God Answers Prayers

There's an atheistic website entitled God is Imaginary which states that it has 50 proofs that God doesn't exist. Proof number 2 is that God doesn't answer prayer. His argument is that God doesn't answer prayer EXACTLY THE WAY WE WANT HIM TO, and therefore God doesn't exist. He goes further on to say that we who pray and believe are silly, and if he's right about God not existing then he has every right to say we are silly. He doesn't have courage enough to permit comments or even provide an email address to allow rebuttals. I do feel sorry for this person, though. I wonder what prayer it is that he thought God didn't answer, it must have been something very close to his heart like a girlfriend, a child, a wife, or a mother he lost. Maybe a father or a best friend. However, I will write a response to him and hope that it makes its way to him. I invite him to reply to me. I invite him to comment. In the meanwhile, I will pray for him that he has a change of heart.
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You cite proof # 2 of God is imaginary as “God never answers any prayers”. On a scientific level, this is patently impossible to prove; therefore it cannot be a proof. In fact, all it takes is ONE occurrence of God answering prayers to debunk this “proof”. I have personally had many prayers directly answered, and many that have been indirectly answered, and several answered with a “no”. No, by the way, is a perfectly acceptable if sometimes disappointing answer frequently used by loving parents and by God.

You act as if God would have to play the big sugar-daddy in the sky in order to be believable, but I challenge that such a God would be less believable. Love has limits, love has boundaries, and love thinks of the greater good, not the immediate want. You cite as an example that if one million persons who were holy were to gather together on a single night and pray for everyone with cancer to be cured, that it wouldn’t happen. You’re right. Most likely, it is true that not everyone would be cured. God’s view of good isn’t always our view. You say that the overnight curing of cancer for everyone in the world would be an obvious good. I challenge that this is not necessarily so.

Cancer is the result of contagions and contaminates in our environment, our waters, and our air. We put those contagions and contaminates there, God didn’t. Thus, cancer is man-made. Now, if God cures all cancers overnight, our urge to find the source of these cancers and eliminate the source is gone. The contagions and contaminates linger, hurting us in other ways and in six months other people will have developed cancer. We would continue to think it’s okay to pour contagions and contaminates into our environment, becoming lazy and careless and expecting God to do the work of cleaning up a mess we have created. What parent that truly wants the best for the child doesn’t teach by allowing natural consequences? Those consequences may hurt, but they are important reminders of how the world actually works. Also, some of the people who get cancer will have changes of heart and remember the God who created them, turning back to him in prayer. If they become well too soon, they may not have this important change of heart. Some of the people who get cancer will cause other people to have changes of heart and remember God. God may save thousands of souls that would have been lost by allowing this one person, who loves Him and trusts in Him, to get cancer. Through that soul’s temporary suffering, God strengthens their already strong belief in him and converts many who would have been lost. God would rather save the soul and lose the body than save the body, which is temporary, and lose the soul. It may also be that some of the people who have cancer may need to die. These people may have allowed themselves to be so filled with evil that they hurt everyone around them, people like serial murderers, rapists, pedophiles, etc.

God doesn’t judge good by our standards, just as an adult doesn’t judge good based upon a child’s standards. A child believes that it would be good to eat nothing but candy and cookies all day long. An adult realizes that this behavior, in the short term will almost certainly cause the child to have a severe stomach ache and in the long run will cause the child to grow weak as the candy doesn’t adequately nourish the body, though it tastes good. Likewise, God doesn’t give us everything we ask for because sometimes what we ask for is short-sighted and over the long run will do us more harm than good. I invite you to read the parable I wrote in the post just before this, to help explain a little more.