So how do you know they are wrong and you are right, particularly if you don’t subscribe to “evidence based religion”?
You said previously
However, that seems to assume that the primary goal of prayer should be to get God to accede to our requests and provide us material benefits. But why so? That assumption seems to be far from obviously correct. To answer this question, we can’t use “evidence-based” methods. Such methods can be used once the goal is clearly identified and delimited. But here we’re questioning what the goal actually is. We have to turn to something deeper, and that is what religion and philosophy seek to tackle.
America has alot of Christians. I imagine alot of them pray about covid-19. Jesus says in Matthew 17:20 if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, presumably indicating even a very small amount of faith, it can move mountains.
So how come America with so many Christians have so much more covid than Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan?
The short answer is that the arguments cited by your Muslims friends are wrong, and one does not need to have faith as a Christian to demonstrate how they are wrong. I don’t want to get into the details here, because I’m not an expert on this, but there are good answers to virtually all of these objections.
Similarly, the evidence is there to demonstrate Christianity is wrong. You are happy to investigate evidence Islam is wrong, but have you dared step outside and see the evidence for yourself?
Have you read any of mainstream bible scholar’s books?
My favorite bible-related book of all time is Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible”.
Other favorites -
Israel Finkelstein’s The Bible Unearthed (how archaelogy relates to the bible)
Avigdor Shinan’s From gods to God (how Israel transitioned from polytheism to monotheism)
Mark S Smith’s The Early History of God (early history of Israel, Canaanites, and YHWH)
James D Tabor’s Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity (as per title)
Tom Dykstra’s Mark Canonizer of Paul (engrossing - will make you view the gospel of Mark with new eyes)
Jacob L Wright’s King David and His Reign Revisited (enhanced ibook - most readable book ever on King David)
Jacob Dunn’s thesis on the Midianite/Kenite hypothesis (free pdf download - warning - highly technical but also extremely well referenced)
As the goal of the forum here is to be heard and understood, I challenge you to understand mainstream biblical scholarship.