To the editor:

Pastor Ken Toth encourages everyone to keep praying. That’s well and good and gives comfort and psychological relief, but is there any objective evidence that prayers have been answered? There’s only unverifiable statements by people that believe in the efficacy of prayer. There has been much written about the power of prayer, but is any deity or other entity listening and acting on any prayers, or is this just wishful thinking?

Sir Francis Galton (1822 – 1911), was an English Victorian polymath and statistician. In his 1872 article Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer, Galton seeks a result revealing whether those who pray attain their objects more frequently than those who do not pray, but who live in all other respects under similar conditions. Galton surveys a number of studies confronting his same inquiry, beginning with a statistical study of the effect of prayer on the longevity of sovereigns; he notes they have the shortest lives of the affluent sample population despite being regularly invoked in prayer. The eminent clergy surveyed displayed no special longevity; their copious prayers also appear to be futile in result. Galton underscores this finding with his own study of theologians bearing indifferent constitutional vigor. Another study shows that missionaries are not supernaturally endowed with health.

Next Galton inquires as to whether seafaring vessels embarking on religious missions are safer than the vessels of the non-prayerful, namely, those of traders and of slave traders. He lists myriad conditions, from trade routes to navigational skill, and detects no trends of higher success among the prayerful, and certainly no immunity to danger significant enough to be entertained by insurance companies.

Were any prayers of the millions of Jews and others killed in the Holocaust answered? Were any prayers of the hundreds of millions of people killed by the plagues, influenzas, and other diseases answered? Were any prayers of the millions of parents whose children died of terrible diseases answered? Why would any deity, seeing all the suffering and painful deaths, need the prayers of the faithful before taking action? Where’s the benevolent deity?

This is known as the theodicy problem:

Is god willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?

— Epicurus