This post on the Platform Formerly Known As Twitter was passed along by a "technical" philosopher still working on his Ph.D., with the remark "People are making fun of this, but it worked."
My first thought was to wonder if the man was able to extract himself because of the hour-long prayer session, or because the woman's muscles simply relaxed after awhile, as I think one would expect. It probably didn't save them money, because holy men expect compensation for their services. You could argue that distracting them for an hour "worked," but it wouldn't mean that the prayer and preaching were direct causes. Or, going on the reasonable assumption that the goal was to get many views for the video, you could say that it worked: two days ago the video had 230 thousand views. A philosopher should be able to do better than this.
My second thought was that the video was very likely staged. My third was that from the description, it appears that the man and woman were not married to each other, and that the Lord was imposing the due penalty for their sin on the fornicators (or adulterers?), showing his infinite mercy by letting them go after a little time, while putting a little cash in the pocket of his servant. My fourth is that there are people who need divine intervention a lot more than these two.
I also thought of a quip ascribed to the glorious snarkmeister Bernard Shaw, about the healing site at Lourdes: "All those canes, braces and crutches, and not a single glass eye, wooden leg or toupee." I haven't been able to confirm the source, but what matters is the point. Jesus, according to the gospels, healed a man with a withered hand, and restored life to a man who'd been dead four days. (According to Matthew, many people who'd been dead for much longer than that came to life when Jesus was crucified.) One of the most famous Christian healing sites doesn't even come close to such feats.
While trying to find a source for the supposed Shaw quip, I found an odd article which quoted it, and tried to answer it.
Point taken, but somewhere in that logic a greater miracle is missed. Consider the cripple. Assuming he was not faking it, the fact still remains that he was able to discard his walking support. Hardnosed rationalists would not call that a miracle. They'd say that if such an event occurred at all, it was probably due to some psychosomatic effect - if they didn't say it was a placebo thing outright.
And that's the common everyday miracle they would be missing; how does the mind effect the body? Consider amputees next. Over 50% of people who have an arm or leg surgically removed report what is called "phantom pain" in parts of the limb which is no longer there. Medical science doesn't have a coherent theory why this happens though, amazingly, medications, including placebos, can reduce the pain.
So phantom pain is a miracle? I've noticed that Christian apologists often try to confuse the meaning of "miracle." They point to the glory of sunrise, the wonder of biological reproduction, and other everyday events and call them miracles.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”
If everything is a miracle, then nothing is. Nobody marveled when Jesus walked on land, though it was just as miraculous on this logic, and a literal act of God; they marveled when he walked on water. Nobody marveled when Mary gave birth; they marveled that she had conceived without sexual intercourse. There's dispute among philosophers and theologians as to what a miracle is, whether it involves violations of the laws of nature for example. It's true that earthquakes, plagues, and other events have been called acts of God, though many modern Christians are uneasy about doing so. So it's conceivable that the eventual separation of the Kenyan fornicators might have been Jesus' doing. But any other god could have been responsible, or none at all.
Just because something is unexplained, and never may be explained, that doesn't make it a miracle. Invoking placebos is an attempt to dodge the question, to distract. The point of the quip about Lourdes is that an all-powerful god's ability to work wonders of healing has some intriguing blind spots. Get back to me when a placebo makes a missing eye or limb grow back.
Later the same day that I saw the Kenyan video, YouTube pointed me to this video. (A miracle! It couldn't be mere coincidence!) The man who makes them, Andrew Henry, is a biblical scholar. Unlike some other YouTube biblical scholars I could name, his videos are well-planned and organized. This one is about reported appearances by the Virgin Mary to ordinary people, which have been happening for centuries. I learned quite a lot from it, and it occurred to me that when Protestant apologists deride scholars for disbelief in the supernatural, they don't seem to have in mind Fatima or Guadalupe or the many other sightings Andrew Henry discusses. Why not? Don't they believe in the supernatural? I'll have to ask about this the next time I encounter this accusation.
