The Bible and Medicine

I have noted before that fundamentalists get all worked up about evolution and how it contradicts their inerrant interpretation of the Bible, while they do not seem at all upset by medical science and psychology, which contradict their fundamentalist assumptions even more. I wish now to present some actual data to back up this claim.

The Gospels of the New Testament contain numerous accounts of Jesus healing the sick and casting out demons, sometimes simultaneously. In several places (Matthew 10:1; 10:8; 23:24; Mark 1:32; Luke 6:17; 8:2) the writers describe Jesus as healing diseases, pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics—demons are thrown right into the list of diseases. In many cases, but not all, demon possession is indicated as the cause of disease. This being the case, creationists should reject medical science which attributes contagious all diseases to germs and other diseases to things that have gone wrong inside the body, and none of them to demons. They have not, however, done so.

What I wish to do now is to provide a complete list of Jesus’ healings, and indicate which ones were and were not attributed to demon possession. In order to do so, I have tried to determine which of the parallel Gospel accounts refer to the same event, so as not to double-count them. And here they are (demonic events in bold).

	Event	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
1	Healing a leper	8:1	1:40	5:12
2	Centurion’s servant	8:5		7:1
3	Peter’s mother-in-law	8:14	1:29	4:38
4	Same day as 3: demoniacs	8:16
5	Gadarene swine	8:28	5:1	8:26
6	Forgave the paralytic	9:2	2:1	5:17
7	Resurrected ruler’s daughter	9:18	5:21	8:40
8	Woman with hemorrhage	9:20	5:24	8:43
9	Two blind men	9:27
10	Dumb demoniac	9:32		11:14
11	Man with withered hand	12:10	3:1	6:6
12	Blind dumb demoniac	12:22
13	Canaanite woman with demon daughter	15:21	7:24
14	Epileptic boy falling into fire	17:14	9:14	9:37
15	Blind men near Jericho	20:30	10:46
16	Demoniac near Capernaum		1:21	4:31
17	Deaf dumb man, Decapolis			7:31
18	Blind man at Bethsaida		8:22		9:1
19	Young man in his funeral			7:11
20	Another woman with flux			13:10
21	Man with dropsy			14:1
22	Ten lepers			17:11
23	Official’s son				4:46
24	Lame man at Bethsaida				5:2

I cannot be sure of some of the classifications; item 23 might be the same as item 2, but I have erred on the side of caution in favor of fundamentalists; item 2 refers to a servant, item 23 to a son, which most of us believe could just be a garbled transmission of the account, but fundamentalists do not believe such a thing is possible in the Bible. I have omitted the famous account of Lazarus, since it was considered an example of a resurrection, not a healing.

The point here is that seven of the 24 healings were specifically described—in all the parallel accounts available—as the casting out of demons. This is 29 percent. If you count the stories separately, 14 out of 46 involve demons, which is 30 percent. That is, in roughly one-third of the healings, exorcism was involved. In one of them (14), clear symptoms of epilepsy are described.

And yet biology curricula at taxpayer-supported colleges and universities never include demonology. Never. Certainly not one-third of the courses, or one-third of any course, or even a single mention. Nor do medical schools. How can creationists put up with this? Why doesn’t the Oklahoma legislature pass bills that require OU Health Sciences Center to at least include demonology as one possibility to be mentioned in their courses about infectious disease and endocrinology and neurology? And psychology! Let’s not even get into psychology! All the things the Bible attributes to the spirit, psychologists attribute to the brain!

Lest you think that I looked through the Gospels just to find ammunition against creationists, let me assure you that I looked through them (I have read them several times) with great enjoyment. When I read about the life and sayings of Jesus, I am really uplifted. His words, even though processed by oral transmission for over two centuries before being written down, are astonishing and refreshing—in marked contrast to the grim negativity of the gun-toting modern fundamentalists, whom I believe would drive Jesus out of their churches. Maybe the fundamentalists should actually read Jesus’ words, which flatly contradict most of their political opinions.

You might want to read the Gospels. At least, how can you resist reading about the woman with the demon daughter?