Which conclusions are you talking about? Shalini didn’t give any but one, that there are no miracles to account for.

In each case, your paraphrasings of Shalini’s arguments are made instead from straw and not from any argument of Shalini in this post.

Bad reading comprehension leads to wrong ideas about what you read.

Just a note about your conclusions from this piece.

Your accounting for supposed faith healings (fraud, mistaken diagnoses…you list nine) may very well be all true. It seems to be true that God hasn’t healed amputees with any regularity. That is all fine and dandy.

BUT, you use these points to support the conclusion that God is imaginary. Unfortunately for you, your conclusion is unsupported by your premisses. Your logic seems to go like this:

1. Some people who think they are healed instead have gone into spontaneous remission.
2. Therefore God does not exist.

or…

1. Some people fraudulently call themselves faith healers.
2. Therefore God is imaginary.

or…

1. I have never experienced God healing an amputee.
2. Therefore God does not exist.

In each case, your conclusion is totally unrelated to your premiss. Even if your premiss and conclusion are both true, the conclusion is unrelated and therefore unsupported by those premisses.

Bad philosophy leads to wrong ideas about the world.

The evidence up to this point very strongly suggests it doesn’t! We can obviously never say that faith healing does not work period. Nevertheless, we must go where the evidence, and logic, leads us and both lead to the conclusion that very likely it is bogus.

On the other hand, I would be the very first one that would welcome evidence of God’s existence and that prayer heals. Can you imagine how easy life would become? I guess that’s the sort of comfort that the religious folks get out of it.

Nice work Shalini, very well written indeed!