Are All Prayers Unanswered Prayers?
An internet skeptic's strong claim and the comfort of believing God isn't there rather than God doesn't care
A Christian apologist recently posted a question to followers on Facebook about Christians deconstructing their faith, moving from believers to non-believers through a process of reassessing their core beliefs. One man commented at length as to his deconversion or deconstruction process. Much of his process fell into the category of autobiographical information, he went years praying for God to demonstrate his existence through direct intervening action to no avail. God never answered his prayers, never encouraged him, never provided a shred of evidence concerning God’s reality.
I recently spent time studying the phenomenon known as the Dark Night of the Soul, a term coined by 16thCentury Spanish monk John of the Cross, I understand the frustration and pain associated with this experience. Mother Teresa struggled with the silence of God in her ministry for years as did many others. The sense that God is silent or absent in our trials, particularly for someone fighting to maintain their faith life, can be spiritually debilitating. I address this a little in an unrelated post, but feeling abandoned by God may be worse than feeling judged. There are only two conclusions to draw, God is letting me struggle or God is not there. The former is often harder to accept than the latter.
Beyond personal anecdotes, the deconstructed Christian offers two claims worth considering. The first is his conclusion, considering his experience, the world looks exactly as we would expect it to look if God did not exist at all. Prayer has the same effectiveness in dealing with sickness and hardship as no prayer. There is nothing happening in the world which isn’t entirely consistent with a world where God does not exist. The second claim is that every philosophical and historical argument for theism and Christian particularism fails. The boldness of these claims stuns me. Some sort of qualified statement could be understandable, the author sees no evidence, the author remains unconvinced, but he made no such qualifications. We are left with assertions of absolute negative statements. No prayers are ever answered which might provide evidence of efficacy beyond random chance, no supernatural events have ever occurred, and no philosophical arguments succeed in demonstrating anything toward the truth of theism.
The Rules
The Aristotelian square of opposition sets Absolute Negative statements against Particular Positive statements. Any statement of an Absolute Negative, No S is P, is contradicted by the particular positive statement, Some S is P. It isn’t necessary to prove All S is P, or all prayers are heard and answered, to defeat the Absolute Negative statement that No Prayers are heard and answered. If some prayers are answered, even a small number like at least one prayer was ever answered, then the Absolute Negative is defeated. This is precisely why professional academics tend to be hesitant to make absolute claims. They are tricky to defend from criticism. Far better to couch claims in the probabilistic terms than to risk the sum of human history producing a single credible defeater for a claim. Considering this, the claims about theism and Christianity can be evaluated on the terms offered. God’s intervention doesn’t need to be constant or ubiquitous. It can be rare, focused, subtle, and even singular in nature and the absolute claims fail. The defender could always then retreat to a more qualified particular negative, Some S is Not P, but that category of statement avails him nothing. The statement “God doesn’t exist because prayers are RARELY or ALMOST NEVER answered” is a defeater for the statement “NO prayer is ever answered.” This is an all or nothing game.
Does Prayer Have the Same Results as No Prayer?
We must discount the idea that one person praying fervently for God to work in their life in some special way only to be disappointed by a lack of response is evidence of anything. Unanswered prayers are common. It could be true these frustrations are the result of God not existing. It could also be the requests are unanswerable by God for any number of reasons. They could have been nonsense prayers, selfish prayers, or prayers for ineffectual ends. Perhaps an omniscient God knows giving in to the person begging for a sign would not secure the affections tied to the request. Perhaps God lacked sufficient reasons to act. Who knows?
Skepticism over miracles isn’t a groundbreaking offering to the world. When I was younger, I strongly identified with David Hume’s position on miraculous events. Anyone reporting a miracle was more likely to be mistaken or lying as it is beyond our common experience that miracles occur. One of the first cracks in the foundation of my avowed atheism came when I realized that miracles may be beyond my common experience and David Hume’s common experience, but other people reported supernatural events all the time. By adopting Hume’s position, I wasn’t disproving the existence of supernatural events but dismissing any need to consider them at all. A wave of my hand and the collected claims of thousands of years of human history and multiple faith traditions lay vanquished and incapable of troubling my thoroughly modern mind. This approach may be comforting, but it certainly isn’t intellectual. Examination of miracle claims is necessary at some point in the process of evaluation.
There have been efforts to study the effects of prayers on psychological, emotional, and medical health. The results certainly do not support the view that prayer produces no significant results as those who pray tend to enjoy greater health in the former two categories.[1] [2] Detractors could argue that prayer has a placebo effect, but then they find themselves in the position of explaining away exactly that which they claim does not exist, positive results from prayer. The detractor could point to studies like the one published in 2006 which ran 10 years of data where outcomes of 1,800 patients were evaluated after being prayed for by congregations and prayer groups of various denominational backgrounds which claimed that the prayers of strangers offered no positive effects on medical outcomes.[3] The problem with such a study is that it commits a category error. Applying that process to test divine intervention is silly. It assumes that God must respond to prayers, some of which were scripted by the designers of the study. The only thing those studies definitively prove is that God, if he does exist, has no interest in participating in a study under those conditions. Given the impossibility of testing God like any other natural phenomenon, attempting to predict when and why God may intervene, perhaps it is better to evaluate so called miraculous events which have already happened. After all, if prayer avails nothing random chance cannot also produce then instantaneous and unexplainable medical healings as a direct response to prayer should not happen.
New York Times columnist David French shares his story of suffering from advanced ulcerative colitis and experiencing a sudden and miraculous recovery after a praying friend called him in his hospital room and told him he was healed. His condition has never returned as of this writing.[4] The Catholic Church submits all candidates for sainthood through an evaluation process which includes verifying miracles prayed for through their name as intercessors before God. The miracles demonstrate the prospective saint holds a special place within the company of the departed. Most of the miracles are medical in nature and are required to meet certain criteria including the miracle must have occurred immediately in response to the prayer, the healing must be enduring, and the event must be beyond the medical explanation of secular doctors chosen by the Catholic Church as devil’s advocates. They take an equally stringent approach to verifying reported miracles at the Marion shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in France, where more than 7,000 healings have been claimed but only 70 have been recognized as miraculous by the Catholic Church.[5]
Christian scholar Craig Keener published a two-volume treatment of this subject called Miracles: The Credibility of New Testament Accounts.[6] He lists miracle stories throughout history and around the world including in the modern west. Stories of spontaneous healings of cancerous tumors, a clubbed foot, third degree burns, blindness, deafness, a broken ankle, paralysis, and even death. Many of these happened in the presence of medical professional and some with accompanying scans and x-rays to testify to the original diagnosis. Keener provides additional evidence that prayers contribute to recovery from surgery and psychological health. It’s entirely possible for the skeptic to read these accounts and remain convinced prayer avails nothing beyond those things supplied through random chance, but only if the entire evaluative process is managed through the lens of a worldview which dismissed the idea of miraculous intervention from the outset. We must keep the burden of proof necessary to sustain an Absolute Negative claim. Every account of the hundreds shared by Keener must be a mistake or a deception. If even one truly qualifies as a miracle, an event that defies explanation in a materialistic naturalistic worldview, then the categorical negative statement fails. Evidence suggests some prayers produces miraculous results. It simply is not true that all prayer is ineffectual.
God Answering Some Prayer May Not Be a Comfort
The idea God answers prayers with direct supernatural action in the lives of people on rare occasions may not be the comfort it first appears. For many people, those who deconstruct their faith, those who abandon their faith, and those who walk through the dark night of the soul, a protracted period of feeling the absence of God is agonizing. It would be a great deal more comforting to believe he is not there than that he is there, perfectly aware of the emotional and spiritual trial I am enduring and refuses to answer.
I just read in the book called John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs how Paul McCartney prayed to God as a child to bring his recently deceased mother back to him, fervently and passionately prayed. God’s silence in response left him scarred and convinced that prayer did nothing, religion was a sham. That response is rooted in profound pain and deep need. God is willing to do miracles, but he is not willing to show me he is here when I need a miracle or answer to prayer the most, when I am growing convinced my world is falling apart, my faith is waning, or my hope is dying. It may be better to believe the silence indicates absence rather than cold indifference. Wrestling with the God who will let me fight my way through the mess of my spiritual life to find a deeper and more enduring relationship with Him is hard. It demands a lot of us.
This is not to trivialize the experiences of people who claim to deconstruct their faith, deconvert, or see the secular light of reason and abandon Bronze Age ideas. I reconsider my views all the time. The point is that claiming the world looks exactly as we would expect it to look if there was no God and all prayers are equally unanswered is demonstrably false. I have no intention of using this space to enumerate the centuries of work from the Catholic Church cataloguing miraculous claims associated with prayers to saints, the miracles attested to at Lourdes, or the many accounts in Keener’s two volume treatment addressing this question. This post defends a simple proposition, it is true the world is full of people praying to God and receiving no answer. Other stories abound as well. Stories about people who suffer less depression through prayer, heal faster through prayer, and even see unremitting and incurable diseases vanquished through prayer. I don’t know exactly what I am to conclude when God doesn’t answer my prayers, but it is a step too far to conclude that his silence and my resulting pain indicate his non-existence.
I will reserve discussing the claimed total failure of all philosophical and historical arguments demonstrating the plausibility of God and Christianity for another post.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-men/201912/prayer-and-mental-health#:~:text=One%20large%20population%20study%2C%20led,to%20those%20who%20never%20prayed.
[2] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/187/11/2355/5094534
[3] https://www.templeton.org/news/what-can-science-say-about-the-study-of-prayer
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/opinion/christianity-spirituality-psychedelics-trump.html
[5] https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/37743/the-70th-miracle-lourdes-healing-officially-declared-supernatural
[6] https://a.co/d/3nbNvXq