Does God cure?

Well I guess most of you have heard of Breakthrough - the Christian NGO which devotes itself for teenage work. I am quite a personal fan of theirs, and some months ago I posted a theological question on their website, I didn't hope for a reply, but then, though late, here it was posted on their wall.

This is what I asked, I shall post their reply in the next post.

And you can see the original post here:
http://www.uzone21.com/umentor/display.ctrl?letterBoxId=6325

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Nowadays, we Christians quite often pray for something and wish God to make it true. In particular I want to focus on the point - "pray for cure".

Not uncommonly we heard stories of Christians claiming that God has cured his/her diseases and now become healthy again. Yes indeed the disease was cured, but can we attribute the cure to God's action?

I have two disturbing questions.

1) In fact, we can perform Randomised Control Trials (this is how effacacy of new drugs are tested) to examine God's action on disease. One patient group with nothing + Another group with others praying for them (which they don't know), then we observe for any change in disease outcome, quite scientifically. I can postulate that the results would be similar in two groups. If so, what can we say?

2) Seems the testimonies at church always focus on 內科 diseases (like cancer, pneumonia), does anyone dare to pray for a person with amputation? I can bet on my life that the amputated leg will never grow again no matter how hard we pray. Some try to explain by that God would act against the natural laws he set, but reversing a growing cancer is so much beyond natural laws too - just that we can't see it. How can we explain our faith in believing God will cure cancer, but at the the same time seeing a never-healed-amputee?

* I hate it when christians answer by saying "we cannot examine God". Yes I agree, but if God is actually doing something, by no way He could escape (and I believe He doesn't need to) from the experimental trials, because we are just showing the reality from statistics.

Thank you very much for your reply, I do not aim to challenge, but I really wish I can pray without blind faith, and get a closer relationship to God, both rationally and mentally.

Regards,
James


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(To be continued)