This page:
"Telling God Things in Prayer
When we pray, we are conveying our thoughts to what we think of as God. But, if God is all-knowing then it already knows anything we say. If we pray because we are feeling insecure or frightened... God already knows how we feel. If we pray because we want God to make a friend recover from illness... then God already knows that we want it to help our friend. So what is the point of praying to God for these things? It is certainly not because it needs us to, or because we want it to tell it something that it already knows!"Vexen, on how God Does Not Need Prayer or other things, 2004 Oct
God Knows What Is Best
Of all the many courses of action or inaction, God knows which is best. An all-knowing God knows everything. No Human being can possibly change the facts: No Human can change the fact that God knows what course of action is best. As God does what is best, then no Human can change the will of God. If God wants to do something, God will do it. If God doesn't want to do something, God won't do it. An eternal being, all-powerful, and perfect, God knows what is best.
If you pray for a friend to miraculously recover from an inoperable brain disease, what will happen? If God wants to cure the person, it will. If it doesn't want to, it won't. It will cure that person when God knows is the best time; or, it wont cure that person. God knows what is best. God will be done! What are you thinking when you pray for God to change its mind?
Praying Is Against God's Will
To pray for something to happen is to say to God that you know better than it! It is to say that you do not agree with the course of events that God has laid out. To pray for something is to go against God's will, to ask God to act at a time when God knows it is not the right time to act. If it is right, God will have already planned to do it. If it is wrong, God won't do it. Your prayer will not change these facts. To pray is to oppose God, to harass it, to make a statement that you think you know better! To pray is insolent, ignorant, misguided, confused but most of all arrogant.
Jesus said "Get thee behind me, Satan!" to an apostle who thought he knew better than God's plan (even though the apostle was bemoaning suffering!)... by trying to sway God's mind through prayer, YOU are behaving in the same way as that apostle! No matter how good your intentions are, your own master in chief, Mr Christ, would call you Satanic for it! Think about what it means to pray, hope or wish for things, you might find you're not doing what your God wants you to be doing!
Who are we Really Praying to?
Given that prayer is irrelevant to an all-knowing or perfectly good god, why do theists do it? The answer is that praying is for ourselves. The standard Christian response to the above arguments is just that... that it is us that psychologically need prayer. But, however, the Christian response is narrow. The function that prayer plays is as the facilitator of introspective reflection. Theist religions call it "prayer", Eastern ones call it "meditation". Psychologically it is introspection. In all cases it is connected to the internal states of the person involved.
Selfishness
Prayer or meditation, be it Christian, Buddhist, Muslim or Jewish, is all for the self, not for God, as God doesn't need it. But most Christians and theists do not admit that it is an essentially selfish action!
In Satanism, my own religion, it is common knowledge that religious symbols are reflections of the self, nothing more. But those who meditate and those who pray delude themselves into thinking it is "God" that wants them to do it, rather than admitting they're doing it for themselves. Self-help works better when it is done honestly, "prayer" should be called "meditation" or "philosophical introspection".
Praying is Supernatural
When you pray, the words and thoughts are believed to achieve potential results. This is no different from a wizard or a pagan casting a spell: It is no different to any other supernatural event. It is supernatural because the affect is not achieved through the physical laws of nature that can be investigated through science. If Thor raises a magic army to fight for him, God reanimates the bodies of the dead, a Hindu god makes a statue cry, a Pagan fertility rite has an affect, it is all magic. Now, if a group of pagan perform a healing ritual, or even a solitary pagan burns a statement of healing on a piece of paper, and it works, theists will no doubt say that it only worked because their God wanted it to work. Many others would call it magic. The actual method by which the ritual worked is unknown. It is the same with prayer: When people think that prayer has been successful, they ascribe the cause and effect of it to God. But this cause and effect could by any supernatural phenomenon.
Praying Is Magic
It could be that the spirits of the dead carry out the wishes of a Christian who prays; it could be that everyone, including Christians have spiritual animal guides, and these oversee people's wishes and prayers, and go forth and make some such wishes actually happen. We simply do not know what happens; hence, it is not only supernatural but it is magic.
Now, assume there is a God and that that God chooses to act on someone's prayer. God has to then break the chain of cause and affect if it wants to change the course of events. This unnatural act is no different from any other supernatural magical event; all such events break the natural laws of cause and affect as understood by science. It is magic. God's methods, when it intervenes in the world, are magical. Miracles are magic. When miracles occur, we never know which god makes them occur, or which method. We don't know if spells, prayers, rituals, and wishes are made effective by quantum souls, gods, fairies, demons, dead spirits, etc. No matter which one of these potential beneficiaries carried out our will, it is a magical result.
"The Satanist shuns terms such as "hope" and "prayer" as they are indicative of apprehension. If we hope and pray for something to come about, we will not act in a positive way which will make it happen. The Satanist, realizing that anything he gets is of his own doing, takes command of the situation instead of praying[...]. Positive thinking and positive action add up to results."
The Satanic Bible, Book of Lucifer 1:paragraph 4
Vexen's Website on Satanism: [Link]
There have not been many scientific investigations on the power of prayer. One of the largest was called the "Great Prayer Experiment", and is reported on below by Prof. Richard Dawkins:
“An amusing, if rather pathetic, case study in miracles is the Great Prayer Experiment: does praying for patients help them recover? Prayers are commonly offered for sick people, both privately and in formal places of worship. Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was the first to analyse scientifically whether praying for people is efficacious. He noted that every Sunday, in churches throughout Britain, entire congregations prayed publicly for the health of the royal family. Shouldn't they, therefore, be unusually fit, compared with the rest of us, who are prayed for only by our nearest and dearest? Galton looked into it, and found no statistical difference. His intention may, in any case, have been satirical, as also when he prayed over randomized plots of land to see if the plants would grow any faster (they didn't).Valiantly shouldering aside all mockery, the team of researchers [from the Templeton Foundation] soldiered on, spending $2.4 million of Templeton money under the leadership of Dr Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston. [...] Dr Benson and his team monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals, all of whom received coronary bypass surgery. [...] Prayers were delivered by the congregations of three churches, one in Minnesota, one in Massachusetts and one in Missouri. [...] The results, reported in the American Heart Journal of April 2006, were clear-cut.”
"The God Delusion" by Prof. Richard Dawkins, p61-63
The patients were divided into 3 (double-blind) groups:
What amazing results! Prof. Dawkins continues:
“Was God doing a bit of smiting, to show his disapproval of the whole barmy enterprise? It seems more probable that those patients who knew they were being prayed for suffered additional stress in consequence: [...] Dr Charles Bethea, one of the researchers, said, 'It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?' In today's litigious society [will they] put together a class action lawsuit against the Templeton Foundation?”
"The God Delusion" by Prof. Richard Dawkins, p63
Of course, it makes no sense that prayers would help. If God wanted people to get better, God is all-powerful and will make it so if it is for the greater good. If God doesn't want to, it won't. This is related to the argument above that praying is against God's will. Also, if there was a good god, it would automatically pray, itself, for the full recovery of all victims, and as God's prayers are not only to itself, but they are also the result of an all-powerful being, it holds that if God wants people to recover, then all people will recover. It can be no other way, unless god is not all-powerful. Unfortunately, as there is much suffering, some argue that this is proof that god is evil.
Daniel C. Dennett, Skeptical Inquirer (2007)3
God knows everything - everything we say in prayer, God already knows. The point of praying is definitely not to reveal things to an all-knowing God. God acts only when God knows it is good to act, the wishes of prayer can only ever be against God's will, as I have elaborated on above. So, when prayer works, how does it work? If prayer works, then it is either coincidence (you've prayed for something that was going to happen anyway) or, you knew what was best better than God did, and God intervened!. The latter is impossible. Magic, or prayers, when they are effective, must be against God's will. If you ask a Christian or a Muslim, what will they say is the magical force that acts against God's will? Satan's will. If a supernatural affect such as prayer goes against God's will, then it is Satanic. As such, prayer is either useless, or Satanic. What business, then, have theists got in praying? This is a warning to all god believers that they must be very careful of their own motives when they get together and pray for things!
The Great Prayer Experiment, and the fact that the Royal Family are not miraculously fit and healthy compared to other rich people, provide evidence that prayer does nothing, and it even makes things worse to tell someone that a team is praying for them!
Dawkins, Prof. Richard
"The God Delusion" (2006 hardback). Published by Bantam Press, Transworld Publishers, Uxbridge Road, London, UK.
Skeptical Inquirer
Pro-science magazine published bimonthly by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, New York, USA.
By Vexen Crabtree 2005 March 22