Faith Healing – Real or Fake?
Is the modern faith healing phenomena real? It is possible that God can and even does heal today. But there is good evidence what we seeing is not genuine healing activity but charismania.
EVIDENCE HEALINGS BEING FAKED
Miracles in the Bible were always immediate, successful and permanent.[1] One might also add that they were verifiable (Acts 3:8-10). In contrast, when the healings of so-called miracle workers are examined today, they fall short of the New Testament description.
Oral Roberts claimed to have raised people from the dead. When pressed to give reporters examples, he mentioned one girl who, turns out, had merely fainted in a church service.[2]
Vineyard claims that “hundreds of people [are] healed every month.” [3] However, when pressed, John Wimber gave an example of one woman who was eighty-percent healed of a condition and others who “slowly recovered” over time.[4]
Benny Hinn claimed to have performed seventy-six miracles at a crusade in Portland. However, when asked to supply the names for an HBO television special, just five names were provided. Each case was followed for one year with the following results: (1) a grandmother with seven broken vertebrae later said pain merely lessened; (2) a man hurt in logging accident thought he was healed but afterward could not even dress himself because of pain; (3) a lady with mild hearing loss later made a normal recovery; (4) a girl suffering from shortness of breath continued to suffer; (5) a girl thought she was healed from cancer but died nine months later.[5]
There are examples of miracle workers outright faking miracles. W. V. Grant was caught telling healthy people to sit in wheelchairs and wait until he told them to stand.[6] Perhaps the most embarrassing was in 1986 when Peter Popoff was caught using a wireless earpiece to dupe his audience into thinking he had the power of God to heal. It turned out his wife was reading the details of the prayer cards to her husband over a radio transmission.[7] A man with a wireless scanner recorded Popoff’s wife transmitting the data to him in real-time and revealed the scam on the Johnny Carson Show.
ALTERNATE EXPLANATIONS FOR “HEALINGS”
Dr. William A. Nolen, Chief of Surgery at a hospital in Minnesota believes that the miracle workers he observed were using the power of suggestion to affect peoples’ bodies to bring about real healings.[8] This is called psychosomatic healing and is known to be a real phenomenon. The mind can affect the body to induce healing. People may simply get better by believing in their treatment.
The mind can have such an influence on the body that one man “laughed himself well of cancer.”[9] A woman’s mind can convince her body that she is pregnant. This is called “false pregnancy” and it produces the same symptoms as a real-pregnancy (minus the baby). Because of the psychosomatic effect, pharmaceutical companies must factor in the “placebo” when evaluating the effectiveness of their medications. Nonetheless, psychosomatic healings do not qualify for biblical miracles.
Others believe faith healers are using hypnosis to convince people they are healed on stage in front of the crowd. Mark Haville is a former faith-healer who confessed,
I learned gradually to do what all these speakers like Copeland, Cerullo, Benny Hinn and others do. They manipulate audiences and individuals simply by the power of suggestion… The techniques are no different to those used by any practicing hypnotist… the people in these meetings are already coming with high expectancy… They are psychological techniques – nothing else.[10]
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- Norman L. Geisler, Signs and Wonders (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1988), 28, 29. ↑
- Ibid., 71. ↑
- John Wimber in Ibid., 120. ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- Joe Nickell, “Benny Hinn: Healer or Hypnotist?,” The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, accessed July 8, 2018, https://www.csicop.org/si/show/benny_hinn_healer_or_hypnotist. ↑
- Geisler, Signs and Wonders, 64. ↑
- Robert A. Steiner, “Exposing the Faith-healers,” The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, accessed July 8, 2018, https://www.csicop.org/si/show/exposing_the_faith-healers. ↑
- Abell in Geisler, Signs and Wonders, 20. ↑
- Ibid., 80. ↑
- Mark Haville and Peter Glover, “Ex-Faith Healer Mark Haville Explains the Tricks of the Fake Faith Healing Trade,” The Word on The Word of Faith, May 26, 2009, https://thewordonthewordoffaithinfoblog.com/2009/05/26/ex-faith-healer/. ↑