God acts like Stalin.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

God doesn't care a lot about his "peasants". There is a lot of cynism, apathy, passivness in the way God acts. Like for example, a cancer patient at young age just dies, EVEN if a lot of people prayed for him.

People also pray for two opposite teams to win in a football match, that's a prima facie logical impossibility that even an omnipotent God cannot instantiate. It's clear that God cannot answer all prayers, as omnipotence doesn't entail instantiating a logically impossible world.

A non theist might ask : does God answer any prayer, at all ? The answer to this question is : if, by answering prayers, you mean that the state of affairs that is prayed for is realized (instantiated), then the answer is obviously yes. If I pray to live for the next 10 minutes and my wish was realized, then that's enough to answer the atheist's question. It would be moronic for an atheist to say at this point : but this DoEsN't ProooVE GOD exists !!!! It really would be moronic, because his question (in bold) presupposes God exists. If they don't want to make this assumption, they should discuss God's existence instead of the problem of evil.

Another possible question is : how do you know that God answered your prayer? This question also presupposes God's existence (if it doesn't, it doesn't make sense because a non-existent entity never answers prayers). The answer is : you can't know that. It's not difficult to think of reasons why God wouldn't give such information, it wouldn't really change anything in your life if you knew that God answered your prayer when He did such and such, rather than allow you, by your own free will, to do such and such. Any appeal to natural laws or cosmic coincidence here doesn't help, natural laws and God's will are identical if theism is true.

You mentioned a specific instance of apparently unnecessary evil : a cancer patient dying at a young age. It seems that such states of affairs don't sit well with theism as a worldview. The reason is that one cannot readily see any good reason for letting a human being die prematurely in such a horrible fashion.

But can you think of any good reason for letting even a very old human being die, at all ?

Can you think of any good reason, that an all-knowing being might have, to do anything at all that you see in this world ?

I hope you got my point : we simply don't have the capacity to guess God's ultimate reasons for doing anything, try to do that with questions about everyday life you already know how to answer, you'll see that all your answers are constrained by mundane human considerations and that speculating beyond that is a non starter. Essentially, any atheist who babbles about evil is between a rock and a hard place : on the one hand, complaining, as some people do in ordinary speech, about how God doesn't intervene, presuppose God's existence, on the other hand, trying to make arguments from the premise of apparently unnecessary evil to the conclusion that God doesn't exist, is extremely difficult. It's a massive philosophical project that specialists of the field failed to accomplish so far.

Do Muslims believe in photosynthesis?

Boru