Should we pray to saints or just to God?

I recently was asked about the Roman Catholic practice of praying to saints: is this biblical and is this something we should do? I figured that we'd tackle that question here, because there's something very beneficial to be gleaned from a conversation about this.

Now, the person who asked this question was told that even though this practice isn't described in the bible that, well, the trinity isn't in the bible either. We believe in the trinity, so we should believe (or could believe) in praying to saints also. Let's just attack that trinity parallel first. It's true, the word trinity is not in the bible. However, the trinity is a solution, it's a culmination to many things the bible teaches. Because the bible teaches three things, fundamentally, about God.

The first is that there's one God. The second thing is that the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit and the Spirit is not the Father. It teaches a third thing, the Father is God, the Son is God and the Spirit is God. We have to have a doctrine (a view or a teaching) on God that encompasses these three facts. That is, in fact, the trinity. The trinity is a pulling together of all the bible teaches about God being one being and three persons. It affirms and teaches this. The trinity comes from scripture. It's not something absent in scripture. It's a name given to something that's present.

However, praying to saints is just flat out not in scripture at all. We shouldn't make something an official practice or say it's beneficial for Christian living, if it's not taught, explicitly, in scripture, especially when, as we'll see, it's an actually dangerous teaching.

The first thing I want to say about praying to saints, is that pretty much universally, even in other non-Christian religions, prayer is viewed as an act of worship. Biblically speaking, we should worship no one besides God alone. This would exclude praying to anyone, whether on heaven or on earth. Now, this is probably not going to end the conversation or be very compelling. It would be helpful to be able to provide more evidence and more reasons.

Christianity and the bible do not have this category of people who are extra special or better than other people who are going to heaven. This concept of having saints and then other Christians just doesn't apply. If you're in Christ, if Christ has paid for your sin on the cross, you are a saint. There's no delineation, there's no other grouping or separating out within that.

As a Christian, any good works we do are actually not of our own creation. Ephesians 2 says that, "God prepared them in advance for us to walk in them." When God looks at us and sees an innocent, non-guilty person, that's not because of us, that's because of Jesus. Any righteousness we have is credited to us. It's not innately ours. We don't deserve it. This idea that there're some people that are worthy of being praised or prayed to because they're somehow better, misunderstands what it means to be justified in Christ. That's the first problem.

But the second problem is that the bible never tells us to pray to anyone besides God, whether they're on heaven or on earth. One thing I don't understand about this view where people pray to saints, is: why do we suddenly start praying to good people when they're dead? When their body is in the ground even if their spirit is in heaven with God? Why can't we pray to other people on earth? I think, that's because it's more, obviously, blasphemous to pray to another flesh and blood human being. But the Bible never tells us to pray to anyone besides God.

But another problem with praying to people in heaven is how would they even hear you? You don't…