I’ve seen it at least a dozen times in my life. The pastor stands up and tells of a member of the congregation who was diagnosed with cancer. They had to have surgery to remove the tumor but when they went in for the operation the doctor told them the tumor was removed. The congregation immediately stands up, clapping and praising God. It was a miracle!

In those moments I tend to bow out of the standing ovations and quietly clap with a stony complexion. I’ve never been one to just accept something without proof and these so-called healings always left me apprehensive. I don’t doubt that God has the power to heal or perform miracles; I’m just reluctant to chalk up every medical mystery, serendipitous event and change of luck to the “wonder-working power” of God.

Richard Dawkins, atheist and caustic author of The God Delusion, labels this kind of theology as a “God of the Gaps strategy,” in which Christians fill in the gaps of present ignorance with the typical Sunday School answer: God. By employing this mentality, Christians are essentially worshiping ignorance and using God as a crutch whenever they do not have an explanation for a particular phenomenon. In so doing, they substitute the supernatural for the natural and block scientific inquiry.

The hubris of the church in the middle ages led it to claim authority in all matters, including science. Any answer could be found in Scripture—or rather the church’s interpretation of Scripture. Thus, the church declared that all of creation was tiered and that the heavens were untouched by the fall. Looking up to the sky, humans could see the sun, the stars and the planets revolving around the earth as though they were pushed through glass tubes by angels. Consequently, when scientists like Copernicus and Galileo challenged these long-standing beliefs on the basis of observable scientific evidence, the church found its authority to be threatened and suppressed any scientific discovery that seemed to dispute their own cosmology.

To some degree this trend is repeating itself today as fundamentalist Christians take a stand against evolution on religious rather than scientific grounds. This seems to be both a misconception and misuse of Scripture. The Church was never meant to be a scientific institution. Indeed, it is absurd for Christians to evaluate any empirical event based upon their faith alone. Surely, God did not intend for us to deny reality by believing in Jesus Christ.

Yet this is what I feel like Christians are doing when they readily accept the mysterious disappearance of a cancerous tumor as a miracle of God without a second thought. But if there is another answer, then it would serve all of humanity to discover it and learn from it, in order to make this “miracle” available to all.

Certainly this is not a call for Christians to embrace a positivist-like worldview that flat-out rejects God’s miraculous intervention in every instance. I believe God can intervene in history by any means that God sees fit. That is the essence of my Pentecostal faith. But my faith does not preclude me from accepting that God is sovereign and is just as capable of working through the natural world as God is of working by supernatural means.