If you don’t like how your life is going, why don’t you just ask God for help?

In my last post, I mentioned that my life really isn’t good enough to be worth trading away the hope of heaven, just so I can live by my own rules for what relatively little time I have left in this life. I anticipate the titular question is the type of thing a well-meaning Christian might ask. I’m also drawing some inspiration from my mom, who never hesitates (whenever I’m complaining about my sad state in life) to say that “following God is the only way to true happiness.” This fails to move me, though, because if that were true, I would’ve never left the church in the first place. If that were true, I should think that after two thousand years of Christianity, there wouldn’t still be all this conflict and disagreement about which religion was the right and true one, because it would slowly-but-surely be plainly evident to everyone (not just the people who already believe it) that one religion gets better “results” than the others.

But anyway, that’s a bit of a tangent. Since I’m so dissatisfied with my life, I can see how a person who believes in the power of prayer might think that asking God for help would be a good start to get myself on the right track. Sometimes, when I’m lying in bed thinking about how pitiful my miserable existence is, I might have a moment of weakness and think, “eh, maybe I should just give it a try. What could it hurt?”



At that point, though, I’ve basically just argued for a microcosmic sort of Pascal’s Wager (and if you don’t know what’s wrong with that, this page gives a pretty good rundown of it). When you really get right down to it, the only reason I would be trying an appeal to the Christian God instead of one of the many other supposed gods out there, is because I was raised in a Christian family, in a majority-Christian society. It’s not because I have any reason at all to believe such a god actually exists.

Of course, there’s no real reason I need to pray to a specific god (Christian or otherwise). I could just toss up a prayer with an address like, “dear whichever god may actually be out there.” The problem with that is, it still comes down to the paradox about what effect prayer actually has. If the only purpose of prayer is to make me feel better (which, presumably, will only be a temporary effect), then there are plenty of secular methods which can achieve that result just as well. But if the intended value of prayer is to actually change real events in the material world, that opens up a whole separate can of worms. That reminds me of an old joke by comedian Emo Phillips:

I pray a simple prayer every morning, it’s an ecumenical prayer. Whether you’re Catholic, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu - I think it speaks to the heart of every faith. It goes, “Lord, please break the laws of the universe for my convenience. Amen.”

To me, that pretty much sums up the problem I have with just tossing up a prayer on the off-chance that some type of god is out there listening. If such a powerful entity really does exist, I’m just not arrogant enough to presume upon it that it should reshape the cosmos according to my petty whims.

If prayer worked that way, then the sovereign Lord of all the universe would constantly have his plans being derailed by all kinds of random, petty requests by small-minded religious people who can’t see past their own problems. And yet, somehow, all the prayers to end world hunger or bring world peace have persistently gone unanswered. So, I think there are really good reasons to think that prayer doesn’t make a bit of difference even if a god does exist, but I also think there are a lot of good reasons to think no god exists anyway.

Bottom line, I can’t see it as anything but a waste of time.