Hurricane Irma, 2017
Scientific studies have repeatedly shown that prayer has no effect on improving the medical condition of an individual. Although people report that prayer makes people feel more euphoric after performing the act, the subject of prayer, the person we pray for realizes no material benefit when compared to a control group. For example, no one, who is the subject of prayer, has reportedly regrown a severed limb. Any improvement in a person’s health is by medical intervention coupled with random chance. The same holds true for the relationship between prayer and meteorological catastrophe.
Prayer presupposes a personal God exists and that in almost all deities God is depicted as a male version of a bipedal homonin and that God can interpret the thoughts in the human brain and then react to those thoughts with positive deeds. Prayer presupposes that the personal God is benevolent, that he really cares about our well-being, that he is omnipotent, very powerful, as omniscient, very knowledgeable, and that he often is seen wearing white robes.
In fact our ancestry 60 million years ago closely resembles field rodents. Creatures that resemble human beings did not emerge until approximately two hundred throusand years ago long after the dinosaurs fell victim to extinction.
If you accept that this personal God can affect outcomes, does he also effect the cause for these catastrophes to begin with? If this personal God is responsible for the cause of these catastrophes, why are we rejoicing his presence? Perhaps we should be running to the hills to avoid his wrath.
Perhaps a compromise to the personal God is the extraterrestrial intelligence or UFO myth. If you believe the UFO charlatans extraterrestrial intelligent beings routinely visit planet earth. Perhaps, we should seek out the advice and wisdom of these aliens to better manage the natural forces of the planet earth. While we are at it, perhaps we should seek out the alien’s help to denuclearize the Korean peninsula of thermonuclear weapons, saving us from ourselves.
We live in unsettling times. Given mankind’s arsenal of nuclear weapons and the rate at which we are introducing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, it is possible that one malevolent individual in a position of power will miscalculate and initiate a nuclear exchange that could wipe away civilization as we know it. That very well may happen. In 1983 an exchange almost did happen after the Soviets misinterpreted an exercise known as Able Archer as images on radar.