Praying for sex

 

Sharing miracles with non-believers is indeed a waste of time. There are good reasons for this. You could be lying, delusional, or, more likely, making too much of coincidence. People recover all the time from diseases, prayer or not. My brother told me of praying for sex and getting it: I told him it was because he was young, handsome and confident. The problem with all testimonial evidence, which is something you get a lot in some churches, considering the testimonials you constantly get -- which seems to be mostly lost sheep finding joy when they come back because of some sign they got, is that it is useless. Anything to be evidential has to be repeatable by skeptical people.

You’re putting your finger on a real epistemic divide, and you’re doing it in a fairly classical way. What you’re describing is essentially the standard scientific criterion for evidence: public, repeatable, and testable under skeptical conditions. By that standard, most miracle claims don’t even get out of the starting gate.

Testimonial evidence—especially in religious settings—has a few built-in weaknesses. Memory is reconstructive, not archival; people unconsciously reshape stories over time. There’s also selection bias: we hear about the “hits” (the prayer followed by recovery, the sign that seemed meaningful) but not the vastly larger number of “misses.” And then there’s interpretation: humans are extremely good at weaving narrative out of coincidence. Your brother’s example is almost textbook—multiple plausible causal explanations, with the supernatural one being the least necessary.

From within a faith framework, though, the purpose of a “miracle” often isn’t to function as laboratory-grade evidence. It’s more like a personal sign—something meaningful to the person experiencing it, not something designed to convince a detached observer. In that sense, believers and skeptics are often talking past each other. One side is asking, “Is this publicly verifiable?” while the other is saying, “It was meaningful to me.” Those are different standards, and neither quite answers the other.

Your point about repeatability is exactly why fields like medicine rely on controlled trials rather than anecdotes. If prayer (or any intervention) had a consistent, measurable effect under blinded, controlled conditions, it would show up there. The fact that results tend to wash out to statistical noise is telling—at least about claims of reliable, external intervention.

Where it gets a bit more nuanced is that not all knowledge we rely on is strictly repeatable in that sense. We trust testimony all the time—history, personal experience, even much of daily life—just not when the claim is extraordinary. As the old line goes (often attributed to Carl Sagan), extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Miracle claims are about as extraordinary as it gets, so the evidential bar is correspondingly high.

So yes—if the goal is to persuade a non-believer on evidential grounds, testimonial miracles are close to useless. But if the goal is to reinforce an existing belief or provide personal meaning, they can be quite powerful. The friction arises because people often assume they’re doing the former when they’re really doing the latter.

Still, when the old lady lays dying in hospital, there is good in joining in with the visiting priest in prayer, for the old lady and for you.

Yes—quite apart from questions of evidence, that’s a deeply human moment, and it runs on a different logic altogether.

At a bedside like that, prayer isn’t really an attempt to prove anything or to cause a measurable intervention. It’s an act of solidarity. You’re aligning yourself with the old lady, with the priest, with the situation as it is. It says, in effect, “I am here with you; I take this seriously; you are not facing this alone.” That has real weight, even for someone who is otherwise skeptical.

There’s also something calming and structuring about ritual. In a situation where nothing more can be done, ritual gives you something meaningful to do. It organizes emotion—fear, grief, even a kind of reverence—into a form that can be expressed without words failing. People often underestimate how important that is.

And, quietly, it serves the one who participates as much as the one who is dying. It steadies you, gives you a role, and perhaps helps you face your own mortality a bit more squarely. One doesn’t have to believe that a supernatural intervention will occur to recognize that this is a humane and, in a sense, rational act within that context.

So I wouldn’t call that inconsistent with your earlier point. It’s just a different domain: not evidence, but meaning; not proof, but presence.