(May 15, 2014 at 9:25 pm)Luckie Wrote: I wonder if Christians really think anything will change whether they pray or not about something like this. Seems disrespectful to me, to remind God to protect anything or anyone--thats like assuming he doesn't know. Or that he's not doing enough. Or that its his responsibility to do something.I can understand the concept of asking for something, which fits in with the parent-child relationship that the Bible promotes between god and the believer. But there are so many ways to interpret the "results" of prayer in light of the idea that everything must go according to god's plan, that any outcome is evidence of god's response to prayer. In that sense, every prayer winds up convincing the Christian that god does listen.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
