God’s omnipotence doesn’t extend to being able to do that which is logically impossible or inherently self-contradictory (like the old “Can God create a rock so heavy that He can’t lift it?”). At least, that’s my view. Some may disagree; but in that case, if God is not constrained by logic, then your arguments about what is a “logical certainty” don’t apply to God either.
And so it may be that God doesn’t want people to suffer per se, but that suffering, or at least the possibility of suffering, is a necessary logical consequence of something else that God does want.
And it may be that at least one of those something elses is the ability for us human beings to do things that actually matter. If there were no potential for any kind of suffering, would any of the things we do matter, to ourselves or anyone else?
And it may be that prayer is one of the ways God allows us to matter, by letting our requests to God influence in some way what God actually does.
I hope you can tell by all of these "it may be"s that I’m just speculating here. There’s a lot I don’t understand about God and prayer and how or whether it all makes sense. The OP and others have asked some good questions that I wonder about too.
God is not a genie, and he doesn’t “care” about something more just because someone prays to him about it.
Prayer is about humility and getting yourself (the pray-er) in line with God’s will. Like the Blessed Virgin Mary said to God, “let it be done unto me according to your will”. That is the ultimate prayer and the ultimate point of prayer.
That being said, God is also a Father who loves his children (all of humanity), and there is nothing wrong with asking your Father for something if what you are asking for is a good thing.
So if I’m reading this right, God’s telling us, “I’ll do anything you tell me to”, and then some rando human screams “KILL EVERYONE!” and god says “Okay!” and does it. (And then blames the human, because He was ‘just following orders’.)
Okay, this clearly doesn’t happen, because we’re not all dead. Which means that God’s not going to obey any order that upsets any apple cart he actually cares about. Sort of like how you might let your child sit on your lap and turn the steering wheel, but won’t do that on the freeway.
It would appear that you’re arguing that God doesn’t care about murdering Nana, then. Nana’s suffering doesn’t bother him - at least not enough that he’ll refuse the order. And by “order” I mean “request with no authority over him”.
So it’s still pretty clear that when you have a god that listens to prayers (or puts us in situations that justify praying for people in the first place) it’s a logical certainty that the god just doesn’t really care about human suffering. He’s totally okay with it. No problem.
(To be fair, we know this to be the case prayer or not - if god really was bothered by human suffering the world would be a way different place than it is. Problem of Evil, yo.)
It’s good to try to think about this stuff, because a lot of the thing that people casually assert about god really don’t survive critical examination well.
This all sounds reasonable. But, honestly, if you attempt Christian apologetics in this way, you become such an easy target. Can you explain in equally reasonable terms why God decided that the “rules” for redemption were that he needed to torture and kill his own son as a sacrifice to himself in order to be able to forgive us? We don’t question the story because it’s so familiar, but when you think about it, it’s completely psychotic, isn’t it? And this is the central doctrine of Christianity, not some relatively minor detail like an Old Testament genocide or seven.
Maybe God sees prayer as the equivalent of a child whining.
“Mom, can I have a cookie. Mom, can I have a cookie. Mom, can I have a cookie. Mom, can I have a cookie. Mom, can I have a cookie. Mom, can I have a cookie. Mom, can I have a cookie. Mom, can I have a cookie. Mom, can I have a cookie. Mom, can I have a cookie. Mom, can I have a cookie. Mom, can I have a-”
“Okay, have a cookie. You won’t want to eat supper but I don’t care anymore.”
“God, heal my grandmother. God, heal my grandmother. God, heal my grandmother. God, heal my grandmother. God, heal my grandmother. God, heal my grandmother. God, heal my grandmother. God, heal my grandmother. God, heal my grandmother. God, heal my grandmother. God, heal my grandmother. God, heal my-”
“Okay, she’s healed. It disrupts my divine plan for humanity and a million people are going to die due to consequences you can’t imagine but I don’t care anymore.”
Okay, you invoked free will, without any explanation of what it is. To me, it’s an incoherent concept, there’s no such thing - the burden is on you to explain how it works exactly. In any event, you glossed over the problem that your notion of “free will” is somehow floating out there acting independent of god, which contradicts your initial assumption that god is omniscient and omnipotent. That contradiction is the fundamental problem, you haven’t addressed it at all.
If your response to my claim is that there is no free will, then I think we’re in for a long discussion and we can be fairly certain if 3000 years of philosophy hasn’t gotten to a clear answer yet that you and I on a message board aren’t going to get there either.
Regardless, I’m conjecturing a possibility that answers whether prayer has a purpose. As part of my response I used the concept of free will. I think it’s up to you to prove the non-existence of free will if you want to refute my conjecture. I’m only offering an argument as a possible refutation of the premise that prayer is worthless and it’s up to you to explain why it is not a possibility.
But you have conveniently ignored the second part of what I said. I’ll stipulate the existence of free will for these purposes. How do you resolve the logical contradiction between free will and an omnipotent and omniscient god? This is hardly a novel question, it’s a fundamental objection to the notion that an all-powerful and all-knowing god actually might actually respond to human supplication, and you haven’t addressed it at all.
Spinoza explained it a lot more rigorously than Heinlein did.