Posted on April 19, 2008

The Trouble With Prayer

Nothing is more central to the religious relationship with god than prayer. The deity hears the needs of his faithful and–sometimes–responds. For the unbeliever, prayer is a silly waste of time, akin to a child conducting a tea party with her imaginary friends. But prayer can also be a powerful wedge in arguments against the typical deist notion of an all-good and all-powerful creator—because prayer, if it means anything at all, requires god to interact directly with the world, influencing physical reality and the minds of humans. This influence undermines free will and, therefore, opens god up to criticisms arising from the problem of evil.

Why Does God Allow Evil?

Evil people do terrible things. This fact is not in dispute. But why a wholly benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient god allows those terrible acts is a question that has plagued the faith of the religious since the time of the pre-Socratic Greeks. This is known as theodicy, or the problem of evil. It has usually been dealt with by saying that god gave us free will and, therefore, any human evils are not to be blamed on him.

Free will isn’t a particularly satisfying answer for atheists, since it sidesteps the issue natural evil (hurricanes, disease, etc.) and raises questions about allowing the free will of one human to cancel that of another (i.e., murder).

But, for the sake of argument, let’s allow free will to solve the problem of evil. If it does, prayer should immediately be seen as deeply troublesome.

Prayer Allows Us To Condemn God For Human Evils

Every day on television we see evangelical preachers asking their followers to pray that world leaders do the right thing—often in the form of voting in line with conservative christian values. If the prayer doesn’t work, a lot of Americans are wasting a lot of time. But if it does, if god reaches in and changes the minds of leaders, we are forced to ask why can’t he do the same when Hitler gets ready to murder six million jews?

Presumably, god changes the mind of a congressman regarding a vote on, say, banning stem cell research because god thinks stem cell research is bad. Thus, he changes that mind in order to promote good. Failing to change a mind when he has the ability to do so and has done so frequently in the past, especially when god is all-knowing, amounts to an endorsement of the actions carried out by that mind. Thus allowing Hitler to remain on the mental path that will lead to the Holocaust is a tacit endorsement of the Holocaust. Surely a lot of people prayed for an end to that terror.

If we accept the efficacy of prayer, we are left with the question of why god answers some prayers and not others; why he changes the mind of a senator who is about to vote on gay marriage but leaves the minds of Stalin or Caligula alone to commit unspeakable evil.