Does God Answer Prayers?
Brad Beach raises some interesting questions regarding prayer over at Houghton College's Religion and Philosophy Blog in his post titled "God answers prayer!".
Christians (as well as other religions that include prayer to an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being) tend to deal with the results of prayer in a questionable method. When we pray and the requested end comes to fruition, then the response is obvious: God answered our prayer. What about when we pray and our requests never come about? The common response is that "God's answer was 'No.'"
And how about conflicting prayers? Let's start with a light, inconsequential subject to help make this a bit more accessible. Each year during the Super Bowl, thousands of people are praying for the AFC team to win, and thousands are praying for the NFC team to win. Even if I pray for the AFC team to win and they do, has God answered my prayer? If the AFC team loses, has God answered my prayer with a "No"?
The problem does, in fact, become more substantial once serious, "big" issues are at play. When we pray for a loved one with terminal cancer and they pull out of it cancer-free, we thank God and proclaim that our prayers were answered. What about when a young child has a terminal disease and, despite our prayers, suffers for months and months before dying? Certainly, the "God said 'No'" response isn't appealing at all.
This view of prayer seems to assume that whatever happens after we pray, that is God’s answer to our prayers. If a person is healed, God answered 'yes' to our petition. If the person is not healed, the divine response was 'no'! Is this really how it works? Can we honestly believe that whatever happens is, in fact, God’s answer to our supplications? Under such a construal, is it meaningful to claim that God answers our prayers? Isn’t this simply to interpret every outcome as the divine response to our desperate pleas? Such an interpretation seems to make meaningless the assertion that God answers prayer.
So what then do we do when dealing with "unanswered" prayers of any type? Beach offers some suggestions in his article, which I suggest you read. I suppose much of the answer to this question hinges on your personal resolution to the ::wikipedia("problem of evil")::. However you find solace in the problem of evil, the solution to unanswered prayer should not be too far behind.
Even after this problem has been resolved, I'm not so sure that we are the best judges of what should happen in the world. We humans are certainly not objective, and we're overwhelmingly far from being omniscient or even omnibenevolent. Here's one-third of a (Chinese?) curse: May you get everything you wish for. And here's another well-known English proverb that comes into play: Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.
This entry was posted
on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 22:22 by Novac and is filed under All, People, Religion.
You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.
Related posts:
May 16th, 2006 at 18:55
God does not answer prayers because there is no God. When I was a boy I was a cathedral chorister and there saw the clergy and rich and powerful used the fairy-tale concept of a god in order to wield power and conceal sexual abuse. I prayed the priest(s) wouldn't bugger me or my fellow choristers and guess what the hope of protection in the prayers of my childish innocence didn't materialise.
So God answered 'No' - then it must be a paedophile or it must not exist - lets face it the latter is far more likely.
May 16th, 2006 at 20:08
Of course, sexual abuse of any form is reprehensible, particularly when carried out by supposedly religious figureheads. The continual issues in the Catholic church have, no doubt, tarished the image of God in many victims' minds.
One of the major points of this post is that "God answered 'No'" is not an acceptable response for us. As I noted, this all tends to come back to the problem of evil, whether it is sexual abuse, terminal disease, or natural disasters. Some resolve the problem of evil by claiming there is no God, that God is not omnipotent, or that God is not omnibenevolent. Your personal resolution to the problem is, of course, up to you.
I would suggest a study of the book of Job, who certainly saw more than his fair share of death, suffering, and loss.