Originally posted by terrytnewzealand:
No need to postulate any sort of god.
A God was never postulated to explain seemingly successful prayer. A God was postulated for a whole host of reasons. What's more, Theists believe that God revealed Himself through nature and scripture before ever being postulated.
Kant talked about a logical postulate of reason...which is analytic and has nothing to fear from a transcendental criticism and is about the regressive claim that if the conditioned is given, the entire series of all its conditions is likewise given.
You make the error of stating that prayer is the conditioned and God is of the series of conditions. This is not so.
You can't make one contingent upon the other. Even if some prayer was successful, say, by a thought process at the quantum level, it would still not follow that God did not answer prayer. It would only follow that He did not answer some prayers (the ones that were naturally affected by thought or the ones that were neither granted nor effected naturally).
Anyway, the real problem is that we can never pin down an answered prayer scientifically. Attempts have been made and failed and IMO always will. A supernatural event on that level is totally indistinguishable from chance. I had this discussion the other day with a Church Elder - I stated that there is no way a Christian can ever know whether a prayer has actually been answered or not. He didn't disagree.
But here is a story that interested me: There is a pub near my house that has recently been taken over by a Christian landlord. He believes that God was telling him to do it. He saw that pub and wasn't enamoured of it and carried on his search. But the pub kept springing to mind and coming up in conversation etc. until he felt he could no longer ignore it, and then bought it.
He happened to meet a few Christians in the area and the subject came up and they were gob-smacked. Their house-group had been praying for the last six months for God to get a Christian landlord to take over the pub and change it from a rough drinking hole into a family friendly pub that anyone would be safe drinking in. They clearly considered it an answer to their prayers.
Now my thought on this are:
1. I didn't even know there was such a thing as a Christian landlord.
2. It seems there is at least one, but he and his wife could have chosen any one of the 60,331 pubs in the UK.
3. How many Christians are praying for Christian landlords to take on their local pubs? Well I was quite surprised to hear that anyone was asking for that as running pubs isn't something that Christians are renowned for.
4. The chances of this incident being a chance occurrence must be very low.
5. It?s impossible to tell one way or the other and this is where science and faith differ:
The scientist will say this is a chance occurrence.
The Christian will say this is God.
And both parties, viewing the same events, will have completely opposing views.
But if the faithful are right, you could reasonably postulate a God.
Anyway, I'm off to the pub for the Happy Clappy Hour.
Blacknad.