In Alpha Course 15, we learn all about divine healing: Why it happens, how to interpret a lack of healing, and the enormous effect these miracles have on evangelism and one’s own personal faith. But along the way, the hosts accidentally reveal that miracles don’t really happen—and that they’ll do literally anything to make it look like they do.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 7/17/2026. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do! I’m still dealing with the health situation, so no voicecast today. Hopefully soon I’ll be back in business. For now, please enjoy a longer-than-usual post!)
(‘Answering Alpha‘ series tag.)
SITUATION REPORT: Alpha Course #15: “Does God Heal Today?”
In this video, we find ourselves at the penultimate session of the entire Alpha Course. (The last one is an even bigger letdown, but we’ll get to it soon.) This one concerns divine healing: a miracle involving the curing of a disease or the mending of an injury.
(All timestamps will come from this video unless otherwise noted.)
As we’ve done for the other recent Alpha Course videos, I’ll skip the play-by-play. Instead, I’ll focus on the video’s major themes.
This video takes a very evangelical view of the matter: Divine healing happens all the time and at all levels of injury/disease, except when it doesn’t. But those are miracles too, and it’s quite rude to ask for evidence supporting divine healing claims. In the end, gosh, really, when you think about it, isn’t Heaven the biggest divine healing of all?
Also, Yahweh seems very intent on publicly embarrassing people in order to give them healing, and seems to require particular people to be hands-on to work the miracle. Strangely, a divine healer working a church sounds exactly like a psychic medium trying to cold read people to convince them their dead relatives want to play “20 Questions.”
Along the way, I got curious about the healing miracles in the Gospels (the Bible’s books of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John). And looking at them all, my mind got absolutely blown in a way I haven’t experienced since the early days of unpacking my deconversion!
We’ll talk about all of these points today.
(Note about Alpha Course video numbering: It’s very subject to change. Generally speaking, the new lineup puts this video at #14 of 15 or #15 of 16. Go with the titles, not the numbers in particular.)
Defining miracles, or not
Naturally, Alpha Course never defines miracles at all, much less divine healing. But generally, Christians tend to believe divine healing is a cure/mending that cannot be explained by doctors. It’s the late-stage cancer that vanishes upon a second test, the broken femur that mends by morning, the blindness that clears to 20/20 vision, the against-all-odds conception, the doomed fetus that emerges a bright, happy, perfectly-healthy baby. For our purposes today, that suffices as a definition.
And we must find our own definition of divine healing, because Alpha Course never gives us one.
I can see why, too. Definitions lay bare what is and what isn’t. Something cannot be P and not-P at the same time. Too precise of a definition makes it too easy to tell if something’s miraculous—and more importantly, if it isn’t.
For miracle hunters, our reality poses them a serious problem. As modern medicine improves more and more over time, inexplicable miracles become rarer and rarer on the ground. Our tests have vastly improved, making false positives or misdiagnoses less likely. New medications tightly target what once could barely be scratched.
In response, divine healing must creep into smaller and smaller crevices. Christians must find ways to make what should be completely non-miraculous into utter miracles on par with anything named above. More than that, they must find ways to explain things when they themselves ask for divine healing and get cold nothing from their ceilings.
That’s what this video is really about: Reframing ordinary medical events as divine healing, explaining a lack of divine healing even by those depreciated parameters, coaching the flocks in describing anything as miraculous, and never, ever explaining what divine healing even is.
First: Pretend that the Gospels really happened and divine healing happens all the time
Early in the video (around 3 minutes in), Nicky Gumbel talks about having been an atheist who rejected miracles. He thought it was silly for Yahweh to heal one person while leaving millions of others unhealed. This is, incidentally, one of the major reasons that I reject the idea of divine healing. I find the notion of a god healing one person while ignoring of the rest to be completely immoral.
Then, even after his conversion, Nicky didn’t think divine healing happened in the modern day like it did in the Bible.
But then in 1982, he met a major figure in the miracle-chaser end of evangelicalism, John Wimber. In the story, Wimber comes off as a supremely proficient psychic medium who knows exactly how to work a dubious crowd.
Thanks to John Wimber, Nicky says he learned that the healing miracles in the Bible truly do happen today. Now, his job is making not-P look enough like P to convince people just as motivated as himself to believe there’s lots of P happening in the world today.
Quite a turnaround, isn’t it? He went from skepticism to full-throated embrace of miracles thanks to John Wimber!
He doesn’t even notice that Wimber uses both cold and hot reading techniques to win British hearts.
Sidebar: Hot and cold reading in Alpha Course
In cold reading, a medium makes guesses about someone based on the usually-unspoken cues they give off. A good cold reader can be remarkably accurate in these guesses. They use language and manipulation techniques to look even more accurate. This video is a great introduction to cold reading:
For hot reading, the medium bases the act on precise information gathered about the subject that the subject doesn’t realize the medium has obtained. At any time Christians know extremely specific information about a target that the target didn’t tell them, it’s from hot reading. But they’ll pretend that Yahweh told it to them.
The seminal example of hot reading might be the exposure of Peter Popoff, a prominent faith healer at the time, as using hot reading.
In Alpha Course 15, these two techniques take the form of super-vague but generally-applicable complaints for most, but then a hyper-specific injury description that he pretends Yahweh described to him. Here’s one of the cold reads, at about 5:50 in:
Eventually, there was only one of those 12 words that had not been responded to. One of them was there is a woman here who’s not able to conceive. And we’re British and it was a long time ago, when we really didn’t talk about those things in public. I thought no one is going to come forward for that. But he kept waiting. Eventually, this friend of ours, a young woman, got up and came forward. We didn’t even know that she was struggling to conceive. But he prayed for her that night. The team prayed for her. Nine months later, she gave birth to a baby boy.
She didn’t need to tell anyone she was struggling to conceive. Then as now, chances are good that a good number of women at that meeting were having the same problem. She was just the one responding to the cold read.
At about 5:30 in, we get the hot read:
John said that he and his team had been praying and they had various words of knowledge. He explained that a word of knowledge is something that doesn’t come to your natural mind. It’s something that’s revealed by a supernatural revelation. It could be an impression, a picture, a sort of sympathy pain or something like that. He said that there were 12 of these, and then he read them out. He asked the people one by one to come down. The first one I remember was a man who had injured his back chopping wood with an axe at the age of 14. We thought there’s not going to be anybody like that. And this guy got up, and he came down to the front.
Nicky doesn’t even realize he’s describing cold and hot reading techniques. He is completely fooled by this act.
Most Christians are. And they always have been—as I found out myself while researching this very topic.
Second Sidebar: Things I wish I’d seen while I was Christian
Last week, while I was sick, I categorized the divine healing events in the Gospels. As one might expect of a 1st-century backwater, these were numerous! At 8 minutes into the video, Nicky Gumbel claims that a quarter of the Gospels are just miracle healing stories. I believe it now.
Here’s some from Mark. (Notes about “also in” refer to the same exact story appearing in other Gospels.)
Mark 1:23-28 (also in Luke 4:33-37). Jesus rebukes a demon possessing some guy and cures him of what sounds like mental illness.
Mark 1:29-31 (also in Matthew 8:14-17 and Luke 4:38-41). Jesus cures the fever of Peter’s mother-in-law. He does it by taking her hand and helping her stand. That night (v. 32-34, also in Matthew 8:14-17 and Luke 4:38-41), Jesus meets a ton of people and cures many of them—along with exorcising many demons.
Mark 1:40-45 (also in Matthew 8:1-4 and Luke 5:12-16). Jesus cures a leper by touching him and ordering him to “Be clean!”
It just went on and on like that in the rest of Mark, too. Sometimes Jesus can cure someone by just ordering them to get better, as he did with the paralyzed man in Mark 2:3-12 (also appearing in Matthew 9:1-8 and Luke 5:17-26). At other times, Jesus requires the sick person to do something, like he did in Mark 3:1-5 (also in Matthew 12:9-14 and Luke 6:6-11). There, he told the man with the withered hand to stretch out his hand.
But Jesus himself was just magically delicious. In Mark 5:25-34 (and Matthew 9:18-26 and Luke 8:40-56), a woman suffering with chronic bleeding seeks him out. She touches the edge of his cloak in a big crowd, and the sheer divinity of him heals her. He was in the area to begin with because he wanted to cure a follower’s very sick young daughter. The little girl, however, dies before he can get to her. Undeterred, he took her hand and ordered her to “get up.” She did. This same miracle-via-cloak-touching occurs in Mark 6:54-56 (and Matthew 14:34-36).
So Jesus could resurrect and heal with words—and without any action on his part at all. From that, you’d think that other cures would be simple. But in Mark 7:31-35 (also in Matthew 9:27-34), Jesus has to do quite a lot to cure a man’s deafness and muteness:
So Jesus took him aside privately, away from the crowd, and put His fingers into the man’s ears. Then He spit and touched the man’s tongue. And looking up to heaven, He sighed deeply and said to him, “Ephphatha!” (which means, “Be opened!”). Immediately the man’s ears were opened and his tongue was released, and he began to speak plainly.
We see the same cure-via-spitting act in Mark 8:22-26, which might be the only story in this section not appearing in any other Gospel:
When they arrived at Bethsaida, some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. So He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village. Then He spit on the man’s eyes and placed His hands on him. “Can you see anything?” He asked.
The man looked up and said, “I can see the people, but they look like trees walking around.”
Once again Jesus placed His hands on the man’s eyes, and when he opened them his sight was restored, and he could see everything clearly.
As I read these stories, the idea of divine healing began to lose all context—like how reciting a word over and over again disconnects it from its original meaning. That lack of context shifted something important in my mind.
See, I was a very fervent Christian until the age of 23-24. During that time, I engaged with the divine healing stories in the Bible as a display of Yahweh’s power and might. Even after I deconverted, I had this sense of the Gospel stories as mythic stories about Jesus’ power. Not true, but certainly stories about miraculous events.
Never then, and never since my deconversion, have I actually looked at an entire list of the divine healing events in the Gospels. Now that I have, these stories feel like the acts of con artists taking advantage of the sheer desperation of their communities. They feel like what they are: Made-up stories by uneducated, primitive people who got taken in by their own motivated reasoning—people who had no options whatsoever for dealing with serious medical and psychological problems. It’s impossible to take them seriously even by their own merits.
If these stories depict the actions of a god/a god’s son, the sheer inconsistency and weird magical spellcasting routines make no sense. But if they’re just the collected memories of similar apocalypse-preaching Jewish conjobs running around Jerusalem before the big rebellion against Rome, they make perfect sense.
Second: Define non-healing events and minor cures as divine healing
The people behind Alpha Course 15 don’t know or care about just how scammy the Gospel healing stories sound. If miracles happened then, then they must happen today.
But when reality fails to play nicely with their beliefs, Christians can devise a number of ways to fake it. The easiest, of course, is to define any kind of medical resolution as a divine healing event. In Alpha Course 15, this technique appears several times.
First, the hosts of the video declare that literally all healing everywhere comes from Yahweh. So sure, actual miracles can happen. But it still counts as divine healing if it obviously happens through natural bodily healing processes or modern medicine.
Second, healing doesn’t always look like actual healing. Sometimes, it consists of comforting the sick or encouraging them in some way. It can look like fixing bad relationships too! Or improving our emotional and psychological health.
Really, any move whatsoever to improve their own or others’ lives can be viewed as divine healing.
To borrow what Syndrome said in The Incredibles, when everything is divine healing, nothing is.
Third: How to avoid supporting divine healing claims
Despite this attempt to relabel everything as divine healing, we do get a couple of dramatic stories in Alpha Course 15. None of them involve emotional or relationship healing, of course.
At about 9:50 in the video, a woman named Shaila Visser shares her miraculous testimony of divine healing. The way she describes it, she became extremely sick with a yeast fungus called Cryptococcus gattii. This is a serious infection, one far rarer and more dangerous than the usual C. neoformans (which strikes down about 180k people a year, mostly HIV-infected men in Africa and Asia). First, C. gattii infects the lungs. Then, it travels around the body. If it gets into the brain, as it did in Shaila’s case, it can cause meningitis, wherein the fluids and membranes in the brain get inflamed and swell up.
Obviously, our skulls won’t allow much swelling at all, so the infection can cause long-term brain damage and even death. Shaila’s infection had formed a fungal ball in her brain that was about 1.3cm across. At 3cm, the only way to remove it, she was told, was surgery. So Shaila was in very, very bad shape.
The way she describes it, she was rightly terrified of surgery. Then, on Good Friday, her church sent a minister to pray with her. He told her he thought “God may want to heal you.” She had her MRI scan a few days later on Tuesday, and on Wednesday her doctor told her that the fungal ball had completely disappeared.
That’s incredibly dramatic! But for some weird reason, despite having MRI evidence and a doctor’s verbal statement, we get nothing in terms of supporting documentation for this miracle. NOTHING. The doctor doesn’t show up to talk about the case. She doesn’t show us the relevant MRI scans.
Real acts of the divine would of necessity leave real footprints in reality. She has no footprints to show us. And she knows it. We see the same lack of supporting documentation in the other dramatic miracle claims in the video as well, but this one got the video’s hosts most excited so this is where we spent our time.
Third (and I promise, last) Sidebar: A wild second Shaila testimony appears!
As I watched, I got curious about any potential changes in Shaila Visser’s testimony. So I scared up another copy of it. And as I expected, it’s substantially different from the one in this Alpha Course video. Check it out for yourself:
Shit, the MRI scans we see at 2 minutes in aren’t even hers. The name on them is not Shaila Visser’s. You can see the name on them quite easily; I just don’t want to repeat it in case the original owner is tired of seeing her intimate medical scans online. If so, I can’t blame her. I’d rather pics of my naughty bits get out into the wild than my medical scans. My husband has seen photos of my actual liver, and I can’t even tell you how weird that feels to know.
Did this church get permission to use this other person’s scans in support of Shaila’s claims? That’s the question on my mind.
And to whom do the other medical images belong—the X-rays, the sagittal MRI imaging? The other images have no names on them, but I don’t believe for a moment that they are Shaila’s. Someone at her church used these images to add visual interest to her story, that’s all, just like any other commentary YouTube channel might.
In this video, we also learn (at 2:19) that doctors put Shaila on a powerful antibiotic, Amphotericin B, that they hoped would shrink the fungal ball and avoid having to do surgery. Notably, she doesn’t even mention this medication in the Alpha Course video. In her telling in Alpha Course, nothing seems to be preventing the fungal ball in her brain from growing to the dreaded 3cm size.
In addition, the doctor in the church video’s story gives way more pushback to the idea of divine healing.
Between this and the Alpha Course video, it’s obvious nothing that unusual occurred in her situation. Her doctor certainly didn’t think her recovery was utterly inexplicable. He still had her follow the usual post-infection procedures. She’s framing it after the fact as divine healing, likely because she was very fervent going into it.
Maybe that’s why she offers no evidence for her divine healing in the Alpha Course video—not even a bank of MRI scans that belong to someone else entirely, like she showed in the shorter church video.
Fourth: Address a lack of healing as healing in some other way
Of course, Alpha Course’s hosts know they must deal with the question of someone asking for divine healing and not getting it. At 13 minutes into the video, Nicky tells us about Patrick Pearson Miles. Miles had kidney failure and spent a large part of his life hooked up to dialysis machines. He dealt with this situation for 25 years. Though he prayed and many others did as well, it never got better.
But Miles had a way of dealing with that strange lack of divine healing! See, Miles just told everyone he’d already gotten eternal life, and that was the most healing thing he could ever experience. He’d successfully lowered the bar for “healing” so far that literally anything can qualify, including and especially no healing at all.
(This reminds me of an elderly in-law of mine who once sent everyone Christmas cards saying she’d be sending no gifts that year because she’d already given them all the greatest gift of all: being their mother/grandmother/great-grandmother, thus ensuring they could become Christians in life and then go to Heaven. Same energy.)
Toward the end, Gemma (one of the other hosts, along with Toby) instructs viewers to avoid blaming people for Jesus’ refusal to heal them. She suggests praying for Yahweh to give secret information about the target that might help. She also offers the Mark 8:22-26 story as proof that sometimes even Jesus had to apply his magic twice to get the full effect.
Maybe that’s why Nicky talks about being healed of athlete’s foot. At 22 minutes in, he talks about John Wimber declaring that 10 people were present who had athlete’s foot, and Jesus would totally heal them. Nicky didn’t want to go up, being very reserved and all, but eventually he did. But even then, he wasn’t totally cured, he says. He didn’t even ask to be cured. As he says at about 23:20 minutes in:
One of these very nice Americans came over to me and said would you like us to pray for your your athletes foot? I said no no no, thank you very much. I said um actually I quite like having athletes foot. It’s so satisfying when you kind of rub it in like that. So he was very gracious. He said to me, um, well, what would you like to pray for? So I said, I’d like to pray for power in my ministry. He said, okay, we’ll pray for you. And they just prayed for the spirit to come upon me. [. . .]
As I was going out through the [French] windows, I remember John Wimber saying, “God is giving that person the gift of being able to tell other people about Jesus.” I’ve often looked back to that moment because it was a very significant moment in my life. As it happened, I wasn’t healed of athlete’s foot at that moment, although it has cleared up since then. But I’m so glad that I was prayed for, because it was an amazing experience.
This all sounds so incredibly dishonest, like he’s saying who even cares about being divinely healed when there’s so much evangelism to be done!
And then, after all that, his final words in the video (at 25:30) are an exhortation:
I believe that God uses us today to heal people. He wants to use you to heal people. I encourage you to be someone who brings healing in your family, among your friends, in your workplace, in your community, prays for the sick, binds up the brokenhearted, wipes away people’s tears, lifts up the fallen, breaks down division, and brings healing wherever you go in Jesus’ name.
So despite everything this video has done to undercut its own claims, Alpha Course’s leader still insists that Christians can divinely heal people through their god’s mystic power.
Alpha Course chose the right place in the series to talk about divine healing
It’s interesting to consider where in the series this video lands.
As #15 of 16, this topic comes well after Alpha Course should have reeled in anyone who was going to convert. I can see why they waited, too. This isn’t stuff to show to those who haven’t bought into the ideas yet. To the unconverted, it’s going to sound exactly like what it is: Dishonest framing with a lack of real evidence, just bullshitters going hard on psychological manipulation to make their claims sound more plausible.
And even as polished as the results are, it’s still such a mess of self-contradictions and magical thinking. It reminded me of the Narcissist’s Prayer.
Divine healing really happens.
And if it didn’t, you didn’t want it enough
And if you did, you didn’t pray enough
And if you prayed your heart out, it wasn’t Jesus’ will
And if it should have been, you needed the growth
And if you didn’t, he has a better plan
And if he doesn’t, you’ll be completely healed in Heaven anyway so what’s your fuss?
And if none of that explains the situation, you need to stop questioning Jesus and just trust him.
There’s literally no way to win. I’m sure that’s no accident.
In a way, it’s good that even evangelicals these days seem to realize that their divine healing claims don’t impress outsiders. It’s been some years since I saw one trying to use such a claim as an evangelism tool! Maybe it’s like that xkcd strip about how ubiquitous cell phone ownership has quietly ended all debate about ghosts, UFOs, and Bigfoot: Modern medicine and greater awareness of healing scams has quietly ended divine healing as a major claim in Christianity.
For the adherents of a religion that insists its real live god is doing real live things in the real live world all the damn time, the reality of divine healing must be an incredible letdown. It certainly was to me, on the last night I ever spent as a Christian. If even one truth claim turns out to be untrue, after all, that opens the door to learning about the rest of the untrue claims. And divine healing is such an easy claim to tear apart.
Yeah, they definitely want to make sure viewers are already fully captured before showing them all that dishonest hand-waving about divine healing!
NEXT UP: Looking back at the mid-2010s, when some big-name evangelicals were positive that apologetics would soon experience a major renaissance. See you soon! <3
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