The Fallacy of Thoughts and Prayers

For the last three years I've been living in central Texas, near Austin.  My wife and I moved here to be close to family.  There are things we really like about central Texas and things we don't.

One of the things we've learned about this area is that it has extreme weather, including a history of deadly flash floods.  We don't live on or near a river, so this has not been an immediate concern for us.  But the tragic events that occurred this past 4th of July weekend have seared the lesson into our consciousness.  As I write this, 80 people have died, many of them children, as flash floods ravaged homes, youth camps and RV campgrounds along the Guadalupe, Llano, San Gabriel and other rivers in the region.  That death toll is sure to rise as recovery efforts continue.  There is a pall of sadness over the region now, and the inevitable (and probably necessary) finger-pointing and blame-casting has begun. 

What I find interesting is the prevailing theological response to this tragedy.  Calls for prayer are ubiquitous.  Those who survived are considered to be "blessed."  The Governor of Texas, a religious conservative, declared that yesterday, Sunday, July 6,  be "A Day Of Prayer For Texans Impacted By Devastating Floods," asking that people pray for "God's peace and comfort" and for "His merciful intervention and healing in this time of crisis."  In a press conference on Saturday, he stated "All we know is that prayer does work."

Likewise, social media is filled with calls to pray for the devastated towns and people.

This is the typical Evangelical response to tragedy, be it school shootings or hurricanes/tornadoes/floods/wildfires, and seems designed to provide folks with a sense of doing something while avoiding addressing the actual underlying problems that could be fixed.  Politicians are usually the first to make these calls to prayer, while doing all they can to avoid discussion of why they failed to implement practical solutions to mitigate the tragedies from occurring in the first place.

The theological cognitive dissonance for me during times like this is in the fact that many of the people asking that we pray, and who praise God for the "miraculous" survival stories, also believe that God is omnipotent (all powerful) and omniscient (all knowing) and omnipresent (everywhere at once) and that nothing happens except that God wills it.  This is a doctrine called "predestination," that many, but not all, Christians subscribe to.  Many Christians aren't cognitively aware that they believe in predestination, because they've never really examined their theological beliefs in any systematic fashion.  As a result, they can earnestly ask each other to pray for God to do something even though they believe that God is going to do whatever God wants to do regardless of prayers because whatever happens is part of God's preordained plan.  So, for example, they can be militantly anti-abortion but fail to consider that if an abortion was performed successfully then it must have been God's will for that to happen. They fail to see the contradiction in believing that God has complete unilateral sovereignty and will always accomplish exactly what He wishes, whilst simultaneously asking God to do what they wish Him to do (I'm using the male pronoun here because those who believe this way almost universally envision God as male).  

No one doubts that many of the people who died in the Texas floods this past weekend were praying to God to spare them as the waters encroached and then swept them away.

Christian theologians going back to Irenaeus (125–202 AD) have proffered the idea of predestination as a means of trying to reconcile their belief that God is omnipotent/omniscient/omnipresent with the observed reality that horrible shit happens to people who don't deserve it.

But it is the 16th century Protestant reformer John Calvin who's teachings about predestination have had the most profound and lasting effect on Christianity (particularly on Evangelicalism).  Calvin wrote, "If one falls among robbers or ravenous beasts; if a sudden gust of wind at sea causes a shipwreck; if one is struck down by the fall of a house or a tree; if another, when wandering through desert paths, meets with deliverance; or, after being tossed by the waves, arrives in port and makes some wondrous hairbreadth escape from death—all these occurrences, prosperous as well as adverse ... are governed by the secret counsel of God."  In Calvin's view, nothing occurs except that God wills it.  We may not understand why it occurred, we may think it tragic or unjust or evil, but God willed it nonetheless and we simply have to accept the fact that we can't fathom God's inscrutable will.

I call bullshit on that.  It's an intellectual cop-out.  Things happen because of prior causes.  Humans have a considerable amount of agency to understand those contributing causes and enact counter-measures against future occurrances.  The scientific method serves as a tool for us to better understand these causes.  No, we can't (yet) control every storm and assault-weapon-owning-troubled-mind and aggressive cancer, but we can do an awful lot to mitigate bad things--an awful lot more than issuing thoughts and prayers after the fact, and leaving it in God's hands.

Already, here in Central Texas, it is coming to light that a very lax attitude had developed about placing children's camps (many of them run by Christian organizations) and RV campgrounds next to rivers that have long histories of violent flash floods.  We are learning that in Kerr county, which had by far the highest number of deaths, flood warning systems had not been implemented (as they had in some other counties and towns), despite their need being apparent and the costs negligible compared to the potential death tolls.  We are learning that the state government has been largely AWOL on the need for improving safety in the flood-prone region, being apparently more interested in combatting immigrants and women seeking abortions, banning access to Internet porn, and getting the Ten Commandments posted in public schools.  We are learning that the Trump administration's (and DOGE's) decimation of the National Weather Service was quite possibly a contributing factor for the imminent flood dangers not being adequately communicated.  More failings will come to light, and one hopes that solutions more concrete than "thoughts and prayers" will be implemented in response.

Lives could have been saved, and future lives will be saved, not by prayers or by passive acquiescence to what is perceived as "God's will," but by intentional, practical, proactive strategies and actions.