Over the years I have encountered many people who struggle with their belief in God because they cannot figure out why something happened, or didn't happen. In college, I had a philosophy professor who revealed that his family had experienced a terrible tragedy. He told us about his brother and the way that cancer had destroyed his body.
My professor went on to tell the class that his family had been a Bible believing group who spent hours, upon hours praying for healing for his brother. In the end, his brother succumbed to cancer and the professor reasoned that there could be no God. He ranted that a loving God would have healed his brother and answered his family's prayers.
At one time or another, to one degree, we have all been there. We have prayed earnest prayers and asked out of all the right reasons to no avail. It is not a good feeling. We begin to say God why didn't you......
There is a flaw in this thinking, however. When we assume that God has to answer our prayers we get our perspective backwards. Because we serve a good God he often does provide us with our wants, but we exist to please God, not the other way around. When a potter forms clay into a vase, the purpose of the vase is to bring pleasure to the artist that formed it. It is not the place of the creator to spend time trying to please the vase.
Those that dismiss God because they say science disproves his existence, or that believe he cannot be real because he chose not to do something for them fail to reason about God from the right point of view. If we begin with an open mind and admit that God could exist then we have to also say that He would be the originator, the creator.
If He is the creator, then He has the ability to do things that science cannot explain (creating matter, breathing life into a life-less object, etc.). You see science does not say that God cannot exist, science says that if God exists he has to be able to do things that we can't do, can't understand, and can't explain. Man has simply become so self absorbed and so self important that he believes he must be able to figure out everything. If a God who is capable of breaking our scientific "laws" is real, then all the things we are certain about are no longer absolutes.
Those that believe God has to answer when they call, suffer from a closely related delusion. They believe that they must be the center of God's universe. If there is a more powerful being then He must exist to make us happy, to wait breathlessly at our beck-and-call. God could not possibly see a bigger picture than we can through our limited perspective, and what we want always must be what is best. In reality, sometimes what we want, even with good intentions is not what is best, even if we think it is.
We are but worms, and we cannot understand.....
