'Splain this one Atheists...

[Seth]

I know, I know, it's god. Though which one as there is over 2,500 of the fuckers.

Does it matter to the girl and her family?

[Seth]

INB4: "He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust alike."

How come He doesn't do it "Each to their kind" like He does with every other goddamned thing? Answer that one, theologians.

Erm, because he's God...duh.

[piscator]

If God don't have to do what's right then there is no right, only whim.
If God has to do what's right, then the right is more powerful than the God.

[JimC]

Seth wrote:

If you have critically robust scientific or medical evidence showing what caused this unusual recovery, then present it. If you don't...well...why should anyone believe you and not them?

It is a long way from "no-one in this particular case has yet analysed the nature of the recovery" to " we don't know what caused it, therefore the prayer must have caused the recovery"

Do you think that harried medical staff routinely perform an intricate investigation of every recovery from coma to pin down the precise reasons (part of which will involve random events in any case)? No, they breath a sigh of relief, and move on...

Plenty of similar recoveries occur without a single prayer being uttered, and plenty of unfortunates never recover despite plenty of praying.

I repeat, one anecdote of this nature proves or disproves nothing.

[piscator]

Grammar edit:
If God don't have to do what's right then there is ain't no right, only whim.
If God has to do what's right, then the right is more powerful than the God who wants to violate it, and it should be worshiped and groveled before instead, if you're into the whole "Worshiping and Groveling" scene.

[Animavore]

I'm not a qualified expert and wouldn't even know how to read the x-ray, CRT or MRI charts, or even know what qualifies as a tolerable level of brain damage.

So why the fuck are you asking me to explain it? You should be going to a nuerologists' forum if you genuinely seek answers.

[pErvinalia]

He prefers to troll us, I believe.

[Animavore]

I wouldn't even be interested enough in such an unremarkable, everyday case to bother seeking an explanation, and attempting to do so by making up plausible scenarios is just playing into trolls' hands. An explanation will be found or it won't be. Sit back and wait.

Now if her body was found in the stage of livor mortis, a condition which will have the paramedics pronounce you dead on the scene without debate, and her family prayed and she came back from that, that might make me stand up and take notice. That to me would be a case which would demand an explanation. Hell that would be front page, international news.

The story in the OP barely makes it past the local headlines.

[pErvinalia]

Seth doesn't worry about credibility when trolling.

[Svartalf]

I even have doubts about the veracity of the OP story... plenty such uplifting fictions repertoried on Snopes.com

[Hermit]

To be fair, the Mikkelsens had four years to address this particular case. Then again, there are so many similar stories which turn out to be bullshit that they would either get snowed in, or they might simply have decided that this one is so much more of the same that it is pointless to run it through the debunking process too.

Personally, I don't care either way. Like Strontium Dog, I'll be pricking up my ears when prayer is convincingly shown to be responsible for replacing an amputated leg.

[Svartalf]

I've used prayer for asthma relief, but any process that calms you down is as efficient.

[rainbow]

Many people who have won the lottery prayed the day before, therefore...

[Svartalf]

therefore they were lucky

[rachelbean]

Only the most robust scientific cases get printed in the Daily Mail. I believe in God again