facie unreliable, she is desperately trying to get her very sick daughter to someone who might possibly help before it is too late, she is not carrying out careful tests to distinguish between cessation of breathing and the weak breathing in some forms of unconsciousness.

Hence we have prima-facie quite good evidence for claim one but very weak evidence for claim two.

Andrew Criddle

Originally Posted by Steven Carr

Craig Keener is a Biblical scholar.

http://www.charismamag.com/index.php...he-still-heals

Here is an example of the standards he sets.

'When Thérèse was 2 years old, she cried to her mother that a snake had bitten her. By the time Antoinette Malombé reached her daughter, little Thérèse had already stopped breathing.

Antoinette lived in a remote region of Republic of Congo in central Africa where medical resources weren’t immediately available. Strapping her child to her back, she started running to a village where a family friend, evangelist Coco Moïse, was staying. When he prayed for Thérèse, she began breathing again. By the next day she was fine.


This account was reported to me directly by Antoinette. When I spoke more with her about it, I asked how long Thérèse had gone without breathing. She paused and thought about the distance she had to traverse to reach the evangelist’s village and said it took her about three hours.

The human brain suffers irreparable damage after only six minutes without oxygen, even if the person can be artificially revived. Thérèse had gone close to 180 minutes without taking a breath. Yet she suffered no brain damage—as she herself can attest to today, many years later. Thérèse recently completed seminary.

I am married to her younger sister, Médine Moussounga Keener, and Antoinette is my mother-in-law. Though not meaning to question my relatives’ account of Thérèse’s healing, I nonetheless checked with Moïse, just to be sure, and he confirmed the story as I had heard it.'


The Congo also has many documented stories of child witchcraft. Sometimes the child witches are killed.

As Dr. Keener believes all stories told to him by Christians in the Congo, why is he against killing child witches, as Christians in congo can produce many, many stories of witchcraft done by children?


Why is Biblical scholarship filled with people whose standards for accepting the supernatural are so low that they cannot even be parodied, or ridiculed, just gawped at?

Originally Posted by Steven Carr

Yes, the evangelist said the child was not breathing.

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

By the way, for anyone who is curious, it turns out that someone really did succeed in producing and using a chocolate teapot (TheNakedScientists.com).

Originally Posted by Solo

I am not sure how Dr Keener proposes to establish the causal effect of the prayer on the healing. What woud be the controls here ? Or is the mere fact that child recovered subsequent to being prayed for asserted as evidence for a miracle ? If so, we do not have as much a miracle here, as perhaps a child blessed with a strong immune system and a case of circular reasoning by someone who wants some credit for it.

Best,
Jiri

Originally Posted by Steven Carr

And Keener then presents these claims at an SBL meeting, and is not thrown out, even when he claims people have risen from the dead in the Congo?

So why should we not accept Christian claims that there are child witches in the Congo?

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

Hi Jiri

I agree this is anecdotal evidence. (As are many claims for relief by conventional medical means, a worrying amount of conventional medical treatments have never had rigorous controlled trials.) What one makes of stories like this will depend to some extent upon ones previous biases and presuppositions.

Originally Posted by Solo

I think there is a subtle difference here, Andrew. Humans have the capacity to exaggerate (or confabulate substantially) what they have seen to convince others of the efficacity of certain beliefs, or conduct. Ruth Benedict, the prominent anthropologist and pupil of Franz Boas, recounted (in The Chrysantemum and the Sword (or via: amazon.co.uk)) a popular tale told by the Japanese Imperial Army officers, in which a wounded soldier delivered a message entrusted him at an Army HQ and immedately collapsed. The examining doctor testified that the man had been dead for hours. I suspect that like with the Dr Keener story, we will not get the factual basis of the story, but we know why the story was told.

Best,
Jiri