Humans pray to God for many and various outcomes -- good and bad -- but among the most frequent petitionary prayers are surely those for the recovery of someone else from illness.
But, as everyone knows, most illnesses follow a largely predictable course, apparently independently of this stream of prayer.
Theodicy provides good explanations of why God sometimes -- for some or all of the short period of our earthly lives -- allows us to suffer pain and disability.
Although intrinsically bad states, these difficult times often serve good purposes for the sufferers and for others.
My suffering provides me with the opportunity to show courage and patience.
It provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and to help alleviate my suffering.
And it provides society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering.
A good God gives us a deep responsibility for ourselves, each other and the world, for whether and how we flourish, and for the free choice of how to exercise that responsibility.
And it is good for us to have this responsibility.
Although a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest concern is surely that each of us shall show patience, sympathy and generosity and, thereby, form a holy character.
Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others.
Only in that way can some people be encouraged to make serious choices about the sort of person they are to be.
For other people, illness is not so valuable.
A Christian view of intercessory prayer In Christian doctrine God hears our prayers and answers them -- if it is good for us -- in a way that is best for us.
Yet when we pray for another person, God knows far better than we do whether it will be best for that person and others affected by him that he should recover immediately or later or not at all.
Many Christians are aware of this when they pray for those in need that God would answer the prayer "as may be most expedient.
" A well-known prayer adds to this the clause "granting them in this world knowledge of thy truth, and in the world to come life everlasting.
"No sign of all that in the secular orientation of the prayer in the STEP research project, which states verbatim "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.
" God seeks better goals for all of us, and he may well provide them for those prayed for, despite the poverty of the petitionary prayer.
After all, Christians believe that the salvation of the world was brought about partly by God's failure to answer the prayer of his Son in the Garden of Gethsemane.
But, the point about Jesus having been made, a quick healthy recovery without complications is clearly a good thing, even if there are better things.
If the former can be provided without loss of the latter, God would surely provide it anyway, whether we pray or not.
So what is the point of petitionary prayer? The answer must be that sometimes, perhaps often, it is equally good that what we should pray for should occur as it should not occur, and that God wants to interact with us by answering our requests -- so long as we ask for right reasons.
Of course God wants to do for the person praying what that person wants just because that person wants it for a right reason.
One right reason is that he prays for a particular sufferer out of love and compassion.
In the STEP prayer study, the people praying were not praying out of love and compassion for the particular sufferer.
Although the form of their prayer might -- dishonestly -- suggest that they wanted the well-being of the patient for its own sake, that was not why they were praying.
They were praying to test a scientific hypothesis.
Why should a good God pay any attention to these prayers? One might say: "In order to show us more evidentially that he exists.
" But if there is a God, he does not need to answer such prayers to do this.
If he wanted to do that, he could fill the world with "super miracles.
" There is quite a lot of evidence anyway of God's existence, and too much might not be good for us.
The negative result of the STEP study is entirely predictable based on the hypothesis of a loving God who sometimes answers prayers of genuine compassion.
Why should I care? An analogy will show that what I have written is not an ad hoc hypothesis postulated to save theism from disconfirmation.
Suppose that I am a rich man who sometimes gives sums of money to worthy causes and that I know just how useful -- or not -- different gifts would be.
I receive many letters asking me to give such gifts.
Some research organization wants to know if there is any point in people writing such letters to me.
Do they make any difference to whether I give money to this cause or that? So the research organization commissions a study.
Many people write letters to me on behalf of several causes to see whether I will give more to those causes than to the other causes.
In fact, let us suppose, I am normally moved by such letters because the writers took the trouble to write to me on behalf of some cause about which they care a lot.
But I now discover why I am suddenly bombarded with a stream of letters on behalf of certain causes, and I realize that on this occasion, unlike on other occasions, the letter writers have no deep concern for the causes for which they write.
Therefore, I pay no attention to their letters.