this assumes that god does not want us to have evidence of his existence and of the efficacy of prayer. why would that be?
it also supposes that god chose not to save people’s lives that he otherwise would have to prevent himself from being known.
your argument seems to be that intercessory prayer works but only if no one is keeping track of whether or not it works.
a previous poster’s answer makes far more sense:
“Those studies are absurd. C.S Lewis has an essay on prayer in the book “the world’s last night and other essays,” where he points out that invariable success in prayer wouldn’t prove the Christian notion of prayer, it would prove something more like magic, the power to control or compel the supernatural.”
it sounds to me like you believe in magic.
what i wonder is why believers never call one another on this magical thinking. instead they are likely to commend one another on their faith.
I believe in a God who knows exactly what is going on. He also answers prayer in whatever way He chooses. There are quite a number of times of course when we are perplexed as to why He doesn’t answer prayer the way we’d like.
Secondly He chooses who will believe or not. John 15:16 “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.”
I don’t know what criteria He uses for His choosing, but I suspect our own willingness to agree to be chosen comes into it. I also think that if someone is not chosen, they will also find they weren’t particularly willing either.
This leads on to an episode when my own father appeared in my bedroom the night he died. At one point in the exchange, he exclaimed "I always was doomed! I didn’t really have any choice!’ I argued back saying, “That can’t be right” (and I was an atheist at the time). He replied, “Oh, it’s right, all right. You can see that from here!”
However later he stated, “I was WILLING” (to do the deliberately cruel things he did). So both aspects somehow apply. I still haven’t really come to grips with that reality. I mean for God to give us free will at all, He has to abdicate some of His omnipotent ability in some way.
Incidentally I’ve had prayers answered in relation to confirming whether it was a real event when my father appeared the night he died, and on another occasion when I prayed to meet someone who’d had an NDE (near death experience). In the first case the positive reply came within hours, and within two or three days in the seond.
But I’ve never had a positive answer to a prayer request for a matter which I find much more desirable - a “vocation” in the form of a portable trade or career. I get a continual “No - forget it” which annoys the hell out of me, and I complain about it loud and clear on occasion. But He hasn’t changed His mind so far.
And the same thing applies with prayer. In the final analysis, God is the one in control, not us. If you want an answer to the business of answered or unanswered prayer, you’ll have to ask Him. The best our most profound theologians can do is make an educated guess. And I haven’t yet read anyone who really knows the answer.
In the end you either believe or you don’t, whether your prayes are answered the way you want to or not.
And to reiterate, science cannot study God. The term “religion” is not valid, since religions are a series of beliefs. You may as well ask can science study why a man married a particular woman, when there were 3 billion other women on the planet.
Science cannot even study economics fully, for the simple reason that each economic unit is a person, who will make their own decisions. Sure statistics can give some guidelines, but in the end individual intelligences make individual decisions.
Science studies natural phenomena, and nature does not make independent decisions.
It has no chance of studying a God with an infinite intelligence, whose own creative activity gave rise to the same phenomena it studies.
:thumbsup:you’ve said it very well, KTF (Keep The Faith).