What's to explain? The brain is a complex structure that does weird stuff.

Consciousness is simply an emergent property of that complexity.

all life is merely an orderly decay of energy states; I am simply a "strange loop" within that set chemical reactions.

god doesn't make my brain work, biochemistry does, and imbibing certain chemicals impacts that in obvious ways, e.g. alcohol, lithium, or diazepam

just because I cannot see or understand my unconsciousness does not mean it isn't just another chemical process, in the same way that I do not have conscious control of how my body produces white blood cells or bile.

Are you conflating "unconsciousness" with "higher power" here?

There are sections of the Hebrew Bible that are supposed to be the directly quoted word of God.

And there are various religious traditions that claim various holy texts as being the direct product of a deity.

The steel-man position here — and I say this as one who does not believe in any of the many variations/presentations of the Christian god — is that "answer" does not imply "does what you ask".

What does indicate that the claim "God answers prayers" is false, is the near total lack of personal responses to those praying*, not even so much as "your prayer is important to us, you are number 184,693,224 in the queue" that I'm sure is an SMBC comic but cannot find easily on Google right now — if I had even once had such a clear and obvious statement ringing in my ears when I went through a Catholic school, I wouldn't have switched to Wicca before giving up on religion entirely.

(Not that Wicca gave me direct answers to prayers, just that it never claimed it would, either — Doreen Valiente and Janet & Stewart Farrar were both very clear about having made up the rituals themselves).

* Almost all such people, at least. Just as the number of people who claim to be able to physically shape-shift into werewolves is very small but not zero (guess how to join the dots between me knowing this and having had an interest in Wicca), the number is small enough that… other… causes are more plausible than the divine.

I think you overlook that holy book says “only” God answers prayers. And pray to God for he will answer. The answer doesn’t necessarily have to be the answer you think is correct.

A leg amputated is a leg lost and the journey of a test and struggle that begins next. That’s an answer. Not a lie.

Once again, the writer doesn’t understand God, prayer, religion, and the purpose of man. And he cannot make sense out of this paradigm. So he falls further into misguidance, like a schoolboy who misses the primary instructions only to reject the class entirely.

> there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that many if not most of those particular claims are false

Most, but not all, of these claims are, theologically, untestable.

Here's an analogy: Would you find a guy walking down the street, ask him to take part in your science experiment measuring how high guys can jump, hear him say "no I don't want to take part", then conclude that because he did not jump for you he is unable to jump? You wouldn't. In fact, you might get disciplined by your university's ethics review board for experimentation without consent. In the same way, for most tests, the Bible says that God does not want to be tested. You should assume that your unwilling test subject will not cooperate, or even work to frustrate, your tests.

The talk about observations over longer times can seem persuasive. I think an analog would be hiring a PI to tail the unwilling guy test subject for years. But if you don't see him jump in 5 years, does that mean he can't? What more if he knows you're following him and that you want to see him jump, is years of not jumping valid evidence then? That's not evidence at all, much less overwhelming evidence.

As an agnostic, this is a topic that greatly interests me.

One challenge I've found in navigating this is determining the extent to which (interpretation from an untrained but intelligent layperson) == (interpretation from someone with a lot more historical, linguistic, and theological training).

I.e., how much research is needed before one can reasonably conclude that the "promise" being evaluated isn't just a straw man.