Does anyone believe that prayer works?

Great Debates
41

Exactly. You claim the events are “nothing short of amazing”, yet your only argument to support that statement is to declare that those who disagree are “foolish”. That’s an ad hominem argument. The argument consists entirely of calling your opponent a name.

No, telling someone to read a book does not constitute describing an event. The author of the book may have described them, but you did not.

What’s a “hardened skeptic”? The word “hardened” implies an attachment to old ideas and an unwillingness to consider new ones. Yet a skeptic is exactly the opposite, questioning traditional ideas that non-skeptics accept blindly.

From what I’ve read in the excerpts you provided, it’s quite unneccesary to suggest that Mueller was lying, because nothing extraordinary occurred. He seems to mainly talk about the generosity of people who helped him with his project. Is it unbelievable that people are generous? No, I don’t think so. Is it a miracle? I certainly hope it doesn’t require a miracle for people to be generous. I have a little more faith in humanity than that.

I don’t know - is that the “amazing series of coincidences” to which you refer? It’s hard to tell, when you refuse to give us even a hint about which events you’re talking about, and just glibly refer us to the book. If that’s not it, I invite you…no, I beseech you to tell us to which events you are referring.

I also believe you have some severe misconceptions about what a skeptic is. Being a skeptic does not mean one is emotionless or cynical. Your bias is encapsulated in your assertion that a skeptic would say, “Well, that’s nothing special”. That’s absolutely false. Special does not mean supernatural. Just because one doesn’t believe that an event occured via the supernatural, doesn’t mean one believes it to be any less special. It is quite possible for sublime events to occur without the necessity of appealing to otherworldy forces.

It’s absurd when people donate money to an orphanage? Sounds ordinary to me. Nice, yes. Beyond coincidence, no. I do think prayer worked for Mueller, but not in the sense that you do. I have no doubt that prayer helped put him in the state of mind that allowed him to accomplish his goals. But motivated people accomplishing their goals is hardly supernatural.

I don’t suppose you recognize any irony in that statement, do you?

I don’t have a problem with people believing whatever they like, but when you cast aspersions on others just because they don’t share your belief, then I do have a problem.

42

Ya gotta love the openmindedness of this board sometimes. :rolleyes:

Prayer works. I’ve seen it. I have no proof of this other than anecdotal evidence, which I know usually has no place here in GD, but it’s all I’ve got.

Once when I was a young teenager, I was out riding with my dad on his motorcycle. He’d always been one of those people who liked to make bets with himself to see how far he could get when the needle on the gas gauge was pointing to empty. One day we ran out of gas and had to pull over on I-495.

This being before either of us had cellphones and several miles away from the nearest exit, we prayed. I remember specifically my dad saying, “Lord, we just need a half a gallon to get to the next exit.”

Moments later a pickup pulls over. The guy asks what’s wrong, my dad tells him we’re out of gas. He says, “Well, I’ve only got a half a gallon. Think that’ll be enough?”

Coincidence? Maybe, but I don’t think so. If nothing else, my dad isn’t quite so daring with the gas gauge anymore.

43

I’m curious: If God intervenes in something as mundane as giving someone a half-gallon of gas so they don’t have to walk 1/2 mile, why doesn’t he intervene in more profound matters, like the suffering and death of the innocent, for example?

44

Amen, blowero. Ha! A pun!

The problem I have with the fundamentalist Christian view of prayer I grew up with is exactly that. I grew up with stories of the “I lost my mitten and my dad was going to beat me for losing it, so I prayed and lo and behold, there was my mitten, I know God answered my prayer” variety. To me, these were always fake, and showed a shallow faith.

I do believe that prayer can be beneficial because you use the prayer/meditation/whatever to deal with the situation rather than due to any supernatural explanation. By elucidating it, you analyze and internalize and rationalize it, enabling yourself to come to grips with that situation.

I’ve always felt it’s a little unfortunate that the “shallow faith prayers” above prayed rather than using the brain God gave them.

45

How do you know He doesn’t?

46

Because innocent people suffer.

47

So because some people suffer it proves that God never saves anyone? Sorry, but that’s kind of weak.

48

So, what do you think the outcome would have been if you had not prayed? Or if your dad had not specifically asked for a 1/2 gallon?

Pash

49

So then you would have us believe that God chose not to intervene in such matters as the Holocaust and the Stalinist Purges, yet decided to get involved in the matter of providing you with 1/2 gallon of gas? Let’s say you’re correct, and God chooses to save some people and not others. I’m interested in hearing your explanation as to why 6 million Jews wouldn’t be at the top of God’s “to do” list. I can’t wait to hear your non-“weak” argument.

50

Regarding prayer, I have always remembered Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s classic novel “ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVITCH”:
-this is when Ivan is in despair, and his (Baptist) friend attempts to comfort him, he (the Baptist) says something like:
“Brother Ivan , do not pray for food, or a warm bed…instead, pray that God will grant you understanding”
Frankly, that kind of prayer is more honerable than asking God for various favors.

51

I don’t know. I just think it’s interesting that he got what he asked for.

I don’t claim to know why God does the things He does.

52

[notebooks of Lazarus Long]

If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course!

[/notebooks of Lazarus Long]

53

If God is utterly inscrutable to you, how do you know He’s good?

54

What has that got to do with this thread?

55

Okay, what does “prayer works” mean to you? If I toggle on an electric light switch, and “it works,” the lights in that room will come on. Are you seeking a solely mechanistic criterion? Because nobody thinks God is a prayer-granting robot.

On the other hand, there is a non-religious context in which “that prayer was answered” has a legitimate meaning: law. At common law and still in many jurisdictions, litigants and their counsel “pray” the court for motions, decisions, etc., which may or may not be granted, according to the judge’s understanding of the law, justice, mercy, etc. To suspend the impact of a minor offense in North Carolina, one offers to the judge a Prayer for Judgment to be Continued, “asks for a PJC” – the equivalent of “adjournment in contemplation of dismissal” in New York law. Using the court metaphor, for some prayers to be answered and others not might make sense. And because each is taken in the context it’s offered, there’s no comparison. For God to grant the elder Lord Ashtar a half gallon of gas, while denying someone’s saintly but cancer-ridden 80-year-old grandmother surcease of pain, then does not violate our sense of fairness, because each prayer is being reviewed in the specific context of the circumstances in which it’s being offered. It becomes a metaphysical variant on the maxim that “bad cases make good law.”

Finally, what I suggested in my first post here but seems to have been treated largely as a throwaway line, there is one real sense in which prayer definitely “works” – because “prayer” in the sense in which religious people mean it is not limited to petition and intercession for particular things or events. It can be adoration, contrition, communion, meditation, etc. And I’m living proof that prayer changes the individual. There are others on this board who can say likewise. We’re talking about interior emotional and self-image transformation, visible through exterior changes in behavior. And in that sense, prayer can be demonstrated to work.

56

I agree that it might make sense, but I gave some specific examples where it does not (or at least appears not to).

But why is there no comparison? Surely God does not want you to be a mindless automaton, saying “Thy will be done” even when the most horrible atrocity occurs. I mean, it is allowed to think about these things, isn’t it? Because, as I asked earlier, if one blindly accepts every decision by God as automatically correct, then by what standard are you judging God to be good? Surely God isn’t only good by definition.

Now, I understand the argument that God chooses not to intervene because he wants us to have free will. But then when one begins claiming that God does intervene in some cases, it opens the door to asking: Why then does he choose not to intervene in other cases where it quite obviously would be beneficial?

Granted. But then what exactly is the “context” in which the Holocaust was judged to be a good thing? Or for that matter, what context makes your “grandmother” example a good thing? I mean, surely you can understand that I when I ask why God would grant 1/2 gallon of gas over the lives of 6 million innocent people, that “He moves in mysterious ways” is not a particularly convincing argument. How do you justify the fact that God gave us the ability to reason, with the seeming fact that God’s actions (or lack of) often appear unreasonable?

I absolutely agree, and I said as much in my first post. It is that second definition of “works”, where God ostensibly intervenes to change the outcome of events, that I have trouble understanding.

I hope you don’t think my purpose is to denigrate - it’s not. I’m just asking some tough questions because I figure that you and/or Lord Ashtar must have considered these things before, and I’m always curious to know how people reconcile such things.

57

I do. Not always the way anyone expects or perhaps wants, but I believe it can have an effect. Part of my personal faith is that God’s ways and means are far beyond anything I can understand, and that perhaps something that happens in response to my prayer was ordained by Him a long time ago, as part of a specific purpose.

blowero asks some really good questions. I’m not sure how to answer them, but I know there are so many factors involved that you could argue both the presence of God and the lack of presence very effectively.

58

Blowero, what you’re defining is the Problem of Evil, which is one of the oldest questions in theology and philosophy, and I’ve never seen anything that even comes close to being a reasonable answer to it from a theist of any sort.

The three comments I’d have to make go hand in hand, and make me non-uncomfortable enough with the issue to survive in my beliefs (and the double negative is quite intentional; I’m not happy with the answer, but it’s what works for me until I can get a better take on it).

First, you are, I think, familiar with my take on faith as a special case of trust, not totally susceptible to rational analysis. If I have trust or faith in someone, I feel that I can count on them, to their ability, to treat me decently. and any apparent injury is not intended and/or part of a greater positive. (The analogy in another thread to a parent watching his/her child get inoculated, suffering momentary pain to a greater good of protection from severe illness, is the sort of thing I’m speaking of here.) If I have faith in God, then I am compelled to believe that He permits evil to happen for good, and ultimately beneficial, reasons.

Second is hand in hand with the above, and honestly throws itself on the “mysterious ways” cliché. His understanding of what is ultimately good may not be what I can perceive right at the moment. I suffered severe financial loss twice, once in dealing with and trying to provide for the three boys whom I consider my “sons,” and once in leaving my remunerative but intensely soul-killing state job. I personally consider that in the long run, I gained far more than I lost, in a measure of what matters to me personally, though from an accounting standpoint I’m in much worse condition than before. Then my first real encounter with death of a loved one was the massive heart attack that took away my beloved grandfather, when I was ten. And I still recall hearing from my aunt that the autopsy had revealed a severely metastatized cancer that would have taken him slowly and painfully, incapacitating the active and vibrant man who always had time for the little boy who was his only grandson. His sudden death, shocking as it was, took him without that soul-eating, lingering death he would have faced. That helped shape an early understanding that I’ve never lost, that sometimes one bad thing prevents a worse thing.

Because I understand God to know all and to be working for the greater good of all, I can see, dimly, how He may have to work things in that way. None of the tsunami victims will die a lingering death of starvation, none of the kids who died in it will suffer abuse and molestation. Two children became friends in a shelter during one of the hurricanes; they will eventually grow to adulthood, marry, and have a child who will discover a cure for a dread disease when he in turn reaches his full potential. And so on. I don’t know this is true; I trust Him that it is.

Third, and founded in Niccolo Macchiavelli of all people, is the idea that we are responsible as well. God has designed a world in which human beings are called on to help each other through their problems, and in doing so, achieve something beyond what a rubber-bumper world would allow them to become. I think this too was a part of His purpose, and while it doesn’t justify evil, it ameliorates the fact of its existence.

59

It was an awareness of the utter uselessness of prayer (in any practical sense), that led me to free myself from the bonds of theism in the first place.

Prayer: useless, pointless, no better than any other superstition. People will have all sorts of loony anecdotes about how their prayer for something worked, but there are people who say the same things regarding wishing upon stars, or chain letters, or other similar nonsense.

My money’s on the negotiating skills.

60

Thanks for the reply, and not to harp on the point too much, but:

I understand the argument. I’m not arguing that the presence of evil disproves God, but rather that, IF (and only if) one claims instances of God’s interference in the outcome of events on Earth, then that opens the door to the question of why God doesn’t interfere at other times, and why God’s selection criterea would remain so indecipherable to us.

So if I’m understanding correctly, there are two answers for theists: (1) There really is no such thing as intercessory prayer; prayer is really for the person doing the praying, or (2) You simply have faith that God is selecting wisely as to when to intervene, and implicitly trust God without ever questioning the outcome, because you have faith.