Prayer For Healing

In James 5:14-16, the apostle of the same name says that the prayer of a righteous person is "effective and powerful" and that God might deliver someone from sickness because of prayer.  Perhaps because of this, or perhaps because of its subjective appeal or because they have heard it from others, some Christians talk as if prayer is a cure for everything from insomnia to cancer.  God could heal someone with or without prayer preceding it--but it does not follow that he will or that it is epistemologically likely that he will.  Some of the ramifications of the opposing ideas might not even be what their proponents would like.

If true, this would necessitate that God is actively the primary reason why all other Christians, even the ones who are not irrationalistic fools, are afflicted with physical or mental health conditions and is the reason why everyone is sick or healthy at all times.  Rather than just universally permitting and in some cases causing these things, though he certainly would have the power to do so, Yahweh is the sole or constant cause of all calamity and healing according to this unbiblical philosophical idea, and prayer supposedly wins him over to courses of action he would not have brought about.

God could be fully active in all causal events in the physical world and mental plane in the sense that this does not contradict logical axioms, but the Biblical deity is in some ways far, far more deistic than many like to acknowledge.  It is not that it is logically impossible for the uncaused cause to personally intervene on a regular basis or that the Bible does not teach that there are many times where this has already happened.  It is that Yahweh is not constantly, directly, universally healing people or otherwise interacting with their lives.

Yahweh sometimes allows people to go about their lives without his direct interference one way or another, and in other Biblical narratives, he performs great punitive or revelatory miracles.  What is clear even within the context of Biblical stories is that God does not always act or not act in these respective ways.  Prayer is much more about cultivating or leaning into a relationship with God than it is about actually convincing him to suddenly heal someone who was otherwise not going to be divinely healed.

This is only egoism, the ignoring of the obligation to align with God and to relate to him properly whether one wishes to or not until one would derive terrestrial benefit from it.  Due to epistemological limitations, it is not as if I could know anyway whether it is random scientific correlations, divine interference, or a combination of both that leads to any sort of healing from sickness or other conditions that I experience, and this is because there is no logical necessity in any of them.  I pray not because I will or know I will have the circumstances of my life changed.  I do so because it is an obligation according to the only moralistic worldview with any probabilistic evidence pointing towards its veracity.