All religious people who believe in a personal God can give accounts of how the creator of the universe has responded to prayers made on behalf of sick people. These accounts will usually be a combination of scriptural “proof”, hearsay examples given by their religious leaders, and possibly examples from their own personal experience:

“Brother so and so was declared terminally ill, the doctors gave him 3 months to live, so we formed a prayer circle and we all prayed for a whole week and then he started to get better and the doctors were amazed and said they couldn’t explain why, and now he is completely disease free!”

It’s hard to find any religious person who doesn’t have at least one version of this story fixed in their minds. But how can they know for sure that it was God responding to prayer that caused this person to be cured? To establish if prayer really works we need to eliminate all cases where co-incidence is a possibility. Cancer remissions and other similar unexplained medical recoveries don’t prove anything because these “miracles” also occasionally happen to non-religious people and people who are not being prayed for. But what about amputees and people paralysed because of severed spinal chords? These people never get better naturally, or by surgery or by medicine.

In all of recorded history there must have been many thousands of these unfortunate people who were devoutly religious, humble and sincere servants of their God. They must also have been the subject of millions of prayers – prayers asking God to make them well again.

If God listens to prayers and sometimes cures people of a variety of ailments, some of which are not life threatening, why has He never, ever seen fit to cure a person with a severed limb or spinal chord?

Do not doubt the significance of this question. At first reading it may sound flippant but it is deadly serious. The legitimacy and credibility of all religions that believe in a personal god hinges on how they answer this question.

Religious people are usually pleased to discuss the power of their God. Apparently He created the universe in a few days, He turned water into wine, He parted the Red Sea, He cured blindness and leprosy and even raised people from the dead. This God also sees fit, as a matter of course, to enable lizards to re-grow their tails if they are cut off. If God can do all this and, seemingly regularly, destroy inoperable cancerous tumours surely the repairing of a broken spinal chord or the re-growing of a limb should be no problem at all.

The question bears repeating: If God listens to prayers and sometimes cures people of a variety of ailments, some of which are not life threatening, why has He never, ever seen fit to cure a person with a severed limb or spinal chord? If the omnipotent, omniscient "loving" god of the bible or Koran really exists why would he discriminate against paralyzed people and amputees?

This is the point where religious people start to shift uneasily on their feet. "Well, maybe there have been limbs re-grown that we don't know about." "Maybe in God's eyes there hasn't been an amputee worthy of being cured." "Maybe God thinks to carry out such obvious miracles would make belief in him too easy." "We shouldn't question God's choices as to when and how he intervenes in human affairs." There is no limit to the mental gymnastics religious people will perform to avoid facing, what for them, is a terrible truth:

God never cures people with severed limbs or spinal chords because either God doesn't exist, or if he does, he never responds to any prayer.

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