This argument does not claim that all people who pray consciously intend harm, nor that prayer is psychologically insincere. It argues instead that the practice of petitionary prayer, as commonly understood within theistic frameworks that affirm both divine goodness and worldly indeterminacy, implicitly relies on the hope that outcomes will favour the petitioner rather than others, and that this reliance cannot be morally neutral.
Most classical theisms hold that God is perfectly good, is all-powerful and that God knows the full moral landscape, including all suffering. God is already maximally motivated to prevent unnecessary evil.
From these assumptions it follows that God does not require moral prompting. If some suffering ought to be prevented, God already has sufficient reason and power to prevent it. Therefore, petitionary prayer cannot supply God with new moral information, better motives, or superior judgment.
If God is perfectly good and already acts in the best possible way, then any request for a better outcome faces a dilemma. Either the outcome should occur anyway - in which case prayer is causally redundant. Or the outcome should not occur - in which case prayer asks God to deviate from what is best. Prayer thus cannot improve divine decision-making without contradicting divine perfection.
Thus prayer is effectively invoking the random to serve you. It is asking God to act without reason.
Believers commonly hold that God created the world, and some events are not strictly determined (e.g. illness outcomes, accidents, lotteries, wars, economic shifts). These events are treated as open or unfixed from the human point of view. When a person prays for a favourable outcome in such cases, what they are effectively doing is hoping that an indeterminate process resolves in their favour. This is not divine cooperation in a moral sense; it is hope for favourable contingency.
Suppose an event is not morally negotiable for God already wills the good, not informationally improvable for God already knows all and not causally altered by prayer without undermining divine perfection. Then prayer becomes a wish that the unresolved aspects of reality break one way rather than another. That is precisely what luck is: a favourable resolution of events beyond one’s control.
Another central feature of prayer is its connection to seeking forgiveness from God. Real forgiving is a process but God gives it too fast and the person gets it too easily. Thus it is too random in that sense. Growth is put on the back burner.
Many people assume that their prayers have been answered when they experience health, wealth, or success, but there is no way to know whether these blessings come from divine favor or mere chance. Life is full of randomness, and some individuals simply navigate it with fortunate outcomes, while others suffer through no fault of their own. When the fortunate credit prayer, they obscure the true role of luck and reinforce the illusion that the universe responds to their requests. What seems like an answered prayer may be nothing more than a pattern our minds impose on random events—a coincidence interpreted as divine approval. In reality, prosperity and well-being often have no connection to moral virtue, spiritual effort, or prayer at all; they are just the unpredictable consequences of living in a world governed by chance.
No matter how often a person insists that God comes first in their life, the truth is revealed in what they truly value: if they believe that luck or chance has given them their wealth, health, or success, then it is luck, not God, that occupies the primary place in their devotion. Their gratitude and attention follow the source of tangible benefit, not abstract theology. In practice, the god of convenience is the god of personal fortune, and prayers are just rituals performed alongside a quiet, unacknowledged worship of random favor. The claims of piety and humility are contradicted by the subconscious hierarchy of what they hold most dear: their own survival and prosperity, secured not by divine action, but by the unpredictable roll of the universe.
We conclude that those who pray want an advantage from luck and this is terrible when so many suffer.