Quote from lkh:
Is God real, or is he imaginary?
Is God real, or is he imaginary? It is one of the most important questions in America today, because this question lies at the heart of the American culture wars.
If God is real and if God inspired the Bible, then we should worship God as the Bible demands. We should certainly post the Ten Commandments in our courthouses and shopping centers, put "in God we trust" on the money, pray in our schools and eliminate the theory of evolution from every curriculum. We should focus our society on God and his infallible Word.
On the other hand, if God is imaginary, then religion is a complete illusion. Christianity, Judaism and Islam are pointless. We should eliminate God from our society because God is meaningless. Belief in God is nothing but a silly superstition, and this superstition causes significant problems for all of us.
But how can we decide, conclusively, whether God is real or imaginary? Since we are intelligent human beings living in the 21st century, we should take the time to look at some data. That is what we are doing when we ask, "Why won't God heal amputees?"
When we pray to God to restore an amputated limb, there is only one way for the limb to regenerate: God must exist and God must answer prayers. There is zero ambiguity in this situation. What we find is that whenever we create an unambiguous situation like this and look at the results of prayer, prayer never works. God never "answers prayers" if there is no possibility of coincidence.
Isn't that interesting? We will approach this fascinating relationship between prayer and coincidence from several different angles in this book.
Ambiguity
The fact that God ignores all unambiguous prayers meshes with another fact. If we analyze God's responses to prayers using statistical tools, we find that there is never any statistical evidence for prayer. For example, this article points out:
One of the most scientifically rigorous studies yet, published earlier this month, found that the prayers of a distant congregation did not reduce the major complications or death rate in patients hospitalized for heart treatments. [ref]
It also says:
A review of 17 past studies of ''distant healing," published in 2003 by a British researcher, found no significant effect for prayer or other healing methods.
No valid scientific study has ever found any evidence that prayer works. You can pick any disease you like -- cancer, diabetes, heart diease, etc. Prayer has zero effect in every statistical study. See this page for details.
Cancer
You can see the same effect in the following prayer. Let's assume that you are a true believer and you do believe that God cures cancer. What would happen if we get down on our knees and pray to God in this way:
Dear God, almighty, all-powerful, all-loving creator of the universe, we pray to you to cure every case of cancer on this planet tonight. We pray in faith, knowing you will bless us as you describe in Matthew 7:7, Matthew 17:20, Matthew 21:21, Mark 11:24, John 14:12-14, Matthew 18:19 and James 5:15-16. In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.
This is a valid experiment. We pray sincerely, knowing that when God answers this completely heartfelt, unselfish, non-materialistic prayer, it will glorify God and help millions of people in remarkable ways. This should be an easy prayer for an omnipotent, all-loving God to answer.
This prayer is unambiguous too. If this prayer is going to get answered tonight, God must exist and God must answer prayers. As soon as we remove the ambiguity like this, we see the true nature of "God." There is no way that a coincidence can answer this prayer, and, sure enough, the prayer goes unanswered.
Meaning
If you look at the data rationally, you can see exactly what is happening here:
When we pray to God about any unambigous situation, God never answers the prayer.
When we analyse any ambiguous prayer using statistical tools, we find zero effect from prayer.
In other words, the data indicates that every "answered prayer" truly is a coincidence, nothing more. "God" doesn't "answer prayers" at all. The whole idea that "God answers prayers" appears to be an illusion created by human imagination.
Christians can create dozens of excuses and rationalizations for all of this evidence . For example, Christians will go to great lengths trying to explain why God ignores every prayer to regenerate lost limbs. But have you ever considered what the relationship between prayer and coincidence actually means? What if, instead of rationalizing, we speak honestly about the delusion of religion? The purpose of this Web site is to start this conversation in an open, friendly, easy-to-understand way, so that we can make our world a much better place.
Would you like to learn more? If you are an intelligent human being, and if you want to understand the true nature of "God", you owe it to yourself to ask, "Why won't God heal amputees?"
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