Like I wrote before, Christians don’t pray for truly impossible things, because, I’d guess, deep inside they know that “magic doesn’t work”. They pray for possible things, and, if they happen, they feel good about it, call it a “miracle”, feel blessed (after all, the supreme being of the universe just took a personal interest in them!), and it reinforces their faith. When they don’t happen, either “God has a plan”, or, most likely, they simply forget about it. It’s called “counting the hits and ignoring the misses”.
But… what about the people of other religions? And what about atheists? Why isn’t their life absolutely miserable (or at least noticeably worse), since they don’t have a deity taking care of them and answering their prayers?
Consider this likely example: a Christian comes down with a flu. He prays to God to get better, and, after a couple of days, he does. “Thank you, God, for healing me! Praise the Lord!”, and so on.
Meanwhile, the atheist next door gets the flu at the same time, and, coincidence of coincidences, also gets better at the same time.
What happened here? Did God require prayer and faith from the believer, but not from the atheist?
Or is the believer just projecting supernatural explanations onto something that happened naturally?
If prayer worked, if God intervened due to prayer, then either unbelievers would remain sick forever, or, at least, believers would get better much more quickly. I would say that a miracle — a direct intervention by the omnipotent creator of the universe — should be pretty easy to distinguish from a natural occurrence. Yet we don’t see the impossible happening to believers. We don’t even see the beneficial possible happen sooner, or more often. In fact, everything happens just like it would if…
…there was no God at all.
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You know, I never thought about it that way.
Of course, if prayer works, atheists should have crappy, crappy lives – and not just with illness, but with just about anything a theist can pray for.
What about all those theists praying for a finite resource – like a parking spot? Parking spots are often in short supply, so if prayer works, we atheists should have /no hope/ of getting a parking spot, because the larger number of godbotherers will have them all reserved already…
Yet those cars with the fish decals in the back window seem to be driving around the carparks for just about exactly the same amount of time as me.
Like all brilliant ideas, you have me saying “Now why the hell didn’t I think of that?”
Good post