KEEP IN MIND
Where there is a vacuum, psychology rushes in. As the mind resists uncertainty, it rushes to fill the void—not necessarily with truth, but with notions that it wishes to find value in. Feelings rush in too.
THE ARGUMENT
John is struggling with a terrible injury.
You tell him you pray for him to supported by God in this.
If God has planned to walk beside him anyway - then the prayer is futile.
If God for some reason is not granting support - it is not his plan - then the prayer is futile.
You need to think about if you are projecting a planner/plan, that it is really about your notions about God and not him. You are the one that is praying and yet declaring it futile.
You want a controlled universe - yet you are conflicted. You resist it as well as embrace it. Prayer arises from the part of you that opposes cosmic regulation,
God hearing your prayer does not mean he is a listener - he is not when prayer will not get a response. Vulnerable John wants a listener above and beyond the world you are doing this to him?
Think of those who want to feel that God hears and understands and who feel nothing - despite your prayers for them.
EVIDENCE ABHORS A VACUUM
You need evidence and you have the faculties for assessing it. You grasp for it without even realising. You want it enough that any evidence - even terrible evidence will be used. It’s written into our DNA: as physical creatures facing constant threats, we’ve inherently evolved to assess evidence in order to stay alive. We socially evolve to centre evidence as well.
Thus where there is a gap, our notions and feelings rush in. Our projections are put there - perhaps subconsciously. But they are there.
If God created everything, then everything — in some way — reflects him. His presence and power fills all things. Every part of creation is a kind of divine witness. God testifies to himself through everything that exists. It testifies to him also in a sense - if it cannot exist at all without him.
But this shifts how you understand evidence: it becomes testimony. And testimony requires faith to recognize it.
If you feel religion is unjustly accused of devaluing evidence in religious matters, you need to remember God belief by default makes it meaningless or unimportant simply because it is testimony that matters not evidence.
We see a conflict there. You need evidence and yet you centre a God who undermines that - undermines you.
The best explanation for that is that this is about psychology and not truth. Your relationship with God is a fantasy narrative. If you need evidence and you make a vacuum then you put artificial evidence in there. For example, "I feel that God is here therefore God is here."
If prayer should reach God, how can it? You don't want to reach the "real" one if there is one.
Also, what is the point of stressing prayer if evidence does not matter? Why look for evidence that prayer works? You cannot pray for John to be helped unless you are at least open to help coming for him as a result! The incoherence is palpable.
IDENTITY
You are praying just to feel useful. Not necessarily because there is someone listening, but because the act itself is psychologically necessary. It situates you in a narrative, even if that narrative is fiction. It is about feeling your prayer and John's suffering contribute to something larger, that your waiting is not in vain - that losses are not wasted.
Admit that you have no business approaching John's plight because you want to work out lofty spiritual ideas from it - or to get spiritual feelings.
Prayer becomes less about divinity and more about identity. Not just “Who is God?” but “Who am I if no one is listening?” The need to pray, the need to believe in a Plan, may not reveal anything about the cosmos—but it reveals everything about you.
WHOSE PLAN?
Where there is a vacuum, psychology rushes in. As the mind resists uncertainty, it rushes to fill the void—not necessarily with truth, but with notions that it wishes to get meaning from. This is the idea behind the old saying, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” But more precisely, the psyche abhors meaninglessness. Theologians call it faith. Psychologists call it projection. Philosophers may call it existential necessity.
We found earlier that to pray for God to be helped is useless if it is not in God's plan or if God has already planned to help.
Some would say you feel useless and are projecting that unto God. You in some way are trying to make useless sacred!
The trouble with the Plan is that it seems you are the one projecting that prayer is futile. You are projecting the Plan. Is the Divine Plan something you tune into, or something you invent in the silence?
THE "EXPERTS"
Sigmund Freud, far more skeptical of religion, called belief in God a “universal obsessional neurosis.” In The Future of an Illusion, Freud suggested that religious ideas are illusions—wish-fulfillments born from human helplessness and a longing for a protective father figure. We invent God, in Freud's view, not because He exists, but because we fear the alternative: a universe without direction, without justice, without reason.
And yet, can we so easily dismiss that longing as purely psychological?
The philosopher Immanuel Kant famously argued that even if we cannot know God through reason or empirical evidence, we are morally compelled to believe in a just world governed by a divine moral law. For Kant, faith is not irrational—it is necessary for ethical life. Without some higher order, how do we ground the concepts of justice, dignity, or human rights?
Still, modern thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus pushed back against this need for a higher plan. Sartre declared that “existence precedes essence,” meaning we are born without a given purpose and must create it ourselves. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, acknowledged the absurdity of life—that we search for meaning in a universe that offers none. Yet he did not retreat into despair. Instead, he called for revolt: to live as if life has meaning, even knowing it might not.
FINALLY
We have found that God and prayer are not the issue so much as how people shine themselves unto those concepts. There is a very dark side so the glory that is granted to prayer and worship is cosmetic.