I prayed, "Dear God, forgive me. I’m sorry. Jesus wasn’t a myth." No bear hugs from God. No ‘truth switch’ turned on. It’s still all nonsense. Why?

That is a real experience, honestly reported, and it deserves sympathy before it gets an argument. Sincere prayer met with silence is one of the loneliest things a person can go through — and the Bible is full of it.

1. Scripture is full of unanswered-feeling prayer. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1) is a line of Scripture before it is a word from the cross. Psalm 13 opens, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1) The Bible does not present the faithful life as a series of confirmations; it presents lament as an authorized form of prayer.

2. God never promised a feeling. He promises to be found by those who seek: “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given to you… seek, and you will find” (Matthew 7:7) — a call to keep going, not a guarantee of immediate sensation. Nothing in the text says the answer will arrive as a wave of warmth.

3. Faith is trust, not confidence in a mood. “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). If God produced an unmistakable emotional surge every time anyone asked, faith would be replaced by compulsion — and a love that is compelled is not love. The absence of a feeling is not evidence of absence, though it is often experienced that way.

4. Silence is not the same as absence. Isaiah speaks of “a God who hides himself” (Isaiah 45:15), and the same prophet says, “I will wait for the LORD, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob, and I will hope in him” (Isaiah 8:17). Hiddenness is a category the Bible uses for God's own people, not only for skeptics. That does not make it pleasant; it makes it normal.

5. There is no switch because God works through means. Faith comes “from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17) — a process, not a jolt. God ordinarily works through Scripture, prayer over time, the church, suffering, and the witness of other people. Expecting a single transaction to bypass all of that is expecting a method God has not promised to use.

6. One prayer is not a controlled experiment. If God exists, he is a person, not a vending machine, and a request for forgiveness is not a test designed to make him fail. You did not approach him as a subject to be measured; you approached him, rightly, as someone to be forgiven. Tests and confessions are different acts, and only one of them is a test.

7. The turn: the experiment was set up to fail. “Nothing happened” defines as nothing only the sensation. If the only acceptable answer is an emotional event at a specified moment, then the experiment has decided its result in advance — and no possible outcome could count against it. That is not an empirical finding about God; it is a stipulation about what would count as evidence.

8. Sometimes the answer is no, or wait. Paul asked three times for a thorn to be removed and was told, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Christians should be honest that not every prayer receives the answer it asks for, and that “no” and “not yet” are real answers. Any teaching that promises a sensation on demand is setting people up for exactly this disappointment.

9. The objection assumes its own conclusion. “It is still all nonsense” is presented as the conclusion of the experiment, but it was the premise going in. Nobody runs a test whose failure condition is the thing he already believes. That does not make the belief wrong — it makes the experiment uninformative, and the honest position is to keep asking rather than to treat an ambiguous result as a verdict.

What you experienced is real, and it is not proof that nothing is there. The Christian claim is that God gives himself through means and over time, not through a switch — and that the silence of a season is not the verdict of a life.

Sources: C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters; C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain; Stand to Reason; Reasonable Faith.

Related challenges:
• IF God exists, He’s maniacal. If He WANTED to forgive sin, He’s 'all-powerful' and 'all-loving' – He could just, SHAZAM, forgive sin. Instead, He sends down His only Son to be slaughtered and murdered to take care of the sin problem. Now THAT’S evil!
• I hear a lot about “intelligent design.” Has this now proven God and falsified evolution?
• How would you respond to Victor Stenger’s stinging assertion that religious argument leads universally to dismal failure and untold suffering?