See the gas price board on the right? This is from April, aka “the good old days,” when regular was under $4.00 a gallon even in San Francisco. Back then, someone called Rocky Twyman decided the solution to high gas prices was to ask God to lower them:

Twyman […] staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday [April 25], asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday [April 23], with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in.

He repeated the performance again on May 28. Well guess what, he was successful! Yes, according to The BBC, Twyman is claiming:

…the credit for the recent sharp drop in the US price of petrol.

Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April.

Since then, the average price of what the US calls gasoline has fallen from more than $4 a gallon to $3.80.

Well then, I guess it’s time we atheists admitted we were wrong and that God really does exist. If prayers really do work, we must have been wrong all this time, yes? Let’s take a look at the (no doubt) solid evidence that prayer worked in this case. I got this graph from GasBuddy.com, showing the prices in San Francisco and DC (the places where he prayed back in April), as well as the US average:

Click the graph for a bigger image.  I’ve added a couple of arrows to indicate when the prayers took place. And as you can see, gas prices came down immediately after the prayer...  er, rose despite the prayers.  Actually, rose even more steeply immediately after the prayers on May 28. And they’re still higher than they were at any time before the prayers started.

You know, looking at this graph, it’s almost as if prayer is completely useless at influencing gas prices.