Faith healing is healing through spiritual means. Believers assert that the healing of a person can be brought about by religious faith through prayer and/or rituals that, according to adherents, stimulate a divine presence and power toward correcting disease and disability. Belief in divine intervention in illness or healing is related to religious belief. In common usage, faith healing refers to notably overt and ritualistic practices of communal prayer and gestures (such as laying on of hands) that are claimed to solicit divine intervention in initiating spiritual and literal healing.

Claims that prayer, divine intervention, or the ministrations of an individual healer can cure illness have been popular throughout history.Miraculous recoveries have been attributed to many techniques commonly lumped together as "faith healing". It can involve prayer, a visit to a religious shrine, or simply a strong belief in a supreme being.

The term is best known in connection with Christianity. Some people interpret the Bible, especially the New Testament, as teaching belief in, and practice of, faith healing. There have been claims that faith can cure blindness, deafness, cancer, AIDS, developmental disorders, anemia, arthritis, corns, defective speech, multiple sclerosis, skin rashes, total body paralysis, and various injuries.

James Randi (born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge; August 7, 1928) is a Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic best known as a challenger of paranormal claims and pseudoscience. Randi is the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Randi began his career as a magician named The Amazing Randi, but after retiring at age 60, he began investigating paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims, which he collectively calls "woo-woo".

Although often referred to as a "debunker", Randi rejects that title owing to its perceived bias, instead describing himself as an "investigator". He has written about the paranormal, skepticism, and the history of magic. He was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and was occasionally featured on the television program Penn & Teller: Bullshit!. The JREF sponsors The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge offering a prize of US$1,000,000 to eligible applicants who can demonstrate evidence of any paranormal, supernatural or occult power or event under test conditions agreed to by both parties.

Peter Popoff (born July 2, 1946) is a televangelist and self-proclaimed prophet and faith healer. He conducts revival meetings and has a national television program. He initially rose to prominence in the 1980s. He went bankrupt in 1987 after skeptics James Randi and Alexander (Alec) Jason exposed his method of receiving information about revival attendees from his wife via an in-ear receiver. According to Fred M. Frohock, "the case of Peter Popoff is one of many egregious instances of fake healing". Popoff has since returned to public ministry.

Peter Popoff was born in Berlin, Germany on July 2, 1946. He emigrated to the United States with his family in 1950. His father George, a Pentecostal minister and pastor, toured the U.S. preaching in some of the nation's largest churches. He began a radio ministry and also pastored several churches in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Peter traveled with his family much of the time, finishing high school by correspondence school. He also helped his father with the preaching and radio ministry.

Kenneth Copeland (born December 6, 1936 in Lubbock, Texas) is an American author, public speaker, and televangelist. He is the founder of Kenneth Copeland Ministries, and known for teaching “prosperity message ” which says that believers can become wealthy through tithing, giving offerings and using faith, as well as sound financial practices.

Prior to his conversion to Christianity in November 1962, Copeland was a recording artist on the Imperial Records label, having one Billboard Top 40 hit ("Pledge of Love", which charted in the Top 40 on April 20, 1957, stayed on the charts for eight weeks, and peaked at #12).

Following his religious conversion, Copeland turned the rest of his life over to the gospel and ministry work. In the 1960s, he was a pilot and chauffeur for Oral Roberts. In the fall of 1967, he enrolled in Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Kenneth is married to Gloria Copeland. His children are John Copeland, Kellie Copeland and Terri Pearsons.

He was a member of the Oral Roberts University Board of Regents until 2008. Copeland's oldest daughter, Terri, is married to pastor George Pearsons, who served until January 2008 as the ORU Board chairman.

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept into evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.

Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief." As of January 2010 the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.