On Prayer, or "Sorry, but prayers ain't workin'"

I have prayed for many things, but have yet to see a response to prayer – whether mine or someone else’s – that is anything other than something which can be explained by completely natural processes.

While it’s possible that God could choose to only work this way in daily affairs, it does raise significant questions about the reality of such a god.  Why should I believe in a god that only ‘intervenes’ in ways consistent with non-intervention?

Around the world, prayer is undertaken by people from a vastly wide spectrum of religious beliefs.  Why do they pray and continue to pray?  Presumably they think or hope that such prayers will make a tangible difference beyond the internal subjective difference their prayers might work upon themselves.

It’s quite true that prayers can work an effect on the one who is praying, or on those who hear and believe the prayer – the placebo effect is real and measurable – but I don’t think there are too many who are suggesting that this is all that is meant by ‘the power of prayer’.

The trouble with claiming successful answers to prayer for things that can be quite readily construed to natural processes and coincidence is that it focuses attention on the countless unanswered prayers, many of which seem vastly more significant.

To pray for a lost item and then to find it again isn’t that impressive.  Even if the location suddenly came to you in a flash, and you have no recollection of putting the item there, it’s still not that impressive or significant.  Compare this to a starving mother’s prayer for food to sustain her family, which goes unanswered.  By rejoicing in God’s goodness in answering the former, you must confront the reality of the failure of the latter being answered positively.  Especially in those cases when the failure ultimately leads to death.  I know the Christian answer is that God has something better planned - eternal life.  Except if it's a Christian mother praying for God to feed her not-Christian children...

I know that many claim that God answers prayers with “yes”, “no” and “not yet”, but that response is meaningless, since this covers every possible outcome.  If we create a Venn diagram of this, there’s no possible option outside of these responses.  That makes it utterly meaningless as a diagnostic for evaluating prayer.  It makes it impossible to critique the prayers of other faiths.  Even prayer to a jug of milk.  It is essentially unfalsifiable, and thus not a substantive truth claim at all.

There’s much more to say, but that’s enough of a rant for today.

Can anyone give me a good reason to consider that prayer actually makes any real, objective difference?