I'm not going to get involved right here and now in a discussion about prayer and it's effectiveness (or rather lack of it). Instead, I'm going to start by building up a factual record, from events in the public media, of occasions when prayer is known to have been used on a wide scale, and the documented events that followed the praying.

I expect that the facts will speak for themselves, that there will be no correlation whatsoever between the outcome requested in the prayers and the actual outcome. I'll do my best to be impartial and report any instances I hear about of positive results of prayer, but I will NOT report examples such as "my brother was on a plane that crashed, and I prayed that he would be OK, and he was the only survivor". Why? Because this is a prime example of "counting the hits", where a tiny positive result is singled out from amidst an overwhelming mass of bad news and seen as evidence of divine intervention. This person's brother lived, but what about the other 78 people on board the plane? Was nobody praying for any of them? Why did God allow all those wives & husbands to die anyway in such a horrible way, and leave children orphaned and families distraught? This kind of example is purely statistical good fortune for the one survivor.

No, the examples I'll report of positive effects will be of the kind "We saw the avalanche coming down the mountain towards our village and we prayed for salvation and avalanche turned aside and swept past the village" or "... we prayed for salvation and the avalanche smashed through the village but not a single person was hurt." If I see anything like that, I'll report it. And I might just possibly become a believer.

OK, so let's make a start:

England, July 2002

The event: Two 10-year old girls went missing in a small country village after going out for a walk together. There was a massive search for them, and thousands of people in churches and at homes up and down the country prayed for their safe return.

The result: Three weeks after they went missing, the two girls were found murdered, their bodies dumped in a field. It was clear from the state of the bodies that the girls had been dead for some time before the bodies were found, so not only had God ignored the prayers for their safe return, he also allowed people to go on praying long after he had ceased to listen.

Southern Italy, 29 October 2002

The event: Mount Etna on the island of Sicily erupted. The local people took to the churches to pray for their homes to be saved and for the destruction to stop.

The result: The volcano continued its eruption and further damage was done. Moreover, on 31 October there was an earthquake in the village of San Giuliano di Puglia, in another part of southern Italy. A village school collapsed and 26 children were killed. Geologists said the volcano and the earthquake were not connected, but I think it's a pretty callous God who chooses to inflict two such disasters so closely together on the same region. And why choose a school full of young children to be the target of the earthquake?