Free will, prayer, and God's intervention

Hey all. I was wondering what your take is on the questions below. How do your Christian acquaintances answer these (or how would they if you could get them to answer)?

Does God intervene in daily affairs today?

If not, what is the point of prayer?
If so:
1. Why do we see no evidence of intervention?
2. How can he intervene without occasionally interfering with free will (which most of my Christian friends assure me he does not do)?

I understand he could intervene for a disease to be cured without necessarily affecting free will, but I've had Christians tell me that they pray for a promotion in their job, which seems rather difficult to grant without affecting free will.

Anyway, just wanted some thoughts on possible Christian explanations to these questions because I've never gotten any decent ones (not a rare occurrence, I admit). Thanks.

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Patrick Day on August 15, 2012 at 9:25pm

Got one of my christian friends to reluctantly answer.

According to him:

1. Prayer does work.

2. Anytime something happens out of the ordinary or is greatly contrary to expectation is a sign of God's intervention. Any anomalies in data or patterns is a sign that god is changing something, if god wasn't pulling strings, then everything would always go according to pattern and prediction. (Science is only good for the things that god isn't currently dealing with.)

3. God does not alter free will at all, he simply changes the conditions around individuals to set them up for a specific path. It's up to the person in the end to decide whether to do one thing or another. That's why some prayers don't seem to get answered, god tries, but some one somewhere didn't follow his plan.

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Permalink Reply by Yahweh on August 16, 2012 at 4:44am

Ask your friend how this works.

Person A prays to win in a poker game, and he wins, and credits god. But then person B who is dying of cancer prays he gets better but dies horribly later on. Does this mean that God cared more about Person A winning the poker game than the dying Person B?

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