Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?

This is an objection which has always fascinated me, as there is more than one argument behind it. For example one line of reasoning would be this; If God answers prayers, why has He never, in recorded history healed an amputee? I mean if you would think that God would find it appropriate to do at least once right?

First of all, how do we know God hasn’t? Second of all if you are going to be consistent in your objection you have to take into account Jesus healing the roman soldier by re-attaching his ear. Thirdly, how could we know that there would be an appropriate time in which God would want to answer such a prayer? Fourthly, the whole premise this argument is based upon is flawed, why should we believe that there would be an appropriate time for God to answer this kind of prayer? There are many different things people have asked for which God has not granted as far as we know. For example; that we may live to be 200 years old, or that our deadly food allergy to peanuts would go away, or that people with dwarfism would become taller. Note that all of these examples are around the same degree of urgency as an amputation, which is not that much.

Ok so as an issue to the effectiveness of prayer this isn’t a useful objection, but what about the problem of evil? Why does God allow amputees to go through all this suffering?

The answer to this relates to my last point above, if you have a peanut allergy, you stay away from peanuts, if you have dwarfism you have to learn to adapt, and if you have an amputated leg or arm, you have to learn to adapt. I mean to expect God to get rid of these issues for you is extremely self-centered and small-minded. Imagine if God did do such things, would we have made the advances in medicine that we have? Doubtful, we would have no reason to. Now of course, I’m not saying that amputees shouldn’t pray to God for strength to get through their predicament, we all need that strength and mercy, but we should ask what we can learn from our mistakes, and from our suffering, how we can gain from it, before we go complaining about it.

I’m sure there are more ways this question is used, but these two cover the main objections drawn from this question. But, what do you think about this issue? Is this question problematic for theists, or is it just simply based upon flawed assumptions?