Prayers and God’s will

  

 

Doctor, how is my brother ? 

He is not at all doing well. Now it’s up to prayers and God.

When dealing with near and dear ones of critically ill people, I have heard many health care professionals saying this. Even some doctors/nurses who do not believe in prayers or a theist God ( the one who interferes for us hearing prayers)  practice it. For doing that they have an explanation. 

Why should we extinguish all their hopes? 

Is it ethical to tell some one that prayers which is proven to be ineffective or a mythical concept called God can possibly help them ? Does such an approach help ? 

It’s true that some patients recover miraculously even though chances of recovery was considered almost nil. They recover because of some factor that helped her recover was over looked or is yet to be known to science. Science and its practitioners very well know this fact and that is why we never say there is no chance of recovery. We always convey that chances of recovery is very slim. So we never extinguish all hopes. 

But by saying only prayers/God can help is like giving false hopes. There is zero proof that prayers are useful. Same stands for God.  So by saying prayers/God can help, you are misleading them. 

After hearing those words, if they foolishly wanted to shift the patient from intensive care to a shrine of worship for prayers you can only blame yourself.

Hearing that if another member of the family got sick , and if they decided only prayers to God is enough, again you cannot absolve from your guilt. 

When men of science give such prominence to irrational methods in every day life , ordinary people tend to become irrational to the core. They will start to believe in faith healing and sorcery. 

Now another scenario. Sudden unexpected death in a family. 

Reaction may be like this. 

“Sorry to hear your parents and brother was killed in that accident. 

It’s all fate. Pre determined. We can’t change it”. 

Or 

“Sorry to hear your parents and brother was killed in that accident. 

God calls back those who are dearest to him early !” 

Imagine this is about that recent fatal accident of German wings airline. 

Is that accident pre-determined ? Are all such accidental deaths pre-determined? Are all deaths pre-determined ? Then there is no point in trying to prevent them. 

Similary if God have special fondness for some people should we mourn their death ? Why should we treat and prevent the re-union of a gravely injured person and God by treating him ? 

But we, as a society try to do everything to prevent such deaths. We fight against fate and God’s will. 

 Now take that case of that German wings incident. Actually it was not an accident. It was cold blooded murder of all passengers by the suicidal co-pilot. If you consider it as fate, or God’s will, then we need not do anything. No need for strengthening of medical check ups of pilots. No need to provide special keys to pilots so that a pilot cannot lock the other one outside the cockpit. 

Concepts like pre-determinism and God’s will are not good ideas. They give us easy, but wrong explanations for questions. If you are satisfied with such fake explanations and stop your search for real ones , you will never find out reasons for things happening around us. If human society as a whole throughout its existence  were believing in pre-determinism, there would never have been any progress from hunter gatherer era. 

It’s Rationalism and disbelief in lazy explanations of fate that fuelled the flourishing of human society.  Now even in this 21st century , it’s the laziness of those who want to believe in god’s will that is retarding our progress.