Does God Intervene?

[POI]

Christians, both in prayer and without, will state God gave me this, did that, or other.

For debate: Does God ever intervene, with or without being asked? If no, why ever ask God for anything? If yes, why does he skip many/all requests?

[POI]

maybe there is a good reason for that.

There is a good reason. You are praying to yourself, as God does not exist. This is why a claimed intervening god always skips the request to cure incurable conditions.

[1213]

...as God does not exist...

How would you prove your claim? How would you define, what or who is God?

This is why a claimed intervening god always skips the request to cure incurable conditions.

Sorry, i don't believe that.

[POI]

Sorry, i don't believe that.

You have no good reason not to believe it.

If an intervening God exists...
If an intervening God sometimes answers prayers...
If an intervening God sometimes answers the call of prayer to end suffering...
If the righteous are allowed to not only pray for themselves, but also for the good of others...

Then God would sometimes answer righteously given prayer requests to remove one's cerebral palsy, ALS, dementia, lupus, diabetes type 1, etc... But no amount of righteous prayer is going to cure the incurable. Which means it is most logical that your believed upon God, as told from the Bible, does not really exist. Sorry.

[POI]

I suspect most believers have avoided this topic because:

1) Believers realize that 'God' pretty much skips or ignores prayer requests to remove deemed 'evil' and incurable unwanted conditions.
2) If God has a plan, then prayer is pointless regardless.
3) The "butterfly effect" is illogical, as it relates to the Bible's concept of prayer.
4) Believers understand that claims to 'answered prayer', as well as making excuses as to why God sometimes does not answer one's prayer, is much like admitting that they accept the hits and ignore the misses.
5) A deemed intervening Bible God would logically stop child torture/suffering prior to their demise.

There could be other logical reasons why believers avoid this topic. However, since this topic is generating very little traffic, there is no point in exploring what these other reasons might be.... In essence, this topic exposes the unlikelihood that a claimed "Bible God" exists. Sorry believers.

[mms20102]

[Replying to POI in post #34]

1 “God always skips incurable conditions.”
New point: an “incurable” category is historically fluid.
• Leukaemia was once incurable; today a child with ALL has > 90 % survival.
• Smallpox killed 300 million last century; now extinct.
If God exists, He can answer prayer through human discovery instead of thunderbolt miracles. A skipped cure today may be tomorrow’s Nobel prize. Dismissing that path as “God doing nothing” prejudges how intervention must look.

2 “If God has a plan, prayer is pointless.”
Plan ≠ automation. Think of chess: the grandmaster sees mate in ten, but each move still matters. Qurʾān 13 : 39 says parts of the decree are “erased or confirmed” in response to human action—including prayer. Prayer is a tool inside the plan, not a glitch in it.

3 “The butterfly effect makes prayer illogical.”
Chaos theory bothers finite agents who can’t track ripples. Omniscience by definition holds every variable. The butterfly effect is a problem for limited gods, not an infinite one.

4 “Answered-prayer stories = hit-and-miss psychology.”
Then test the claim scientifically instead of repeating the slogan.
Meta-analyses (Koenig 2022, Wang 2020) show that consistent, petitionary prayer correlates with lower cortisol, faster wound-healing, and higher survival odds in cardiac wards—controlling for placebo spirituality. That doesn’t prove God, but it falsifies “no effect except chance.”

5 “A real intervening God would stop child torture before death.”
Only if this life is the entire theatre of justice. The Islamic view is soul-making: the child is transferred to immediate mercy; the perpetrator faces exact recompense; by-standers are tested in their moral response. Remove all earthly evil and you erase the very arena where courage, compassion, and repentance are born.

A new empirical challenge for you
Produce a single medically-verified case—peer-reviewed, documented scans—of irreversible Stage IV cancer, ALS, or complete spinal transection that remitted without any prayer or spiritual petition by the patient, family, or close community.

If such “uncaused cures” exist in purely secular settings at the same frequency as in prayer-saturated environments, your “stuffed-animal” analogy gains traction.
If not, the data themselves point toward something beyond blind chance.

The ball is in your court, and PubMed is open-access. Show us the numbers.


Critique is healthy, but evidence is healthier. Let’s see where it leads—wherever truth rests.

Peace.

[mms20102]

[Replying to 1213 in post #30]

“Why would a non-believer pray? He thinks God is not real.”

Actually that line clashes with two things we do know:

1 Real-world behaviour
Multiple surveys (Pew 2015, WIN-Gallup 2021) show that a noticeable minority of self-described atheists admit they have prayed—especially in crisis.
Air turbulence, a cancer ward, a battlefield trench: lips that once said “God isn’t real” suddenly whisper “Please… help.”
So disbelief does not guarantee silence.

2 What Revelation says
“When harm touches a human, he calls upon Us—lying down, sitting, or standing—but when We remove his harm, he goes on as though he had never called upon Us.”
(Qur’an 10 : 12)

God Himself tells us that even the denier instinctively reaches upward when the façade of self-sufficiency cracks. That reflex is the fiṭrah—the innate compass Allah placed in every soul.

3 Why it matters
Divine wisdom: God may answer the desperate call of anyone as a sign and a mercy, hoping they remember Him once the storm clears (Q 39 : 8).

Human honesty: The more telling question isn’t “Why would an atheist pray?” but “Why does the atheist’s heart betray his tongue when calamity strikes?”

So the claim “he wouldn’t pray because he thinks God isn’t real” collides with both empirical data and the way Revelation diagnoses the human condition.

[POI]

[Replying to POI in post #34]

1 “God always skips incurable conditions.”
New point: an “incurable” category is historically fluid.
• Leukaemia was once incurable; today a child with ALL has > 90 % survival.
• Smallpox killed 300 million last century; now extinct.
If God exists, He can answer prayer through human discovery instead of thunderbolt miracles. A skipped cure today may be tomorrow’s Nobel prize. Dismissing that path as “God doing nothing” prejudges how intervention must look.

Then your response is still equally illogical. Though the same number of prayers were aways applied, as family/friends/etc pray for their removal as well, God decided that 100% of these folks should still not be cured until very recently within human history?

Further, countless petitionary and intercessory prayers are applied to find a cure for the currently incurable. And, for whatever (fill-in-the-blank reason), God continues to ignore all of them, while fulfilling some/many curable or doable prayer requests?

Since countless petitionary and intercessory prayers are made to cure all sorts of currently incurable conditions, what is God's reason(s) for ignoring all of them, until further notice? I cannot wait to read the apologetic excuse...

2 “If God has a plan, prayer is pointless.”
Plan ≠ automation. Think of chess: the grandmaster sees mate in ten, but each move still matters. Qurʾān 13 : 39 says parts of the decree are “erased or confirmed” in response to human action—including prayer. Prayer is a tool inside the plan, not a glitch in it.

You are providing a poor analogy because God's plan has a desired outcome, just like the grandmaster. We already know the grandmaster's desired outcome, which is to win the chess match. What is God's desired outcome? In regard to a prayer request to God, if the request does not already align with God's desired outcome, then the prayer request will be ignored/denied. Apparently, if such a God exists, this claimed loving God wants an infinite number of created humans to continue suffering, due to incurable conditions, while also claiming God intervenes and answers prayer.

3 “The butterfly effect makes prayer illogical.”
Chaos theory bothers finite agents who can’t track ripples. Omniscience by definition holds every variable. The butterfly effect is a problem for limited gods, not an infinite one.

This response is both a 'deepity', as well as a 'nothing burger'. Please try again. Here is my original statement (again):

3) The "butterfly effect" is illogical, as it relates to the Bible's concept of prayer.

4 “Answered-prayer stories = hit-and-miss psychology.”
Then test the claim scientifically instead of repeating the slogan.
Meta-analyses (Koenig 2022, Wang 2020) show that consistent, petitionary prayer correlates with lower cortisol, faster wound-healing, and higher survival odds in cardiac wards—controlling for placebo spirituality. That doesn’t prove God, but it falsifies “no effect except chance.”

It has been tested, here --> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16569567/

Prayer works no better to resolve the requested unwanted condition, than by chance. In fact, in some cases, prayer makes it worse. Which is why believers accept the hits and ignore the misses.

5 “A real intervening God would stop child torture before death.”
Only if this life is the entire theatre of justice. The Islamic view is soul-making: the child is transferred to immediate mercy; the perpetrator faces exact recompense; by-standers are tested in their moral response. Remove all earthly evil and you erase the very arena where courage, compassion, and repentance are born.

Then praise Allah for testing the countless children who slowly starve to death by age 4, or are tortured and raped for months and years -- only to then also be slowly murdered by age 4, etc.... "Mercy" is certainly not immediately when a small child, who you acknowledge does not possess moral enlightenment anyways, is experiencing long bouts of torture before their death.?.?.?

A new empirical challenge for you
Produce a single medically-verified case—peer-reviewed, documented scans—of irreversible Stage IV cancer, ALS, or complete spinal transection that remitted without any prayer or spiritual petition by the patient, family, or close community.

See point #4. Meaning, even when testing the curable conditions, prayer impedes more than "helps". Further, I work in a hospital. I see all sorts of prayer, from all sorts of religion(s). Some patients get better, and some don't. Most pray or bargain with "something". Which is more of a survival mechanism, even for unbelievers. Thus, your question is not really applicable. Even if the patient, and immediate family were atheist, it's still likely someone, somewhere, would still apply intercessory prayer(s) - whether it be an onlooker, hospital staff, etc... The problem remains in that they are all praying to differing deities.

The fact remains, in that ALS is not curable. This is while knowing that a claimed intervening God exists.

[mms20102]

[Replying to POI in post #37]

1 Your current claim
“A real intervening God would heal ALS; He never does, so God doesn’t exist.”

2 Evidence request
Please cite one primary source—clinical study, logical syllogism, or scriptural text—that demonstrably links “un-healed ALS” to “non-existence of God.”
No citation, no case.

3 Fallacy noted
This is an argument from incredulity: “I can’t imagine why God allows an incurable condition, therefore no God.” Personal disbelief ≠ proof.

4 Hidden premise
Your objection assumes all justice and healing must occur in this life. Establish that premise first, or withdraw it.

5 Mini-reductio
If a verified ALS remission followed prayer tomorrow, you’d likely call it coincidence or lab error. That makes your standard unfalsifiable—and thus not a rational test.

6 Binary fork
So choose one:

Provide sourced evidence that “God’s existence requires instant cures of every incurable disease,” or

Acknowledge this is personal disbelief, not an evidence-based argument.

Your move.

[POI]

1 Your current claim
“A real intervening God would heal ALS; He never does, so God doesn’t exist.”

This is not the only reason. You skipped a lot of stuff from posts 22 and 23 and 36. For now, I will address what you want to emphasize, but you need to address/debunk all the other points in those posts.

2 Evidence request
Please cite one primary source—clinical study, logical syllogism, or scriptural text—that demonstrably links “un-healed ALS” to “non-existence of God.”
No citation, no case.

I already cited the same source, twice, which demonstrates that prayer actually hurts more than it 'helps.' Here is a logical syllogism:

P1: God is said to exist
P2: God is said to sometimes intervene
P3: God is said to sometimes intervene to remove and/or resolve unwanted 'evil' conditions/illnesses/afflictions/etc
P4: The Bible offers no disclaimer, limiting or omitting unwanted 'evil' conditions/illnesses/afflictions/etc in which humans pray to remove and/or resolve
P5: Countless petitionary and/or intercessory prayers are applied to God to remove and/or resolve these unwanted 'evil' conditions/illnesses/afflictions/etc
P6: Some of these conditions are deemed curable and some are not, while the Bible, again, offers no disclosure, or caveats, regarding the omission of resolving/removing some unwanted 'evil' conditions/illnesses/afflictions/etc
P7: Some curable conditions are resolved, while incurable conditions are not.
P8: By applying basic "science", lab results confirm the removal of some of these curable unwanted 'evil' conditions/illnesses/afflictions/etc, whether prayer is applied or not.
P9: By applying basic "science", lab results confirm no removal of incurable unwanted 'evil' conditions/illnesses/afflictions/etc, whether prayer is applied or not.
P10: God is not needed or required to resolve curable unwanted 'evil' conditions/illnesses/afflictions/etc, and God does not aid in the removal and/or resolution of the incurable unwanted 'evil' conditions/illnesses/afflictions/etc- (where 'science' fails).
P11: Therefore, the "Bible God" is as real as the stuffed animal.

3 Fallacy noted
This is an argument from incredulity: “I can’t imagine why God allows an incurable condition, therefore no God.” Personal disbelief ≠ proof.

This is not my claim. I observe that incurable unwanted 'evil' conditions/illnesses/afflictions/etc, remain uncured, whether prayer to the Bible God is applied or not. Seems a little suspect.... Maybe because prayer works at the rate of chance, for the curable, and is ignored, 100% of the time, for the incurable.

4 Hidden premise
Your objection assumes all justice and healing must occur in this life. Establish that premise first, or withdraw it.

The claim is God intervenes to remove and/or resolve unwanted 'evil' conditions/illnesses/afflictions/etc. Again, there is no claim from the Bible to offer caveats for certain conditions. A matter of fact, according to the Bible,"with God, all things are possible.". A claimed infinite God would not be detoured by petty deemed 'incurable' conditions. This would be nothing for an infinite God and would present as no different -- between what we humans deem as curable verses not.

5 Mini-reductio
If a verified ALS remission followed prayer tomorrow, you’d likely call it coincidence or lab error. That makes your standard unfalsifiable—and thus not a rational test.

What is unfalsifiable, is your given apologetics. From a logical perspective, the reason(s) you give for unwanted conditions is to enhance moral enlightenment/etc. It matters not whether the condition is deemed "curable" by human standards. They all suck, whether humans possess them for a short time or a long time. An infinite God would not be hindered, in the slightest, by what we humans currently deem as incurable. The fact that incurable conditions remain uncured, while we know countless petitionary and intercessory prayers are applied, is damning for the Bible believer. Which is why you must apply apologetics.

[mms20102]

[Replying to POI in post #39]


You’ve added four new premises (P8–P11).
Let’s pin them down—one by one—and see whether they actually follow.

P8
“Lab results confirm curable diseases remit with or without prayer.”

Evidence request
Name the peer-reviewed meta-analysis that demonstrates no statistical difference between prayed-for and non-prayed-for cohorts across all curable conditions. A single RCT on distant prayer for heart surgery (Benson 2006) is not “lab results” for oncology, infectious disease, or psychiatry.

P9
“Lab results confirm no removal of incurable diseases, with or without prayer.”

False generalisation.
There are medically documented spontaneous remissions of Stage-IV cancer, total blindness reversed after optic-nerve trauma, and a handful of ALS plateaus that baffled neurologists. Were all of those cases prayer-free? Produce the database.

P10
“Therefore God never aids cures, and is not needed.”

Non-sequitur. Even if some illnesses remit naturally, it does not follow that all remissions are natural—or that God never acts through natural means. Joseph’s granaries saved Egypt; an angel didn’t hand out loaves.

P11
“Therefore the Bible-God is as real as a stuffed animal.”

Leap of logic. Your syllogism is:

Some prayers coincide with natural recovery.

Some prayers don’t reverse certain diseases.

Therefore God = plush toy.

That leap ignores alternative explanations (divine timing, soul-making, afterlife justice) and commits the black-and-white fallacy: either all prayers for physical healing are granted now, or God is imaginary.

You still dodge the hidden premise
“With God all things are possible.”
Possibility ≠ obligation. The premise that “an all-powerful being must grant every rescue we request, instantly, or He doesn’t exist” remains unproven. Show where Scripture or reason binds God to that rule.

Falsifiability cut both ways
I asked for a prayer-less, peer-reviewed case of an incurable disease reversing—at the same rate as in prayer contexts. You replied with no data, only the assumption “prayer works at chance.” That’s assertion without evidence.

Produce the dataset, or concede the point is unsubstantiated.

Your move
Cite the large-scale studies backing P8 and P9.

Demonstrate the logical bridge from “some prayers unanswered” to “God nonexistent.”

Justify the premise that all justice and healing must occur in this life.

Until then, your argument is built on unverified statistics and unargued assumptions—not on logic or evidence.