If lightning is the anger of the gods, the gods are concerned mostly with trees. – Lao Tse

There is an excellent Web site, whydoesgodhateamputees.com, that contains a book’s worth of material on the irrationality of belief in the Christian god. It centers on one excellent question for those who believe in the power of prayer: Why does God refuse to heal amputees? The Christian Bible is very clear on the efficacy of sincere prayer by true believers. It promises that people who pray will get what they ask for:

- If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer (Matthew 21:21).

- If you ask anything in my name, I will do it (John 14:14).

- Ask, and it will be given you (Matthew 7:7).

- Nothing will be impossible to you (Matthew 17:20).

- Believe that you have received it, and it will be yours (Mark 11:24).

- And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well … The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective (James 5:15-16).

Millions of people believe that God answers their prayers. People claim to have been cured of cancer and other diseases, to have been spared by tornadoes and earthquakes, all because of prayer.

God saves or heals people in response to prayer all the time. So say 80 percent of Americans, in a CBS poll. A Pew poll finds that 75 percent of Americans pray frequently. So why not pray for someone’s missing limb to be regenerated? This would be something God could easily accomplish, and the faithful are promised in the Bible that He will deliver on any sincere prayer. But such prayers not only fail some of the time, but all of the time. Amputees are never, ever helped in this way by prayer.

People seem to anticipate this. How silly it would seem to pray for someone’s missing limb or limbs to be regenerated! That has never happened, and it never will. God always ignores the prayers of amputees, no matter how faithful and deserving. Why does this morally perfect, loving being discriminate against amputees?

The fact is, prayer never brings about events that would otherwise be impossible. God never answers prayers unless there is a possibility that the results are a coincidence. Apparently, prayer only works in such a way and in such circumstances that its workings are undetectable.
You can’t even show that prayer has any statistical impact. No one has ever been able to actually demonstrate the efficacy of prayer. It’s easy to test it out: just flip a coin one hundred times while praying for it to come up heads every time. Or pray over one set of sick people and not some others, and see if the first group does better than the other. That is exactly what they did in a recent major study funded by the religion-friendly Templeton Foundation, with unambiguously negative results: news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/04.06/05-prayer.html.

A common rationalization of the ambiguity of prayer’s efficacy is that God needs to remain hidden, perhaps because to be too obvious in His actions would destroy faith. The test, this reply goes, is to believe even in the absence of evidence.

But then why answer prayers at all? Answering prayers results in the “evidence” for the efficacy of prayer so many people cite when they explain why they believe in prayer. Does He want us to have evidence or not? Further, God was not hiding when He sent plagues upon Egypt, parted the Red Sea and sent His divine son along to go around telling everyone he was God and performing miracles. And then He commissioned a book that tells us all about these events, clearly expecting us to believe they really happened. Hardly the actions of a being who wants to remain hidden, or who worries that being too obvious would undermine faith!

Another popular rationalization of the ambiguity of prayer is that we cannot understand God’s will. God works in mysterious ways, and must have a good reason for acting this way. This answer is familiar, because it is the usual fallback position for the theist when confronted with innumerable examples of needless suffering that God could have prevented. There is no way to prove with absolute certainty that God doesn’t have some such hidden reasons, any more than one can prove that unicorns don’t exist. But that doesn’t make it reasonable to believe in God or unicorns.

Worthy people pray, and good things happen; equally worthy people pray under the same circumstances, and nothing happens. This is exactly what one would expect if prayer is meaningless. Which is it more reasonable to believe: that God exists and only chooses to intervene in cases where no one could show that an intervention has taken place, and so discriminates against amputees, and does so in direct violation of what is written in His holy text, or, God does not exist, and things happen or don’t happen by chance or natural causes? Belief in a god, fairy or other magical being who is there to protect and help us is a matter of wishful thinking. It is a scary world. We are buffeted about by events, frequently insecure, and our death, and the death of our loved ones, is always in the back of our minds.

People have strong motives to believe in miracles, or to represent themselves as being able to call them forth. When someone testifies to having witnessed a miracle, David Hume asks, which is the “greater miracle” (i.e., less likely): that a miracle has occurred, or that the person is lying, mistaken or a victim of wishful thinking? Like second marriages, belief in miracles is “the triumph of hope over experience.”

But why shouldn’t people have hope? Why rain on their parade? Because the religious are easily manipulated into suicide bombings or supporting stupid wars in the Middle East. Because religion is only tenable when conjoined with some level of contempt for reason and evidence, and we desperately need to face critical challenges — like violent fundamentalism, climate change and global resource depletion — rationally and with respect for evidence. That is why we need to be less respectful of the person who, standing by her tornado-spared house with the wreckage of her God-fearing neighbors’ homes all around, thanks God for answering her prayers.

Adrian Bardon is an associate professor of philosophy. (His columns this semester are part of a book project.)