An ineffective feminist, a beauty queen, and a genocidal anti-Semite
Xerxes king of Persia (the grandson of Cyrus) held a banquet. He showed off his vast wealth to his nobles and officials and subjects there. He wanted to show off his beautiful wife Vashti too, but she refused to come. The king consulted seven wise men, and they said he should divorce Vashti. That way, all the women in his kingdom wouldn’t think they could get away with disobeying their husbands. So he divorced her.
Now the king needed to find a new wife. So he had lots of beautiful young women from all over the kingdom brought into his harem, so he could try them out. After four years of this, the king found that a girl named Esther was the most attractive. And he made her his new queen.
Nebuchadnezzar had a troubling dream about a big statue being smashed by a rock, which then became a huge mountain. He decided to see if his magicians could tell him what it meant. To make sure they were really capable of interpreting it, instead of telling them what he had dreamed about, he demanded that they tell him first. The magicians said that was impossible; only a god could do that. Since they couldn’t read his mind, the king decided to have all the wise men in Babylon killed for being frauds.
After he had a dream about a huge statue, Nebuchadnezzar decided to make a huge statue. He decreed that everyone had to worship the statue or die. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to worship it, so the king had them tied up and thrown into a furnace. Daniel didn’t get thrown into the furnace, so apparently he was willing to worship the king’s idol.
But God sent a storm, which nearly wrecked the ship. The sailors found out that Jonah had angered his God and brought a storm on their ship. So Jonah suggested they throw him overboard, to divert God’s wrath away from the ship. But the sailors didn’t want to kill him. They tried to sail back and return him to land, so he could resume his mission.
But God liked Jonah’s idea better, so he made the storm worse and prevented them from getting back to land. So the sailors reluctantly threw Jonah overboard, and the storm stopped. God sent a huge fish, which swallowed Jonah and then threw him up on land three days later.
Jesus says believers can ask him/God for anything they want, and he will do it. As long as you have even the tiniest amount of faith, nothing will be impossible for you. Not even moving mountains. Whatever you ask for in prayer will be yours, if you believe it will be.
Well, some parts of the Bible suggest that you might have to ask in the name of Jesus. And have somebody else agree with you on what you’re asking for. The Bible says the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. So just make sure you have a clear conscience, and then you can get anything you ask for. As long as it’s God’s will, anyway…
But actually, the Bible says God gives generously to all without finding fault. So forget about all those apparent preconditions (belief, righteousness, agreement, asking in Jesus’s name, aligning with God’s will, etc.). None of those things are even required before God will give you what you ask for. If you don’t have what you want, it’s only because you haven’t asked God for it. Jesus agrees: he taught that everyone who asks receives. God even gives good gifts to evil people if they ask.
Of course, Jesus and the Bible are wrong, as usual. In reality, nobody ever gets what they want because they prayed for it. Even Jesus didn’t get what he prayed for!
Testing the claim
Scientific experiments
Since Jesus makes such a strong claim—that you can ask for anything in prayer and God will always give you what you ask for—all it takes to disprove that claim is to observe one single case of someone not getting what they prayed for. But we can do better than that. Even the weaker claim that prayer sometimes gets results can be disproved. When people have tried actually rigorously testing the hypothesis that prayer has a healing effect, most of the studies have found no healing effect.
Why only most? A few false positives are to be expected by chance, even if there is no real effect. But usually when a study seems to show that prayer works, it’s because that study is flawed. The more a study is well-designed, the less effect of prayer it finds.
In some of the studies, the subjects all knew people were praying for them. And that’s the only reason they felt better afterwards. As shown by other studies that found that people felt better when they thought people were praying for them, not when people actually were praying for them.
Maybe that knowledge gave those patients performance anxiety. Or maybe the patients interpreted doctors resorting to prayer as an indication that their situation was hopeless. Or maybe there’s no real effect here either way, just minor random variation.)
Then there’s this study, where there weren’t enough subjects involved, and the statistical analysis was done by a biased person without sufficient blinding (a problem other prominent prayer studies have had as well), and they claimed success based on outcomes other than what they were originally supposed to be testing for, and they failed to control for which patients had health insurance, and they didn’t distinguish between prayer and other supernatural healing methods, and it’s not clear whether actual prayer was even involved at all.
And that’s not the worst one that has been done. Another study on prayer had an even smaller sample size and no control group, and was not double-blinded. And it was funded by the Templeton Foundation, which gives the researchers a corrupt incentive to report results in favor of religion regardless of what they actually find.
Even in the few prayer studies that are pretty well designed and still get so-called positive results, the effects are much more limited than you’d expect from an all-powerful God. If the difference in outcomes between groups in those studies was really caused by God and not chance, why would that difference merely be something like 14% of patients in the prayer group getting a bad outcome vs 22% in the control group? And why would most of the outcome variables measured show no effect of prayer? Including variables like “recovering quickly” and “not dying”, which were outcomes that people were specifically praying for.
There was one study on prayer (for increasing fertility) that did find quite a significant effect size… but that study turned out to be completely fraudulent.
“God works in ways mysteriously similar to random chance.”
Keep in mind that these specific studies I’m mentioning here are just the few where prayer appeared to get fairly good results. The vast majority of studies on prayer have found no significant effect at all.
Anyway, maybe studies on prayers for sick people shouldn’t be taken as evidence for or against the effectiveness of prayer, because prayer is awfully hard to control for. Most people who are sick are already going to be praying and/or having others pray for them. So it would be hard to be sure you actually had a non-prayer group of patients to compare with. It’s probably better to assess the effectiveness of prayer by looking at something that people aren’t going to be praying about already.
Informal experiments
Most people don’t even bother keeping track of which of their prayers were or were not successful. As a result, they only remember the times when they got what they asked for. But if you do try keeping track, you’ll find that most of your prayers actually go unanswered.
You can also try keeping track of the same things you would have asked God for, but without praying. Or you could try praying to a jug of milk or something instead. It won’t make any difference. You will get about the same success rate as when you prayed to God, because all the “answered prayers” you’ve experienced were just coincidences. (Of course, to make it a fair comparison, you have to make sure that the way you evaluate the results of praying to the milk jug is just as biased as the way you interpret the results of praying to God.)
Here’s an even easier way to test whether prayer has any effect: Try asking God to do something that unambiguously could not possibly happen without supernatural intervention. After all, if you believe you have access to an all-powerful God who is willing to answer your prayers, why limit your requests to things that can happen without God’s help? Jesus promised that believers can pray for things that seem impossible, and they will get what they ask for.
When you ask for something unambiguous like that, you never get it. It doesn’t matter how good a reason you have for wanting the miracle to happen.4 It also doesn’t make any difference if you make sure to fulfill all the conditions that the Bible sometimes says (and sometimes doesn’t say) are required for your prayers to be answered.
If the only way it can happen is with God’s help, it will never happen. You only get “results” from prayer when you ask for something mundane. Something that can happen even though there’s no God listening to you.
“Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Give him a religion, and he’ll starve to death while praying for a fish.”
Consider the massive amount of evil that is constantly happening in the world. There must be so many people praying all the time for God to stop those things from happening, yet they continue to happen. God clearly isn’t answering prayers. And if he’s not willing for whatever reason to do anything about all the world’s big important problems, do you really think he’s going to take your trivial personal requests? The little things you ask for and get are just things that would have happened anyway.
When one or a few people pray during a disaster and end up being the only survivors, this is taken as evidence that prayer is effective. But were those people really the only ones who prayed? Most people are religious, so probably not.5 You just don’t hear about the rest praying, because dead people don’t get to talk about what happened when they prayed, so everyone ignores them. But most of the people affected by the disaster likely did pray. And most of those people who prayed didn’t survive. So no, that is not evidence that prayer is effective.6
Similarly, lots of extremely ill people pray for recovery, and lots of them don’t recover. But the few who do recover are the only ones you get to hear talking about what happened when they prayed. So if you don’t actively look into the numbers, you can easily get a very distorted impression of the effectiveness of prayer. In reality, prayer has no effect on death rates.
There were much higher rates of premature death before we had modern medicine, even though prayer was no less common than it is today. Similarly, there are much lower rates of premature death in countries where prayer is relatively uncommon but that do have access to modern medicine, compared to less developed but more religious countries. Health outcomes are correlated with human progress only, and prayer clearly has no effect.
You don’t even have to test it to know that prayer won’t get results
What happens if you pray for something that requires other people to do something? Either God doesn’t respect people’s free will and will force those people to do things just because you asked him to, or the outcome of your prayer depends on those people’s decisions rather than on God.
“The man who prays is the one who thinks that God has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct God how to put them right.”
—Christopher Hitchens
Or what happens if two people pray for incompatible outcomes? They’re not both going to get what they asked for. Jesus’s claim that all prayers will be answered isn’t even logically possible.
But why should you even need prayer? A good God would protect everyone from harm all the time, not just when they prayed. So why pray? Do you think God doesn’t already know what you need? If an all-knowing God hasn’t helped you already without you praying, it’s because either God is not good, or helping you isn’t actually the right thing to do. Either way, praying isn’t going to make any difference.
They say God has a plan. They say everything that ever happens happens for a good reason, since it’s all part of God’s perfect plan. This idea is incompatible with the idea of a prayer-answering God. Not everything people want is going to be part of God’s original plan. So any prayers that don’t happen to fit into the plan are going to have to go unfulfilled.
What else could God do? Do you really expect God to change his plan just because a human asks him to? Why would you even want him to? Do you think you know better than God? To ask God to do what you want is to say that you think his own plan isn’t good enough. Prayer is blasphemy.
God already knew what you would want, and he already took that into account in his original decision. Either he was already going to do what you think he should do, so asking him to do it is pointless, or he already decided it wasn’t the right thing to do, which means you are asking God to do something bad. Do you think God is going to agree to do something bad for you? Do you think just because you think the alternative course of events would be bad, God is going to prevent it, and thereby prevent all the greater good consequences that he knows it will have?
“Long time ago God made a divine plan. Gave it a lot of thought. Decided it was a good plan. Put it into practice. And for billions and billions of years the divine plan has been doing just fine. Now you come along and pray for something. Well, suppose the thing you want isn’t in God’s divine plan. What do you want him to do? Change his plan? Just for you? Doesn’t it seem a little arrogant?”
—George Carlin
Because according to a popular theistic argument, every seemingly undesirable event that ever happens was planned by God for a reason. It must have some awfully important planned consequences, if God was willing to intentionally plan for that unpleasant event to happen, just so those consequences could happen. So God is certainly not going to let you disrupt his perfect plan and prevent all the good that was going to happen because of that event, just because you said so. He’s going to ignore your prayer.
If God is all-knowing and all-good, then he doesn’t need you to tell him what to do, and he isn’t going to let you. Or alternatively, if God does let imperfect humans influence his actions, then God is imperfect.
Since it makes no sense to expect God to answer prayers, it’s much more likely that there’s a more mundane explanation for any apparently answered prayers. Maybe the improvement you experienced only corresponded with your prayer because you didn’t feel the need pray until you had nowhere to go but up. Or maybe you pray all the time, so of course anything good that happens is going to happen after you pray. Or maybe you mistakenly gave the credit to prayer when what had really helped was one of the other ways you tried to get what you wanted…
Making excuses for God
Believers have plenty of explanations for why God doesn’t answer prayers. It’s easy to come up with excuses for God when you’ve had so much practice because God has been constantly disappointing you all your life.
When King David was old, he had trouble staying warm. His attendants solved that problem by finding a hot girl to lie next to him in bed. Her name was Abishag, but he didn’t shag her. One day, David’s wife Bathsheba came to his room with a complaint.
After he became wise, Solomon suggested cutting a baby in half. Then he wisely decided not to let the baby be raised by a prostitute who thought his idea was a good one. (He gave the baby to a different prostitute instead.)
One day, while David was fighting the Philistines, he complained that he was thirsty. There was a well over near where the Philistines were encamped. So three of David’s best warriors risked their lives to bring him some water from that well. But then David refused to drink it, claiming that they had brought him blood instead of water. He poured the water out on the ground.
