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Recently my daughter was in the hospital for a severe case of pneumonia. While she was there, being treated with modern medicine, using the latest advances in science and technology people would tell me an odd thing. They would say We are praying for her. While I certainly appreciated the sentiment, which was something like, we feel bad for your situation and wish there was something we could do to help, I couldn't help thinking, if prayer actually worked, why would she have gotten sick in the first place. Surely there is someone out there praying that innocent children don't have to suffer needlessly if God can stop it at will. And further, if prayer worked, why did I need to have her at the hospital at all? If god was going to miraculously heal her, you'd think he could do it in my living room, instead of at a state of the art multi-billion dollar hospital that specializes in child care. Also, if god has a plan for everything, then it was part of that plan for my daughter to get sick. What makes these people think he would change his plan, god being all powerful and perfect, simply because you asked? God supposedly knows everything anyways; surely he knows you want a baby to recover from an illness. So what is the point of asking?

That sentiment in itself didn't seem too bad until my daughter actually did recover from her illness. Then God had answered everyone's prayers. Never mind the hospital, doctors, nurses, medication, equipment, and the minds of the scientists who had discovered so much about the human body and had invented all these procedures my daughter had undergone to make her well again. To me it seemed that these superstitious people were spitting in the face of the doctors who saved my daughter's life. It was not their achievement, and an achievement of science that she is alive today. It was because of prayer. It wasn't because of the people in the hospital who spent a full month working with my daughter, using the scientific method to discover what was wrong with her, and then applying technology developed through scientific discovery. It's not right that religious people should belittle those doctors by crediting the results of their studies and labor to prayer.

The truth is we didn't need prayer for my daughter to get better. We didn't need God at all. We needed the power of the human mind and the achievements of science.

Learn more about this author, James Hughes.
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