What is prayer but the petitioning of God for His devine intervention in human lives. This most often occurs in matters of life and death, when we or a loved on is facing a major health crisis, such as surgery or battling a deadly disease. Sometimes prayer is used in hopes of saving an embattled marriage, a failing business or a financial crisis. The goal is for our pleas to attract God's attention, have Him look upon us with sympathy and mercy, and then use His supreme powers to enact positive change in our lives.
In order to fully understand the fallacy of prayer, we must first accept certain qualities attributed to God. First and foremost is the idea that God is prescient, which is to say He knows everything that has happened, is happening, and that will happen. It is not unlike the lyrics to the Christmas classic,Santa Claus is Coming to Town. "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake."
There isn't anything that God does not know, because if He doesn't know it--if he lacks knowledge or foresight--then He cannot be God. He must be all knowing and all seeing. To be anything less means He isn't a supreme being.
Which brings us back to prayer.For the sake of argument, let us create a character named Jack. He is a middle-aged family man who has been critically injured in an automobile accident. He is rushed to surgery, where doctors repair severely damaged organs. The surgeon tells the family that he has done all he can, and that it is now a waiting game to see if Jack survives through the night. "It is in God's hands," the surgeon solemnly declares. In response, the family initiates a prayer vigil. They go to social media and implore friends to pray for Jack. Somehow the idea exist that with enough voices petitioning God, He will be duly impressed, influenced and ultimately spare Jack's life.
Here is where the contradiction lies. As stated earlier, God is omniscient. That means that the very second Jack was conceived in the womb, God, as if viewing a biographical documentary, knows what will happen to Jack every second of every hour of every day of Jack's life. That also means He knows the precise second of Jack's death, where he will die and the cause of death. How does He know all this? Because He is an all-knowing God. And what does that imply? It implies that prayer is a futile exercise. How do we reach such a conclusion? We reach it by the very definition of prayer. I stated at the beginning that prayer is a petitioning of God to change an outcome, to intervene in our lives to circumvent trajedy. In short, the goal of prayer is to change God's mind. But if prayer can change God's mind, it must mean He doesn't know the future. The instant of Jack's birth, God knew that he would have a car accident on that particular day and whether Jack would sirvive or not; therefore prayer is pointless. To suggest that prayer can change God's mind about an outcome means God does not really know for sure what the future holds. And if He doesn't knowwhat the future holds, He cannot be a supreme being.
God either preordains all human events, or He has no clue what will happen. The concept of prayer can mean only two things: 1) It is useless because God has already determined the outcome of a given situation. 2) Prayer can change God's mind, which means He has no more grasp of the future than we sinful mortals.
To reach the latter conclusion is to admit there is no omniscient, infallible Supreme Being.
No doubt there are those who would pray I am wrong.
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