Absurdities - God in the Car Park
Here we consider the absurdity that some believers hold to that God helps them to find a space at the busy supermarket car park in response to a prayer request – in short we are asking the question
- 'Are believers guilty of crediting God with things that are better explained as rational events?'
Below you will find an extract from 'A Short Book of Believer Absurdities' which addresses the question and some book recommendations and links to websites where people are discussing this or similar questions.
Extract from 'A Short Book of Believer Absurdities'
Over the next few weeks, the question rolled around in my head as I struggled to elicit the circumstances in which God might answer someone’s prayer for a car parking space. At last, I arrived at a conclusion that I believe remains true to the possibility that God can intervene in this way, while taking seriously the sceptical concern that such instances are better understood through rational explanations – namely that people will sooner or later leave a supermarket, load up their cars and go home, leaving a car parking space available for others to use.
Now before I develop this model and the conditions by which I think that God might answer a prayer for a space at the supermarket car park, I would like to say something about the earnestness of the believer in all of this because I do not sense there is a false intention in attributing these acts to the Divine. By this I mean, the believer does not genuinely seek to mislead or deceive others when they say that God answered their prayer at the car park – they seriously believe this! After all, they made a request for a car park space and it became available and because of this, they credit God with answering their prayer. However, the difficulty arises because the believer is not circumspect enough to consider alternative explanations for what could be happening in these situations. Moreover, it appears that the believer’s understanding of God is quite naïve in the presumption that God is at the beck and call of humans for trivial things such as lost keys, misplaced glasses and spaces at the car park. Moreover, the inability of some believers to see a mismatch in expectation of how God is totally capable of providing solutions at the supermarket but unable to deal with the more serious issues of terminal illness and the like, is a worrying concern.
Extract from 'A Short Book of Believer Absurdities ' to be released Bob Eckhard
Further Reading
Pete Greig’s book 'God on Mute' is an interesting read which explores the turmoil of unanswered prayer and how this is understood/processed by the believer