The Prayer and the Past Challenge

[panta dokimazete]

While I've ceased being amazed at how often unbelievers argue against a gospel which is not the true gospel (which displays how great their fear and enmity against God is since they go to the extent of arguing against God through the fabrication and argument against their own strawmen), I'm still not amazed at how many different ways unbelievers will come up with in misunderstanding or misapplying the text of Scripture to try to argue against God.

For example, John Loftus, in his recent post on "Debunking Christianity" entitled "Can Prayer Change the Past? One More Time" sets a challenge before Christians to "pick any event in the past, announce that they are praying to change it, and then watch what happens." His argument is that if God lies outside of time, but hears the prayers of believers, then God can change the past, events like "the Holocaust, the terrorist 9/11 attacks, or any tragic event reported in the daily newspaper."

More here

 

[etexas]

More here

For my part, I refuse to get into absurd arguments with infidels. When they throw things out like our prayers and our God's response to them, they are not asking a real question they want to tread on that which is Holy! They want to blaspheme not have rational discussion. Never should we give people like that the satisfaction. Pearls to swine. They shall find their answers in Hell.

 

[puritan lad]

Loftus, like many, has to have a god who measures up to his own satisfaction. Sad.

 

[Jane]

God foreordains all things

Why would an unbeliever challenge Christians to pray a past event out of existence? It is absurd. As the WCF says, God foreordains all things whatsoever comes to pass. The reason these things happened is because God ordained them in His infinite wisdom.

Just because God exists outside of time and space does not mean we as Christians can pray to undo the past. This is a ridiculous idea because we, as human beings, exist in the realm of time and space. Therefore we exist in the present. We can no more undo the events of the 1940s or any other era than we can undo the Crucifixion of Jesus.

These atheists expect Christians to perform the impossible in order to prove that God exists. It doesn't matter what we do, it will never be enough. They don't believe because they are hardened in unbelief among many other reasons. They are just setting up hoops for us to jump through. It's a fool's errand to take them up on these challenges because God is not going to answer prayers like these that are obviously a violation of His will and are for the sole purpose of "proving" to the unbeliever that He exists. The very creation proclaims His existence every day!

 

[Vytautas]

Who controls the past, controls the future.
Who controls the present, controls the past.

 

[gwine]

If it were possible that we should pray and a notable event like 9/11 did not take place, then how would we then know that it ever happened? There would be no news articles about it, no one would know of anyone that died because of it, we wouldn't have gone over to chase after Osama bin Laden because of it.

We might just as well say that the asteroid didn't hit us yesterday. What? You say that there was no asteroid near enough? That's because someone 2 years in the future prayed that the asteroid that was on a collision course with the earth would move out of its normal orbit and crash into the sun on the other side so we would never know what happened.

It all seems absurd to even think such things.

 

[gwine]

Who controls the past, controls the future.
Who controls the present, controls the past.

Or, as the bumper sticker goes:

I don't know what the future holds,

but I know who holds the future.