CAN PRAYER CREATE A ROCK

ANOTHER PRAYER CANNOT

MOVE
BY
THEOLOGIANS CROSS-PRAYING AT

CROSS-PURPOSES

Edited by jeffperado
BNOresearch Press

Big Picture Enterprises

2016
 Contents

Does Prayer Change Things?

Michael J. Murray
Why Pray?
by Stephen Oliver
Motivating Reasons to Pray
by Dan Hayes
Prayers for the past
KEVIN TIMPE
Response to a Statistical Study of the Effect of Petitionary
Prayer
 Does Prayer Change Things?
Michael J. Murray

Franklin and Marshall College

The belief that God responds to prayer is

widespread. According to a recent Newsweek survey
87% of Americans said that they believe that God
answers prayers. In fact, they believe so heartily in
the efficacy of prayer that nearly one third of those
polled said that they prayed to God more than once
a day. What is even more interesting about this
belief among ordinary Americans is that it has been
denied by so many theologians. One might think
such denials would be found only among
contemporary liberal theologians who deny that
miracles are possible or that God would deign to
interfere in human affairs. But in fact, such denials
can be found in the writings of the founding fathers
of many religious traditions. Of course, these
theologians do not thereby deny that prayer is
important or meaningful. Instead, the argue that it is
meaningful because it brings about certain internal,
psychological benefits for the petitioner.
 But why, one might wonder, would these
traditional theologians deny the popularly held belief
that petitionary prayer is efficacious, not only in the
sense that it affects the heart of the petitioner, but
also in the sense that it moves God to act? The
reason is, in fact, quite straightforward. If God were
perfectly good he would want to provide us with any
good that would improve our true well-being and
further would deny us anything that would detract
from our well-being. Thus, if one prays for something
that it would be truly good to have, a perfectly good
God would have already intended to give that good
thing, whether it was prayed for or not. Likewise, if
the thing prayed for is not good for us, God would
not give it to us regardless.

However, this argument stands in tension not only

with overwhelming popular opinion, but with the
claims of central texts of the major Western religious
traditions—texts which resoundingly affirm the
efficacy of prayer.
The argument offered in short fashion above against the efficacy
of prayer is a powerful one, and unless we can find some way to
circumvent it, the traditional teaching that God does answer prayer
seems to run the risk of making traditional religious belief
incoherent. So, our question is, can it be circumvented? I will argue
that it can. In order to show this, I we will begin, in section I, by
tracing out the argument against the claim that God responds to
prayer with greater care. In Section II, I will look at what must be
shown in order to defeat the argument. In Sections III-V I will
offer a number of reasons for thinking that the argument is in fact
defeated. And finally, in Section VI I will look at some global
objections that can and have been raised against the reasons
offered in Sections III-V.

Section I: The Argument Against the

Claim that God Responds to Prayer

0. A perfectly good being will seek to maximize the true goods

of each individual to the extent that a) doing so is possible for

such a being, and b) doing so does not preclude the provision of

equal or greater goods to others. (defmition)

I. God can be said to respond to petitionary prayer if and only if

God provides the petitioner with what is asked for and would not

have done so otherwise. (definition)

II. If what is requested would be good for the petitioner, then God,

being perfectly good, would provide what is asked for even

without being asked, if it is logically possible for Him to do so, and

if doing so does not preclude provision of equal or greater goods to

others. (from 1)

III. If what is requested is not good for the petitioner, then a

perfectly good being would not give it even though it has been
asked for. (from 1)
IV.It is never the case that God provides the petitioner with

something which was asked for and which would not have been

provided even without the petition. (from 3 and 4)

6) Thus, God does not respond to petitionary prayer. (from 2 and 5)

Section II: Strategies for Defeating the
Argument

There are some troubles with the argument in section 1. The

first is that it is invalid since 5) does not follow from 3) and 4). The

reason is clear once we take a closer look at 4). The words "not

good" in 4) either mean "bad" or "either bad or indifferent." If the

former, then 5) does not follow since it could be that some things

petitioned for are, in the end, simply indifferent for the one making

the petition. Such things, we might suppose, are the sorts of things

that God might be willing to provide if asked, but not otherwise.

Since they are "discretionary," there is nothing in God's goodness

that requires that He give such a thing. And since they are not bad

either, there is nothing in his goodness that prevents them being

given. If, however, "not good" means "either bad or indifferent"

then 4) is simply false because there is no reason to think that God

would be obliged to provide indifferent things if not asked.

But while this is a problem, it is a minor one. Religious

people believe that prayer is important not just when it comes to

the insignificant "little extras." In fact, many believe that prayer
for trifling things are the very prayers God does not answer (as

evidenced by the fact that a majority of respondents in the

Newsweek poll do not believe that God answers prayers regarding

the winning of sporting events!). Rather, religious believers

usually hold that prayer is most important when it comes to the

most serious events we face in life, even matters of life-and-death.

Surely it cannot be true that such things are always indifferent for

us. That is, religious people seem to believe that prayer is not
efficacious for just the discretionary things, but that it is

efficacious for the "big things" as well. And this argument, one
might think, at least shows that this is false.

Thus, we might reformulate the argument so that it

provides a less stunning but still troubling conclusion by

changing 5) and 6) to read as follows:

5*) It is never the case that God provides the petitioner with

something which a) was asked for, b) is either good for the

petitioner to have or bad for the petitioner to have, and c) which

would not have been provided even without the petition. (from 3

and 4)

6*) Thus, if God responds to petitionary prayer it is only in cases

that concern provisions which are neither good nor bad for the

petitioner. (from 2 and 5*)

 However, this revised argument faces further problems.

Premise 3 is supposed to follow from Premise 1. While Premise 1

is controversial in a number of respects, the problem I would like

to note here is that 3) simply does not follow from 1). To see why,
consider a certain good, say, relief from physical pain. Imagine

that during her workout, Olympic athlete Gail Devers has a mild

cramp in her leg. The coach knows that if she stopped practicing

immediately, the pain would go away. But he also knows that she

needs to complete this regimen in order to be in good enough

shape to compete at the time trials. According to 3, if the coach is

good, he is required to stop the practice since doing so will yield a

good for Ms. Devers, namely, relieving the mild pain she is

experiencing.

Clearly nothing about the notion of perfect goodness

requires the coach to do that. In fact, we might imagine Ms.

Devers being quite angry at his order to stop practicing,

recognizing that relieving this bit of suffering now will likely

deprive her of a very great good she wants even more than she

wants relief from this momentary pain.

Premise 3 as it stands is false then since it requires that a

good being will bring about goods even if doing so will preclude

the possibility of outweighing goods in the future; and this claim is

clearly false. Thus, the argument needs a replacement for 3) that is

true and follows from 1). I suggest:

3*) If what is requested would be good for the petitioner, then God,
being perfectly good, would provide what is asked for even without
being asked, if a) it is logically possible for Him to do so, and b)
doing so does not preclude provision of equal or greater goods to
others, and, c) doing so does not preclude God's securing future
outweighing goods for the petitioner. (from 1)

Of course, once we replace 3) with 3*), the argument is

again invalid since 5*) does not follow from 3*) and 4). What

does follow from 3*) and 4) is this:

5**) It is never the case that God provides the petitioner with

something which a) was asked for, b) is either good for the

petitioner to have or bad for the petitioner to have, and c) would

not have been provided even without the petition, unless doing so

would preclude the possibility of outweighing goods in the future.

The reader who is following along up until now might

wonder just what this line of response to the argument in section I

means for petitionary prayer. The answer is this: 5**) is consistent

with God's sometimes making the provision of certain goods depend

on petition being made for them, in order to secure certain

outweighing goods that could not have been secured if they had been

provided unconditionally. Thus, the defender of the claim that God

responds to prayer might hold that there are certain goods God wants

to secure, goods he could only secure by making the provision of

certain other goods depend on them being petitioned for. If this is

right, then it would also be right to say that, in those cases, if no

petition is made, it would be better for God to withhold the good in

order that the outweighing good might be obtained (the outweighing

good, that is, which comes from making the provision dependent on

the petition).
Section III Are There Such Outweighing
Goods?

One way to defeat the argument of Section II then is to show that

there are outweighing goods that God can secure by making

provision of certain other (lesser) goods depend on petitions,

outweighing goods which a) in fact outweigh the good of

providing the thing asked for unconditionally, and b) could

not have been secured in a way that entails less evil.

I think that there are such goods and that there are different
goods to be secured from the different types of prayers religious

believers are requested to offer. In this essay I will look at the two

most common types: prayer for goods for oneself and prayers on
behalf of others (I will call these "self-directed" and "other-

directed prayers", respectively).

Outweighing Goods Arising from Self-
Directed Prayer

In this section I will examine three outweighing goods that arise

from self-directed petitionary prayer: preservation from idolatry,

coming to a greater understanding of the divine nature and

purposes, and the promotion of friendship between God and the

creature.
Preservation from Idolatry
In Making Sense of It All, Thomas Morris argues that atheism

is an urban phenomenon: As we have become progressively

distanced from our natural sources of sustenance, we have come to

view ourselves as largely self-sufficient. When the rural, eighteenth-

century farmer considered his situation it was easy for him to

recognize that his continued existence was due, in large measure, to

forces beyond his control. Would a late frost take the potato crop?

Would a drought dry up the corn? Would a flood wash out the seed?
These questions led the farmer to rely on the only Being to whom he

could appeal for help in these matters. It was evident to him that he
was directly dependent on the Superintendent of nature for his "daily

bread." For the urbanite, whose water and gas come from a pipe,
whose waste exits likewise, whose food comes from the grocer,
shelter from the contractor, light from the bulb, etc., it can come to

seem that we are largely self-sufficient and we are dependent only

"on other people and the products of their hands."2 As a result, when

things go wrong (or right) we tend to look for human agents to

blame (or praise). And conversely, when we are in need we tend to

look to the appropriate human benefactors for their provision. In

doing so, however, we tend to put creatures in the position

reserved for God as the giver of "every good, and perfect gift," as
he is described in the Christian scriptures, i.e., we are at risk of

committing idolatry. 3
Petitionary prayer can short-circuit this tendency by forcing

the believer to realize that the goods she receives have their source
beyond human agency. While her food might still come from the

grocer's hand and her drink from a tap, it is still God who brings the
rain, provides the chemist with the intellect required to thwart

white-fly infestations, and gives the physical strength to the

assembly-line worker who constructs the tractors which harvest the

wheat. With each petition, the believer is made aware that she is
directly dependent on God for her provisions in life.

One might object at this point that while this is surely a

good that might result from the practice of petitionary prayer, it is

just another internal psychological benefit, one that can be

secured whether prayer is ever efficacious or not. What seems to

be important in this case is just that we come to recognize God as

the ultimate source of all goods that we enjoy, and in coming to

recognize it we see him and ourselves in our rightful place in the

universe. None of this presupposes that prayer is actually

efficacious.

The point of this section, however, is that making provision

of certain goods truly dependent on petitioning is what allows many,

and maybe all, to "recognize God as the source of all goods we

enjoy" in the first place. My son, who likes to play with action

figures, provides an helpful example. If I were simply to shower him

with new figures regularly and indiscriminately, I can imagine him

becoming spoiled and presumptuous. Thus, I often do not give him

any new figures until he asks for them. And even then I might

sometimes refuse for other reasons. Still, by making his having the

figures dependent on his asking for them, and further by making the

granting of the request something less than automatic, he not only has

a genuine appreciation for the opportunity to play with them, he has a

genuine appreciation for the fact that I provided it for him. While it

could happen that he would have such an appreciation even if he

were to receive the toy without asking, it is common for such

appreciation to wear thin and become downright hollow unless

the economy of provision is of the sort I have described.

 As a result, it seems reasonable to suppose that God might
likewise make the provision of at least some goods depend directly

upon our making petition for them. Not only does doing this
preserve us from idolatry by forcing us to recognize that God is the

ultimate source of all the goods we enjoy, it further, as the example

of my son illustrates, fosters in us a genuine appreciation for the

provisions that are made.

Promotion of Divine Friendship

Eleonore Stump has described a second sort of good that is

secured by making provision sometimes depend on petition.' In

general, she argues that petitionary prayer is a hedge against the

dangers of a "bad friendship" between God and His creatures.

Throughout Christian Scriptures there are passages that describe the

type of loving relationship that ideally exists between God and

humans. Images of bride and groom, parent and child, friend, and so

on are regularly employed to emphasize different facets of this

relationship. Stump's contention is that in any relationship or

friendship between two persons, one of whom is perfect and

powerful and the other of whom is neither, there are certain dangers

which can preclude friendship. She highlights two. The first is the
danger of God "overwhelming" the creature. When the balance of

power and abilities is so vastly uneven, the weaker member of the

pair has a marked tendency to become a pale shadow of the stronger
member, losing all sense of individual personality and personal

strength. Stump argues that efficacious petitionary prayer guards

against this potential to overwhelm because it precludes God from

providing for needs that are not understood or even felt. If God
refrains from making provision except in response to prayer, it

allows Him, in turn, to refrain from imposing His, potentially,

unwanted designs upon His creatures.

As an example, Stump describes a teacher who notices one

of her students procrastinating on a term paper and thereby "storing

up trouble for himself"' If the teacher were to call the ±student at

home and present him with the scheduling help he needs, Stump

believes that his justified response might be, "Who asked you?" or,
"Mind your own business." However, if the student were to ask for

help, the teacher could provide the student with needed instruction
without the danger of overwhelming him. Similarly, if humans

were led to docile acceptance of God's unrequested provision, it

would infringe on their autonomy. Only if believers ask for those

things they are given can the necessary conditions for true
friendship between God and His human creatures be met.

Stump describes the second potential harm to the divine—

human relationship as that of becoming "spoiled." The advantages

of a friendship with a perfect Being, she argues, are likely to

cause the weaker member to become willful and indulgent. Prayer
helps safeguard against spoiling in that the petitioner is forced to
acknowledge her need, and to further acknowledge a dependence

on God for fulfillment of that need. In addition, if that prayer is

answered, the petitioner must in turn be grateful to God for His

grace. This helps avoid the kinds of human pride and indulgence
that might occur if God was to make provisions for us without

petitionary prayer.'

In a similar vein, Vincent Briimmer notes that if God did

not, at least in some cases, make provision for our needs

dependent on our requests, the relationship would become

"depersonalized." He argues that if God provided for all of our

needs automatically we would be akin to the potted plant on the

kitchen window sill which is watered when and only when our

caretakers decide to water us. But just as we cannot have a

personal relationship with an entity of this sort, God would be cut

off from a personal relationship with His creatures without

efficacious petitionary prayer.'

Understanding the Divine Nature and

Purposes
The Hebrew Scriptures contain a widely-known story in
which the prophet Elijah faces off against the prophets of the
Canaanite deity, Baal, on Mt. Carmel. Both Elijah and the prophets
of Baal were to prepare sacrifices and call upon their respective
deities to consume the sacrifice. The prophets of Baal spent hours
engaging in a variety of religious rituals attempting to cajole Baal
into intervening. When they had fmished, to no avail, Elijah
stepped up, prayed that God make his power evident to those who
were there, and God immediately sent fire from the heavens to
consume the sacrifice.'
This is, of course, not the ordinary mode of discourse one

finds in the relationship between God and his creatures. But it

points to a centrally important good that can arise from

efficacious petitionary prayer. One result of God's miraculous

display on Mt. Carmel is that those who witnessed it immediately

acknowledge "Jehovah" as the true God. And it was not, of

course, simply the miraculous display that brought about their

change of heart, it was the fact that the display came in response

to Elijah's petition. Seeing God respond affirmatively to Elijah's

petition was, one might say, instructive.

We can generalize on this example, seeing that God could

teach us a number of things about his own good nature and

purposes in the world by responding one way or the other to our

petitions. In doing so, God can teach his creatures in much the

way that parents teach children when they honor or fail to honor
their requests. When my children ask for chocolate bars for

breakfast and I deny the request, I hope to teach them something

about eating well and maintaining their health. When I deny my
children's requests to forego doing their homework, I hope to

show them something about the importance of learning and

meeting your obligations. And so on.

Of course, there are some serious obstacles to be overcome

in trying to apply this analogy to the relationship between God and

his creatures. When I pray for rain for my vegetable garden and no

rain is forthcoming, should I conclude that God wants me to cut back

on vegetables in my diet, or that I am spending too much time in my

garden? Maybe God didn't send the rain because were he to do so

some tragic result would occur which I am completely unaware of. It

seems that this ambiguity is going to infect and thus undermine any

opportunity I might have to learn something about God's nature

and purposes on the basis of his responses to petitionary prayers.

There are surely limits to the sorts of things that God can

teach his creatures through responses to petitionary prayers

alone. Few would deny that those on Mt. Carmel drew the

correct conclusion. Of course, it is rare that a request and a

response are given in circumstances that lead to such

unambiguous conclusions.

Yet, many religious believers are quite convinced that they

do learn about God's nature and purposes from seeing God

respond to prayer. In most cases where this is so, however, the

believer usually claims that God made it clear that the provision or
the lack thereof was indicative of some important truth about

God's nature or purposes. We see a representative case of this in

St. Paul's second letter to the church in Corinth. In the letter Paul

tells the church that he petitioned God three times to take away a
particular infirmity. God reveled to Paul that he refused to grant

the request in order to make it clear to others that his success was

not due to Paul's efforts and abilities alone.

Of course, many religious believers claim that God similarly

teaches them in such circumstances though often by means less overt

than booming audible voices. Instead, they claim, God enlightens the

mind of the petitioner to make certain features of the world salient

(features related to the provision or failure thereof), and to see the

reasons for the provision or its failure.

As in the "idolatry" account given above, one could argue

that the relevant benefit here could be secured without efficacious

petitionary prayer. If God can "enlighten" the mind to teach a person

why a prayer was granted or not, God can simply enlighten the

persons mind to teach them the relevant truth about God's nature or

purposes alone. Of course, God could simply insert occurent beliefs

in my mind, but it is no surprise that truths learned by experience are

more vivid, effective, and deeply rooted for us. There are some

lessons that simply cannot be taught in an enduring way by sanitized

didacticism. Instead it takes, for example, getting or failing to get

something we desperately wanted for such truths to take hold. And

so while a similar outcome might be secured without making

provisions dependent on petitions, a much greater good can be

secured by God allowing such a dependence relation to obtain.

Section IV: The Problem of Other-
Directed Prayer

Up until now, our focus has been on self-directed petitions. But the

major Western theistic traditions are united by the fact that they

advocate other-directed prayer is well. The Christian Scriptures

repeatedly state that this is just what is required of believers. In

Paul's letters, for example, we find him not only giving explicit

teaching about the efficacy of corporate prayer but also recruiting

the prayers of his audience. To the Colossians he writes, "at the

same time pray for us as well that God will open to us a door for

the word, that we may declare the mystery of Christ..." (Colossians

4:3), and to the church at Corinth: "On Him we have set our hope

that He will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your

prayers." (IICor. 1:10-11). The implication of the practice is, of

course, that more people petitioning for a particular outcome

makes it more likely that it will be granted.

If self-directed prayer seems initially baffling, the

practice described here is all the more so. Why, one might

wonder, would God choose to grant a request to provide a

petitioner or petitioners with some good because more people

pray for it? Such a practice seems to treat God as a cosmic

vending machine, dispensing goods as long as the right

combination of prayers is inserted.

Without reformulating the argument of Section I into an

argument against other-directed prayer, one can still see what

must be done to make sense of this second practice. As before,

we must look for some good which arises out of the practice of

other-directed prayer which outweighs both the good of God

simply providing that which is requested, and the good of

provision by way of mere self-directed prayer.'

Section V: Outweighing goods secured through other-
directed prayer Cultivation of community and inter-
dependence

One reason for God to make provision of certain goods contingent

upon corporate requests is that allowing his creatures to assist one

another in this manner generates an interdependence among

believers—one that fosters the sort of unity God demands of the

Church. In Scripture, the Church is often portrayed as a body. The

picture is of many parts that, while all individually useful and

important, depend on one another for their effectiveness. In his

first letter to the Corinthians Paul writes, "But God has combined

the members of the body . . . so that there should be no division in

[it], but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If
one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored,

every part rejoices with it."(12:24-6). Paul explains that spiritual

gifts are distributed among members of the Church so that they

might realize God's purpose for the Church on earth. But they are
also distributed in such a way that the members of the body must

rely on one another to perform their own function effectively, in

the way that the parts of our own bodies do.

As a result, one of God's purposes for the Church is that they

recognize their interdependence and through this cultivate healthy

mutual relationships within the community Other-directed prayer

can serve this end by leading believers to humbly share their needs

and shortcomings with each other so that others might pray for
them. But more than this, other-directed prayer forces believers'

interdependence since God has, to some extent, made the granting

of petitions contingent upon them recruiting others to pray for their

needs. Unity among the members of the church is a good

significant enough for God to make many of His provisions to

individuals contingent upon their securing the other-directed

prayers of different member of the church.

By way of analogy we might imagine a parent telling her

children that in order for them to receive certain goods, they would

not only have to ask for them themselves, they would further have to

enjoin their siblings to ask for the goods on their behalf. No doubt,

this would be an odd practice for earthly parents to adopt. But

consider what would likely result. Since the siblings would

recognize the importance of making requests on each others

behalf, they would, first, be moved to share their deepest needs

and hopes with one another. Since the children do not know which
goods depend on multiple petitions, they would be moved to share

things that are most important to them. Second, since aiding a

sibling requires actively making request on their behalf, good will

is generated between the siblings. Seeing that my brother was

willing to help me out by asking on my behalf, deepens my

gratitude towards him and thus deepens our relationship. Finally,

such an act deepens my brothers love for me since by acting on my

behalf he thereby involves himself in the promotion of my

interests.

From this analogy we can come to have a sense for how

similar benefits might arise for the Church when God has made

provision of some goods truly dependent on other-directed

petitions being made for them.

Meeting needs of one another

But other-directed prayer not only serves to achieve the indirect

benefit of fostering unity among members of the church. In

addition, it serves the more direct purpose of making the

community of believers aware of each other's needs so that they

themselves can meet them. In this way, other-directed prayer

helps believers to avoid the pitfall, described by in the epistle of

James, of deserting the cold and the hungry with the mere

salutation, "Be warmed and be filled" (James 2:16). When

petitioners are confronted with the needs of others directly they

are moved not only to intercede for them but to provide for them

themselves. Thus, praying for one another develops a pathos

among the members of the community that again disposes them

towards interdependence and away from independent self-

reliance.10

Of course, this too might be seen as a benefit which can be

secured even if prayer is not efficacious. This is true, in so far as

believers would willingly agree to share their deepest needs with

one another even if prayer were not efficacious. But such an

arrangement might not be effective since those in the community

of believers might be much more reluctant to share their needs

with one another. By making the efficaciousness of prayer

depend, at least in some cases, on other-directed petition being

made, the believer has a powerful and immediate incentive to

share those needs with others in the community

 Section VI: Some Further Problems for
Petitionary Prayer

While Sections III-V have, I think, successfully undermined the

central argument against petitionary prayer outlined in Section I,

there are some lingering objections against the view of

petitionary prayer I have developed here that must be addressed.

We can put the first objection as follows:

The view of petitionary prayer you offer here suggests that

God makes provision of certain goods directly dependent

on our petitioning for them. Of course, there are plenty of

people out there who never petition God for anything since,
among other things, they don't even believe God exists! If

provision of some goods is a necessary condition for their

being provided, we should expect that those who pray to

receive certain goods that those who do not pray never do.
But such an expectation is clearly not met. The unbeliever

and the believer alike receive their "daily bread" without

regard to whether they pray or not. Thus, while the claim

that petitionary prayer is efficacious might be

philosophically defensible, the empirical evidence proves

that it is false.
This sort of criticism rests on a number of mistakes. First, it
assumes that provision of every instance of some type of good

requires petition for that type of good. That is, it assumes that some
good such as "daily bread", i.e., nourishment, is provided only to

those who pray. And, the objection continues, since this is false,
provision of nourishment does not depend on prayer.

Nothing in the view developed above, however,

requires that prayer is a necessary condition for receiving

every instance of a given type of good. God does not need to

make provision of every good or even of every instance of a

type of good rest on petition to secure the goods mentioned

above. All we can infer from the model I have offered is

that there are some times when God makes provision

dependent on petition, and in those particular cases, those

who fail to pray will fail to receive the petition. Nothing in

the empirical evidence could show us that this never

happens.
In addition, even if prayer were a necessary condition for

receiving certain types of goods, it might be that those who do not

pray receive the good in question by piggybacking on the
provision for those who do. When the rain falls on the faithful
farmer's field, it does on his infidel neighbor's as well. But this

provides no evidence against the efficaciousness of petitionary

prayer.
 There is, however, another response that one might make to

this objection. The outweighing goods described above are largely

goods aimed at those who are already believers in God. Idolatry

prevention, promotion of friendship with God, securing unity within

the community of believers, etc. are all goods aimed at those

already in the believing community. As a result, one might hold that

petitionary prayer is only a condition for provision of goods for

believers, since it is only in their cases that having this dependence

relationship will even possibly bring about the desired outweighing

goods. If this view is right, then we might expect that religious

believers would have even less in the way of goods since only they

stand to lose out on some goods for failure to pray. The empirical

evidence provided by the fat pagan then would, far from

undercutting the support for efficacious petitionary prayer, actually

support it!

There is a second objection, however, that has troubled

critics of petitionary prayer. We can put the objection this way:

We can think of the goods God might provide for us as

falling into two categories: a) basic goods which are

required to insure that our long-term quality of life is not

significantly diminished and b) discretionary goods which

serve simply to enhance an already acceptable quality of

life. While it seems reasonable to suppose that God might

 sometimes withhold discretionary goods to secure the

outweighing goods mentioned above, it also seems

reasonable that he could never do so when it come to

basic goods. The problem, of course, is that religions that

believe in petitionary prayer usually highlight the fact

that one ought to pray (even especially) for basic goods.

Thus while the account given above makes sense of

some types of petitionary prayer, it does not make sense

of the sort advocated by most major theistic traditions.11

Notice, first, that the objection raised here only gets worse if we

assume that God sometimes withholds basic goods from those

who are not religious believers because of their failure to pray.

For, in that case, not only are the unable to have the outweighing

goods mentioned above that come from making provision depend

on petition, but they lose out on the good petitioned for as well—

a very serious matter in the case of basic goods. As a result, let's

suppose for the remainder that provision hangs on petition only

for believers.

The objector here assumes that the good secured from

allowing provision to depend on petition is never sufficient to

outweigh the basic goods that could be lost were the person to fail

to pray. Is this true? One philosopher has argued that we can see
that it is true when we reflect on the analogous situation between

parent and child. A parent, it is argued, would never be justified in

withholding basic goods simply because they are not requested.

And there is no reason to think that what is transparently true in

the parent-child case does not apply equally to the case of God and

his creature.12

There are, however, a number of problems with the parent-

child analogy. First, it is a caricature to say that basic goods are

withheld because the creature "fails to pray." While it is true that

this is the proximate reason, the ultimate reason is that the person

"failed to pray in a situation in which there was an outweighing

good that could be secured only if the provision was made in

response to a petition." Thus, the failure to receive the basic good

would be due to the fact that an outweighing good would be

secured by not making the provision.

Second, is it clear that a parent is never justified in

withholding basic goods under such circumstances? Maybe it is

true that the parent is never justified in withholding every instance

of a type of basic good, e.g., every instance of nourishment, but it

is not at all clear that the same is true for some instances of a basic
good, e.g., one meal. And since, as we argued above, the view I

develop here does not require God to make every instance of a

type of good dependent on provision, the criticism seems to fail.

 Some, however, might not be satisfied with these responses.

There is something, the critic might persist, about this view that

seems to make God into a utilitarian accountant, weighing up the

goods of provision and the outweighing goods to be had from not

providing. And while this may be acceptable in some contexts, it just

seems that anyone who would withhold basic goods as defined here

just does not love the person needing the basic good.

I think this objector has not appreciated the force of the

above replies. As a result, let me add one more. There are two

disanalogies in the parent-child relationship that makes it clear why

it is not a fitting analog for the relationship between God and his

creature in this case. The first disanalogy is that parents who choose

to make provision depend on petition do not know whether they will

be petitioned or not. But God, if he has middle knowledge, as I

suppose he does, can know prior to creating any world whether or

not a policy of making provision (of even basic goods) hang on

petition will have significantly bad consequences. If God foresees

that such a policy will result in some being denied basic provision to

a severe extent, he might find creating such a world morally

unacceptable. Alternatively, God might simply choose, in such a

world, not to make that sort of basic provision dependent on petition.
The second disanalogy is that parents, unlike God, do not

know whether or not the outweighing goods that ones seeks by

making provision depend on petition will actually be realized or not
if such a policy is established. Thus, a parent might institute such a
policy in vain since it may turn out that, in her case, setting up such a

dependence relationship yields only bitterness in the child. God, on

the other hand, who can know perfectly just what results will arise

from such a policy, can make provision depend on petition

selectively and thereby ensure that the outweighing goods are largely

(if not completely) secured by such a policy. Thus, if the parents had
perfect middle knowledge, and knew perfectly if and when the child

would refuse to request provision, and further knew just what would
outweighing goods would be secured by establishing such a policy, it

is clear that the parent would be justified in setting up such a

dependence between provision and petition.
Section VII: Conclusion

The practice of petitionary prayer and the belief in its efficacy is

deeply rooted in the major Western theistic traditions. A number of

philosophical arguments have been raised against such a practice,

the most powerful of which I have discussed here. While it may

seem that there are no reasons that God would make provision
depend on petition, we have seen that in fact there are a number of

outweighing goods that can be secured through God's establishing

such a dependence. Further, we have seen that the most serious

potential problems that can arise from establishing such a

dependence can be mitigated if we assume that God has middle

knowledge.

Endnotes
1. Making Sense of It All, Grand Rapids: Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1992.
2. James 1:17.
3. James 1: 17.
4. Stump, Eleonore, "Petitionary Prayer," American
Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 16 (April 1979), 81-91.
5. Ibid., p.87.
6. This part of Stump's argument points to a good which
is quite similar to the good that we think occurs when
idolatry is avoided. In both cases, the petitioner is
reminded that his needs are ultimately fulfilled through
God, and not himself.
7. What Are We Doing When We Pray, Vincent
Briimmer, London: SCM Press Ltd., 1984, p. 47.
8. 'I Kings 18:16-39
9. 0f course, in some cases, petitions might be made on
behalf of someone who is not praying on their own behalf.
In such cases, the second disjunct here is irrelevant.
10. A similar idea is advanced by George A. Buttrick in
Prayer, New York: Abington- Cokesbury Press, 1942 and
also by Brilmmer, pp. 57-8.
11. David Basinger raises a criticism very much like this
one in his "Petitionary Prayer: A Response to Murray and
Meyers," Religious Studies, volume 31, p. 481-84
12. See Ibid., p. 483.
 Why Pray?
by Stephen Oliver

published by the Christian Evidence Society

This refreshingly realistic book explores what

prayer is and how it works. Rooted in everyday
human experience, it is particularly valuable for
those who have never understood - why pray?

Prayer is primitive. That is to say it is a basic part of human experience.

There is overwhelming evi-dence to show that on occasion people find
themselves praying even when they don't consider them- selves to be
specially 'religious'.

When BBC Television investigated the disturbing safety record of ships at sea,
Tom Mangold inter-viewed an officer from a bulk carrier which had gone down
so suddenly that many of the crew had no time to escape. It was a harrowing
story. The ship's hull had been so corroded that a gash opened up in the bow,
allow- ing the sea to pound mercilessly into the forward hold. Internal
bulkheads fractured one after the other under the incessant pressure of the
waves. Below the main deck only a thin wall stood between the engine room
and the ocean when the order was given to abandon ship. The massive carrier
sank in just six minutes. At this point Tom Mangold asked a direct but unusual
question. 'Did you pray?' The officer, clearly moved, returned an equally direct
answer: 'Yes, I prayed.'

Now a reporter of Tom Mangold's hardened experience isn't given to wasting

valuable air-time by putting fatuous and irrelevant questions. He knew what
he was doing. It wasn't enough to dig out the facts and list the number of ships
lost at sea. It wasn't enough even to paint the picture of slack regulations and
negligent owners out for a quick profit. If this programme was to be anything
more than a passing story, he had to reach the audience at that point where
words alone can no longer express the anguish of human tragedy. In moments
of ultimate crisis women and men pray! Who knows what fuelled that officer's
prayer - fear for his life, grief for his friends, fury at the owners, anger at God?
The point is that Tom Mangold knew the audience would identify with that
officer precisely because in times of overwhelming catastrophe they, too, had
found themselves praying.

It's easy to dismiss that kind of prayer as a last ditch attempt at self-
preservation. People do snatch at straws in a crisis and this experience of
spontaneous prayer might be nothing more than the last shout of a misguided
superstition. The trouble is that a personal crisis is very far from being the only
situation which evokes this response of natural prayer. Nor is it by any means
the case that self-preservation is the only motive for praying. On the contrary,
the most urgent and immediate prayer is often for other people: 'God help
them.'

An experienced police officer was driving down the motorway, listening to the
sports programme on the afternoon of the tragic disaster at Hillsborough
Football Stadium in Sheffield. The first reports were of people crushed and
injured. Then followed accounts of supporters trapped inside the crowd barrier
and soon it was clear that people had died. As the horror of that afternoon
began to unfold, he found himself pleading with God to help them. In his mind
he could picture the stadium and knew that this was a major disaster. In so far
as he was conscious of praying at all, he was aware that he held in that prayer
the injured and dying, the emergency services and the families of the
supporters waiting at home and worried sick. All this and more was contained
in three words - 'God help them'. On reflection, he was surprised at the fact that
he found himself praying - but it was so spontaneous that he could not help
himself.

Roy Williamson describes a similar experience in the aftermath of the fire at

Bradford City football ground in 1985. The team had just won promotion to the
Second Division of the Football League. It was a day of celebration which
ended in tragedy when fire swept through the stand with ferocious speed,
leaving fifty-six people dead. Early on Sunday morning a brief announcement
on the local radio station let it be known that in the Cathedral later that day
there would be an opportunity for people to come together and to pray. In the
event, the Cathedral was not only full to capacity but hundreds stood outside.
'It was an incredible testimony to people's need, in the face of inexplicable
disaster and suffering, to be in touch with God - either to weep in sorrow or
shake their fist in anger - and prayer was the way in' (Can You Spare a Minute,
Roy Williamson, DLT Daybreak 1991). The evidence suggests that at times of
human crisis, and particularly when it is other people who are involved, it is not
the case that people debate with themselves whether to pray. It is not even the
case that people want to pray, but rather that they need to pray. And that
compelling experience is as natural as tears and as spontaneous as laughter.
In fact there are no limits to the range of occasions when spontaneous prayer
comes as a natural response, riding on the emotions but directed to God. Joy and
happiness, relief, thankfulness or sheer joie de vivre - a sense of exuberance and
delight can be carriers of that surge of prayer. John Emery was surprised by that
unexpected moment when it came to him at the end of a difficult climb.
'Later, when I came to the harder routes, I found something else, a new state of
mind. This was a sudden and overwhelmingly powerful sensation of humility
and gratitude, so real that I could only interpret it as being directed towards a
creator. I had never been able to arrive at such a conviction through a process
of reason, yet here I was forced to accept it, despite myself - I had made no
conscious effort to achieve it; there was no act of contemplation. It just
happened when I was coiling up the rope at the end of a climb; as prosaic as
that' (The Alpine Journal, 1961 Nov. 'The Runcible Cat').

In a very different context, the French composer Hector Berlioz was

surprised by that unexpected moment whilst listening to music.

'The sound filled me with a passionate unrest, from which I was powerless to
hide. I saw heaven open - purer and a thousand times lovelier than the one
that had so often been described to me. Such is the incomparable beauty of
melody that comes from the heart' (Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, Gollancz
1969).

Spontaneous prayer of this kind, which springs up in response to a range of

human experiences, is very far from being self-indulgent or egocentric. On
the contrary, such instinctive prayer is often the profound expression of
concern for the well-being of others. It can also arise as a sense of deep
thankfulness in the face of astonishing beauty or well up from an
overwhelming feeling of awe at the sheer mystery of life in the birth of a
baby.

One other experience can be the context in which prayer is born, but it attracts
less attention today than in the past. It is an important, if neglected, part of
human nature and because it can be a painful area it is too often avoided. To be
human is to take a high measure of responsibility for oneself and a care for
others. People are also sinners who know what it is to fail and what it is to be
guilty of wrong-doing. There are occasions for most people when punishment
and retaliation have been deserved, but instead of that they have been met with
kindness and understanding. That experience of guilt and grace in relation to
God is to come up against what Graham Greene described as 'the appalling
strangeness of the mercy of God'. It is that mysterious moment when
forgiveness is sought and graciously given. The desire for forgiveness and the
gift of grace meet in consciousness at the point of prayer.

In all these areas of human experience where prayer is an instinct rather than a
deliberate decision, the overwhelming feeling is that of being taken out of
yourself. It is a moment, however fleeting, when thankfulness, or desire and
yearning - whatever it might be - are directed to God. Yet what makes it all so
hard to put into words is the fact that this experience of prayer hardly reaches
the level of language at all.

'... And prayer is more

Than an order of words,
 the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of
the voice praying.'

('Little Gidding' a poem by T S Eliot, in Selected Poems, Faber 1954)

Many people will recognise the experience of such prayer even if they lay no
claim to formal religious belief and even if their hold on the very notion of
God is somewhat tenuous.

Why pray? Because at times it is such a fundamental part of our nature that it is
instinctive. Because uniquely it conveys, however haltingly, the deepest
concerns and the greatest delights of our life. Because at this primitive, basic
level of prayer, if we did not pray we would not be human.

Say one for me

Prayer is dangerous. On the negative side, there is always the temptation to

pander to the immature demands of the child within. This is one reason why
prayer is often reduced to the level of 'asking for things'. It is not that prayers in
this mode are wrong. The problem is that they have not evolved into a much
wider and deeper experience. Children are taught, quite rightly, to pray in this
fashion, but then later their spiritual growth is stunted. The inevitable result is
that an adult person is saddled with an immature spirituality. Hardly surprising,
then, that the demands of the child inside should become expressed as prayer to
the great God somewhere outside. When such demands are not clearly met, then
of course prayer is said to be a waste of time.

The reality of prayer, however, is more complex and much more interesting. In
fact, since prayer is the 'way in' to a conscious relationship with God, it cannot
be less interesting than what might be observed in any personal human
relationship.

All human relationships are a mixture of motives and needs, but there is no
denying that the most authentic relationships are found where people affirm one
another. By contrast, the most fragile relationships in business, marriage or
community are those based on exploitation. In other words, people in mature
relationships are there because they want to be there, not primarily for what they
can get out of it. Now in this context it must be said that prayer invoked as a
'magic formula' or prayer intended as a means of divine manipulation will not
work! Such prayer only reinforces the wrong kind of immature dependence.

In the north transept of York Minster, myriad numbers of candles cast a warm
glow over the cold stones. The modern pilgrim is invited to light a candle as a
prayer. It would be easy to dismiss this invitation as pandering to the immature
superstitions of vulnerable visitors. But nearby is a notice which spells out with
commendable brevity how authentic prayer is always a mature expression of
concern for others or a heightened response to a transcendent truth. Prayer takes
you out of yourself, it doesn't lock you in. The notice reads:

'You are invited to light a candle as a prayer:

In response to beauty and goodness.
In thought for others.
As an offering of oneself.'

The Christian faith is quite clear that while we are dependent on God as the
'whence of our being', that is, for our very existence, nonetheless God relates to
us with respect for our freedom and by affirming each individual's personhood.
Respect for freedom and affirming ultimate worth are the two most significant
ingredients in any creative relationship that has the potential for growth. That is
why the most profound prayers are not the longest but the most perceptive.
They start not with pleading but with affirmation:

'The Lord is my shepherd …'

'Our Father in heaven ...'

'God of grace and God of glory ...'

And they end with respect for the sovereign freedom of God, trusting that in
freedom God will do what is good:

'... yet not my will but thine be done.'

'... Lord hear us. Lord graciously hear us.'

'...for the kingdom, the power and the glory

are yours now and forever.'

Prayer that starts here has the potential power to enable people to grow in their
perceptions and in their personality. Only one other ingredient is required -
honesty! No relationship will ever flower without it. The agnostic's cry for help:
'0 God if there is a God, save my soul if I've got one' might not reach the heights
of literary achievement but it certainly stands on the bedrock of authentic
prayer. As does St Augustine's famous plea: 'God make me chaste - but not yet.'
The uncomfortable aspect of this honest, affirming prayer is its capacity to
boomerang back. It is hard (to the point of hypocrisy) to call God Father, yet
secretly believe that people of a different class, creed or colour are not also
your own brothers and sisters. Far from being an innocent pastime, prayer can
be a dangerous threat to all manner of personal and political prejudices. But
then, growing into a new maturity always was a risky business!
 'Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement.
Properly understood and applied
it is the most potent instrument of action.'

Gandhi

Why pray? Because it would be unfortunate, to say the least, to reach sixty with
the spiritual understanding of a six-year-old.

Prayer is dangerous. On the positive side, it is about the willingness to be open

- to new truth, to yourself, to other people. The Dutch poet and priest Huub
Oosterhuis expressed this vulnerable openness in a prayer of his own:

'Lord our God ...

make us receptive
to everything you can give us.'

Never mind the prayers that ask for this and that. What does God want to give?
Divine respect for human freedom means that nothing can be given that is not
willingly received. That is the significance of the way in which Jesus of
Nazareth taught his followers how to pray:

'do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do;

for they think that they will be heard for their many words ...
Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
Pray then like this: Our Father in heaven ...'

Matthew 6.7-9

God cannot give what is needed if a person is not open to receive it. Prayer is
asking to receive.

If the Bible is to be believed then God wants to give all manner of good things
to his children, save that their freedom to accept or reject those things will
always be respected. The problem in the Western world is that people are
bombarded by all sorts of peer group aspirations, advertising publicity and
political slogans. It is not at all clear that we know what we need even though
we may be convinced that we know what we want. Not that the problem is a
new one. One of the ancient Jewish prophets 2,500 years ago was making a
similar plea on behalf of his people:

'Give me a pure heart, 0 God,

and put a right spirit within me.'

The first priority of prayer is to know what we need, to see clearly what is
required. It is an experience of heightened perception. A psychiatrist once
justified his expensive fee by asking his client, 'How do you know what you
think until you tell me?' It may sound an odd question but it's true to
experience. Someone asks at a dinner party, 'What do you think about capital
punishment7' There is silence, except for the meshing of mental gears as
people genuinely work out what they do think about it. Then, occasionally,
they surprise themselves since they have never expressed a view on the
question before. Prayer is the opportunity for that kind of self-awareness to
grow, but it demands a risky openness that can be quite disturbing.

In this sense prayer is not unlike the experience of talking to yourself. But there
is a real difference. Every summer during the Wimbledon tennis tournament
players are heard talking to themselves with words of biting criticism or
energized encouragement. To talk to yourself like that leads nowhere beyond the
present moment – or worse. Shut up inside yourself, the conversation fmally runs
into the sand. The experience of prayer is very different precisely because the
underlying intention is to be open and receptive so that there is always the possi-
bility for some new perception to grow, some new insight to be grasped, some
new possibility to be seen.

Ultimately, prayer is an attempt to be open more fully to that direct communion

with God that is revealed in the lives of those spiritual giants of faith. His habit
of praying compassionately led Albert Schweitzer to give up his brilliant
academic career to live in Africa caring for lepers. Prayer for the terminally ill
led Cicely Saunders to establish a modern hospice, just as prayer 'for the
despis'd slave' led William Wilberforce down the road which led to the
abolition of trade in human beings.

Prayer is dangerous because when it is truly open then God knows what might
happen next!

To return to the question about whether prayer works, the honest answer is no, if
prayer is exercised as a magic formula or intended as a selfish manipulation of
people or events. But if the question is 'Does prayer make a difference?' then the
unequivocal answer has to be yes. Prayer makes a discernible difference to the
one who prays and, in my experience, a profound difference to the subject held
in that prayer. Yet there is certainly no easy connection of cause and effect, no
telepathic instrument to explain the mystery of this divine communion

Why pray? Because the conviction grows with praying that this is the most
profound contribution that can be made in the realm of our deepest concerns,
not as a substitute for thought or action but as the unique means of
undergirding and inspiring both. To pray for others in their need is often the
only thing that can be done. It is also a very personal thing to do. And those
who are held in prayer often express a profound gratitude even if they do not
pray for themselves.
 You'll never walk alone

The exercise of prayer is a journey of discovery. It requires an element of trust

and that trust can only grow with experience. Michael Novak makes the point
that 'it is in prayer that one comes to know God best'. He goes on to ask the
intriguing question as to whether people do not pray because they do not
believe in God, or whether they do not believe in God because they have
never learned to pray (Belief and Unbelief Macmillan 1966).
To pray is to concentrate in such a relaxed yet focused way that ever- deeper
layers of reality are revealed and ever more nuances of truth are discovered in
people and in the world. Faith's name for the ultimate reality and the source of
truth is God. To rest in God and to stay with God is to pray.

Instinctive prayer, which springs from a particular experience as a response to

God, is both natural and biblical. Natural because it is so common in widely
different cultures and times; biblical because there is such a strong tradition in
the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity that prayer is what God enables to
happen.

'When we cry "Abba! Father!" it is the Spirit of God bearing

witness with our spirit that we are children of God ...
The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know
how to pray ... but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs
too deep for words.'

St Paul's Letter to the Romans, Chapter 8

Communion with God, which is the essence of prayer, is also God's gift. But
it always remains a gift that can be refused, abused or ignored.

The starting point in developing prayer beyond the instinctive urge evoked by a
particular situation is to have the courage to pray. In a secular society with no
apparent need for God, old habits of thought die hard. It is not easy to
recognise those deeper rhythms of life that have been ironed out by a consumer
society. It takes courage to resist the brainwashing which dismisses prayer as
meaningless, but then people in other ages also thought like that, only to
discover again its curious attraction.
'What profit do we get if we pray?' (Job 21) is a slogan which finds an
astonishing echo in a world which asks 'what's in it for me?' There comes a
point where effort is required to combat the spiritual bankruptcy which
fosters a corrosive cynicism eating away at questions of value, purpose and
meaning.

Once the breakthrough has been made then patience is needed to recover those
skills of waiting, stillness and concentration that have been wasting away. The
evidence of those who have trodden this path suggests that at some point there
comes the experience of being met and accompanied on the journey. This is not
to say that there will be no time of dryness - a dark night of the soul and a
feeling of emptiness. In one sense this is only to be expected. An athlete in
training goes through a similar period when progress seems hard. Relationships
go through barren times, only to flourish again later. The trick is not to panic but
to persevere.

When that first step has been taken, then the journey begins to have about it
the element of discovery. Others, too, have been here and left the marks of
their passing.

If honesty, for example, is required as a vital ingredient in the practice of

prayer, then the language of the ancient Psalms knows no bounds in telling
God straight.

'Why do you stand far off, 0 Lord?

Why do you hide your face in time of need?'

Psalm 10

'When I slipped they mocked me: and gnashed at me with their teeth. Lord, how
long will you look on?'

Psalm 35

'As the deer longs for the running brooks,

So longs my soul for you, 0 God.'

Psalm 42

'0 God, the

heathen have
come into your
land ... We have
become a
mockery to our
neighbours, the
scorn and
laughing-stock
of those about
us.'

Psalm 79

'0 God, you know my foolishness,

And my sins are not hidden from you.'

Psalm 69
Old and young, sinner and saint, heathen and destitute - all manner of life and
every human emotion is carried in those honest and open prayers.

But emotional incontinence is not altogether the most creative channel of

prayer, though it is often a cathartic experience that can clear away a lot of
rubbish.

The time comes when honest prayer needs to be focused but not censored.

Jesus of Nazareth had to teach his followers this art of spiritual concentration.
There are many stories which convey his own rhythm of prayer and the vital
importance he attached to it. He is reported as going into the hills to be alone to
pray without distraction. Exhaustion makes concentration difficult but the
immensity of the landscape and the nearness of the stars can help to bring the
presence of God back into focus. It is after a period of intense activity that Jesus
is often found to be alone or praying with his closest friends. He regularly visited
the Temple and on one occasion insisted to the point of physical confrontation
that it should be a house of prayer. Sometimes his prayer could be a silent
thanksgiving, as when he broke the bread that fed the people on a lonely
hillside, or an anguished cry, as in the Garden of Gethsemane when 'his sweat
like drops of blood fell down upon the ground'.

The important legacy he left is not so much the rhythm of his prayers as the
pattern of prayer which he taught his followers.

Until recently, it was the one prayer that everyone in Christendom knew by
heart. Today there is confusion of forms and not everyone is taught it at school,
even in a nominal Christian country. It may be that future generations will
discover it with delight, having hardly known it in their youth.

The prayer, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 6, begins with phrases
of affirmation and honour:

'Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name.'

From the very start the prayer conveys a note of intimacy and trust. Then
follows the first petition:

'Your kingdom come,

Your will be done on earth
as in heaven.'

At first, it appears to be such a nebulous request. Why not pray for food,
housing or employment? The point is that authentic prayer deals first with the
ultimate issues, not just the symptoms of human concern. Take, for example, the
evil of famine which has been so endemic in parts of the world like Somalia and
Ethiopia. Over the years, the failure of crops and the poverty of the people have
not been the factors which fermented the famine into such a deathly catastrophe.
It was the savage civil war which consumed vital resources and fmally con-
demned children and mothers, young men and old people to a fatal starvation.

Food given by the aid agencies was hijacked before it could be distributed.
Fighting between rival gangs prevented access to the interior villages. What
the situation needed more than food was a revolution in human affairs that
would allow the supplies to get through. When Jesus taught his followers to
pray for the Kingdom of God, it was for a transformation of that blind
wickedness which has allowed evil to wreak such death and destruction.
Whenever people are locked into a vicious circle by prejudice, fear and hatred
as in Bosnia, Serbia, Sri Lanka or Northern Ireland, the priority prayer must
be for the coming of the Kingdom, the rule of God. It could not be expressed
more precisely than in this prayer.

Having said that, it must be added that prayer which never includes any
particularities will also lack any real engagement with the profound issues of
the world. To that extent, the prayer of Jesus needs to be 'earthed' in the
concerns of the moment. But then the prayer itself never gives any excuse for
a religious flight of fantasy. There is nothing more 'earthy' than to pray for
bread.

'Give us today our daily bread.'

It is a straightforward prayer that can be used with great simplicity. But it also
carries an elusive depth of meaning. In practice, it is one of the most difficult
phrases to translate from the Greek of the Christian gospels. In the days before
supermarket shopping, a family would go to the local bakery and place an order
for tomorrow's bread. When there were no deep freezers and bread went stale in
a very short time, it was important to have fresh bread regularly supplied.
Somewhere in this prayer for daily bread is the request that God might provide
tomorrow's fresh bread - today. It is another way of expressing a longing for the
Kingdom of God which is yet to come.

But that Kingdom can only be given when it is willingly received. So the
prayer moves on to confront those barriers which prevent the coming of the
Kingdom.
'Forgive us our sins
As we forgive those who sin against us.'

Once again, there is a realism here which cannot be avoided. The healing of
God's forgiveness is gladly and generously offered with the one provision that
such forgiveness should spill over into the healing of every fractured human
relationship. There is evidence in the teaching of Jesus that divine forgiveness
even precedes the expression of penitence. Jesus accepts the tax collector
Zacchaeus and goes to his home even before Zacchaeus confesses his faults.
The father of the Prodigal Son rushes out to meet him before the penitent lad
has chance to utter a word. There are no conditions laid down to qualify for
God's forgiveness, save that when it is received it should be shown to others in
the same generous spirit.

The prayer of Jesus finally confronts the ultimate issue of evil. The famous
psychiatrist Carl Jung used to complain that theologians never took evil
seriously enough. The same cannot be said of Jesus!

'Lead us not into temptation.'

This is a pointed prayer for deliverance when faith is tested, confidence is

eroded and evil is confronted. It is the test that Jesus faced in the wilderness
and, more acutely, in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is the climax of the
prayer and the most crucial petition.

The prayer ends with a final acclamation of glory, which includes an expression
of trust and faith:

'For the kingdom, the power and the glory

are yours now and forever. Amen.'
This prayer has been handed down from
generation to generation. Saints and sinners have
been instructed by it in every age. Sometimes the
prayers of the past seem more of an encumbrance
on the journey of faith rather than a help. To use
them seems at times like trying to walk in boots that
are several sizes too big. But the point is not to be
intimidated by them. Rather than abandon them
altogether, it is worthwhile considering whether in
time you might just grow into them. The Lord's
Prayer is a prayer that will from time to time be the
channel of fresh insight and new spiritual growth.

Why pray? Because at rock bottom 4,000 years of

evolutionary history have been invested in human
beings who have learned how to pray. It would be
foolish to settle for our own spiritual desert when
previous generations have discovered the odd lush
pasture and green oasis. Those generations might
not have had the knowledge that is enjoyed in our
age but without their spiritual depth, our knowledge
could prove more of a threat than a promise to the
future.

Pray up and shut up

Prayer is more, far more, than words. When I was
growing up, my grandparents lived just down the
street. They never locked their front door, which
shows how different life was in those days. I could go
in and see them whenever I liked and no doubt there
were times when they were glad to see the back of
me. But I remember very clearly walking down the
street and thinking what a good idea it would be to
surprise them if I crept into the house without them
knowing that I was coming! It was a dark, early
evening in winter. They still had gas lights in their
house and an open fire in the hearth. As I crept down
the hall, I heard nothing but the creak of a rocking
chair, the hiss of the gas mantle and the odd
dropping of ash from the fire into the grate. I stood
for a while outside the living room door, caught in a
companionable silence. Both my grandfather and
grandmother had got to the stage where words
weren't that important any more. They enjoyed
simply being together. In the end, I couldn't bring
myself to shatter that stillness so I crept out, waited
a while and then went back with my usual clod-
hopping step and shouted down the hallway, 'It's
only me.'

There comes a point where prayer is more like a

companionable silence than a frantic conversation. It
is best described as an awareness of God - a walking
with God all the time, rather than paying the
occasional visit. Of course it is vital to attend to
prayer, setting time aside, being alone and so on.
But those times come to inform the whole of life
rather than being excursions from an otherwise busy
schedule.
 Motivating Reasons to Pray
by Dan Hayes
published April 28, 2010
www.startingwithgod.com/knowing-
god/motivating/
startingwithgod.com

I know prayer is important. All the godly people

I’ve ever met testify to the crucial nature of prayer in
their lives. So I understand I should pray, but . . .

Well, let me be honest. It can seem that our

motivation for prayer is results-oriented, simply to
get answers. Prayer can feel like a grocery list: “Our
Father, who art in heaven . . . Gimme, gimme,
gimme!” This is sort of a “shop ’til you drop” way of
praying. But somehow I cannot see that as the prime
(and certainly not the most satisfying) reason to
pray.

So I began to study how and why Jesus prayed, and

discovered five very motivating reasons to pray.
 • Prayer builds my relationship with Jesus
• Prayer helps us overcome temptation
• Prayer is crucial in determining God’s will
• Prayer accomplishes God’s work
• Prayer is a weapon of spiritual warfare

Prayer Builds My Relationship with Jesus

I am first called to prayer because it is a key
vehicle to building my love relationship with Jesus
Christ. Hear me now -this is important. Christianity is
not primarily rules. It is relationship.

Certainly Christ has standards, but we don’t

become Christians because we receive standards.
We become Christians because we receive Christ,
who loves us, died for us, lives in us daily.

What I need, then, is to build my love relationship

with Him. I have to learn to allow Him to embrace
me, to care for me, to point out my needs to me (and
how He fills them). I need to listen to Him, and I
desperately need to talk to Him.

In Ephesians 3:14-19, Paul prays, “that you may be

able to comprehend . . . what is the breadth and
length and height and depth and to know the love of
Christ which surpasses knowledge . . .” “Know” in
this passage is the same word used for the intimate
closeness of a husband and wife in sexual embrace.
Paul is praying that you and I will experience that
kind of love with Christ – not sexual, but intimate,
deep, close, unfettered. It is so deep that Paul later
says it “surpasses knowledge.”

One place we can experience this is in prayer.

When we “get down and get honest” before God, we
are on His turf in a unique way. Seldom do we get
closer to Him than in prayer. When we pray, we can
pray to experience this love, to be bathed in it, to
learn how to give it back, to learn how to let it seep
into the dry cracks and crevices of our lives.

I think that the chief reason for the gift of prayer is

that we learn to receive, experience, and return His
love in genuine relationship. Prayer is one place
when God can get at us (and we think prayer is for
getting at Him!) and speak to and minister to us.
That is why David prays in Psalms 18:1, “I love you,
O Lord, my strength.”

Prayer Helps Us Overcome Temptation

Prayer is an important instrument in our
overcoming sin and temptation. Perhaps no
experience in the earthly life of Christ is more
instructive on prayer than in Luke 22:39-41. Luke
sets the scene. It is the night before Jesus’ death.
Jesus and His apostles have left the upper room and
have navigated the winding path they knew well, up
the Mount of Olives to Gethsemane. Jesus knows that
great temptations are soon before them – His
capture, His trials, His scourging, His mockery, the
lure of their denial, His Crucifixion.

Mindful of their need for fortitude, He addresses

them: “He says, “pray [in order] that you may not
enter into temptation.” What did He mean? Simply
that their antidote to yielding to the temptations that
fear, discouragement, and horror would soon
present, was prayer. Prayer would fortify their
trembling faith and courage. How could He know
this? Because He, too, faced His own darkness.
Looming in the next few hours were insults,
torturous beatings, being nailed to a cross. Beyond
that, He would bear all the sins of humanity,
including the sins of all the child molesters and mass
murderers and the Adolph Hitlers of all the ages. Can
you imagine the terror that must have clutched at
His throat? We are naive if we think it did not occur
to the humanness of Jesus, to abort His mission, to
look for another way.

So what did He do? He modeled exactly what He

had told His disciples: He prayed so that He could
defeat temptation. We are told by Luke that His
prayers were so heartfelt, His struggles so intense,
that His sweat was bloody, pre-figuring the flow that
would come tomorrow. He began His prayers with,
“Father if there is any way that this cup can pass
from Me…”At the end of that hour, He rose from
prayer, having settled with His Father, “not My will
but Thine be done.” Prayer had been the means of
His victory. He returned to His men to find them . . .
asleep! He had told them to pray. Instead, they
followed the college students’ motto: “When in
doubt; sack out!” He confronts their tiredness, their
crankiness at being awakened, and says again (verse
46), “pray that you may not enter into temptation.”

Notice that He commanded this in the beginning of

this passage, then He demonstrated it in the body of
this passage, and He reiterated it at the end of this
passage. When you face temptation, PRAY! That is
what will see you through. But instead, usually we
pray only after we have yielded. What about seeing
prayer as our first option so that God can give us
courage and strength prior to our temptations? If we
would pray more, we would yield less!

Prayer Is Crucial in Determining God’s

Will
We pray because prayer is crucial in determining
God’s will. “Now you’re talking,” you say. Here’s
something you might hear from Christians: “I pray
about my choices, and when I have ‘peace’ about
one of the options, then I go with it.” Yet, how askew
is that from God’s Word. Prayer certainly is vital in
determining His will, but not because it gives us
peace. Let me show you how faulty such thinking is.

I asked a group of Christians once, “How many of

you have ever shared your faith, witnessed to
another person about Jesus? Well, right before you
shared your faith, which was almost certainly God’s
will, how many of you felt this warm, calm sense of
‘peace?’ Hold up your hands. Hmmm. No hands!
Weren’t you rather scared, nervous? Perhaps your
palms sweated. Shoot, your hair sweated. No great
feeling of peace there, but you did it anyway
because it was God’s will, right?” God’s real will
often produced scary feelings, not warm fuzzy ones.
So wait. How does prayer help determine His will
then? Jesus again gives us a demonstration in Luke’s
gospel. Read Luke 6:12-16. Here, He prays all night
about choosing from the hundreds who followed Him,
a special group of disciples whom we now know as
the Apostles.

How did prayer help? It helped in the way John

Wesley described. “I find,” he said, “that the chief
purpose of prayer in seeking God’s will is that prayer
gets my will into an unbiased state. Once my will is
unprejudiced about the matter, I find God suggests
reasons to my mind why I should or should not
pursue a course.”

The chief purpose of prayer, then, is to get our

wills unbiased! The purpose is not to give us an
ethereal sense of comfort. Thus, we pray to God
about His will in some area, knowing that we
probably are already leaning in a certain direction.
We implore Him first to help our wills to move back
to the center -that is, willing to do whatever is His
will. Once we arrive there (and it may take some
time), He shows us through our minds why one
alternative is better than another and therefore is
His will for us.

This is conjecture, but Jesus must have had a long

talk with the Father regarding individuals and who to
select for His closest followers. Jesus talked to the
Father all night about this. Maybe Jesus had
preferences for His followers. He probably had a list –
at least a mental one. Perhaps Peter was already on
it, but perhaps Andrew was not. Thomas certainly
wouldn’t have been on mine, and neither would
Simon the Zealot. Maybe they weren’t at the top of
Jesus’, either. Yet, through the work of His Father
and His own yielded nature in intercession, the
reasons came clear to Him why all three of these
men plus nine others should be tapped.
 Our searching out of God’s will can be the same.
We pray so that our wills (not our emotions) can be
yielded to the Divine “whatever.” Then II Timothy 1:7
becomes alive: “For God has not given us a spirit of
timidity, but of power and love and sound
judgment.” As we spend time with God in prayer, He
will guide us to ideas, thoughts, reasons, Scripture,
which will reveal His will to us. It might be over days,
weeks or sometimes months…but to know God’s will
requires talking to Him about it.

Prayer Accomplishes God’s Work

Here is a major accelerator to my motivation to
pray, and it stems from one of the most amazing
statements Jesus ever made. It is found in John
14:12-14. It would be good to open your Bible there
because you’ve got to see it to believe it.

It is the night of the Last Supper, and Judas has left

to betray Jesus. His leaving allows Christ to pass on
some of the most sublime of His earthly teachings to
the remaining faithful. In the context, He is
discussing His deity, His union with the Father, and
the works of God in the world. Suddenly, He makes
this statement: “Truly, truly . . . he who believes in
Me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater
works than these he shall do; because I go to the
Father.”
 Look at that statement. Savor it. Regard it. Study
it. “He shall do.” Jesus did not say, “they shall do.”
He did not say, “the corporate body all combined
together will do.” He used a singular pronoun
meaning one person. “The very works that I do and
greater than these” is His statement.

What works did our Lord do on earth? Oh, just a

few: cleansed the lepers, healed the sick, proclaimed
release to the captives, taught tens of thousands, led
thousands to salvation, raised the dead, healed
those born blind. Piece of cake! Yet the plain fact of
Jesus’ statement is that the only qualifier to doing
such works is “[the one] who believes in ME.” How?

Verses 13 and 14 relate directly to verse 12. “And

whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, that the
Father may be glorified in the Son.” And, since He
knew they wouldn’t get it the first time (and neither
would we), He repeats it: “If you ask Me anything in
My name, I will do it.”

Prayer is the way His greater works get done! Most

of us will not be worldwide evangelists, though a few
will be. Most of us will not be gifted in healing,
though some will be. Most of us will not be great
preachers and teachers, though some will be. But
every one of us can kneel down and pray. We can
pray, asking Jesus to touch the lost masses of earth
and help snatch them from eternal darkness to
eternal life. Through prayer, we can participate in
Christ’s healing power spreading both medically and
miraculously across the earth. Every one of us can
pray, asking Jesus to stop the forces of moral
degeneracy that threatens to engulf the depth of the
human spirit. Every one of us can do these things
through our prayers!

Today, if I will, I can spend 15 minutes on peoples’

behalf, influencing them for God and for good.
Today, I can spend 20 minutes touching the
entrenched Muslim minds of the Mullah’s of Saudi
Arabia or the ascetic Buddhist Monks of Nepal.
Today, I can stand against pornography and rape
and incest and child abuse in the far-flung towns of
this country. Because, when I talk to God in my living
room, or office, or church, He is the same God who
reaches into families, into Nepal, into Arabia, into the
Kremlin, into homes. I participate with Him, not only
through my efforts and works in my geographic
location, but also throughout the world in
accomplishing His works through my prayers. It
matters not what type of gifts, talent, or personality I
have; it matters only that I take this time to
cooperate with Him in my prayers. And that is all
that matters for you, too. May we “get it” before
much more time passes. Jesus said, “…greater works
than these he shall do; because I go to the Father.”
Anything that brings the Father glory, Jesus said,
“ask Me…I will do it.”

Prayer is a Weapon of Spiritual Warfare

Prayer is a major weapon in fighting the spiritual
battle. Ephesians 6:10-20 reminds us that ultimately
our struggles are not against humans, but against
powerful spiritual beings and forces. The picture here
is that of a war. Life as a Christian is not a
playground; it’s a battlefield.

We are instructed by Paul, an experienced soldier

in this combat, to be appropriately prepared for our
struggle. Modeling a Roman warrior, we put on the
helmet of salvation, the breastplate of
righteousness, loins girded with truth, feet shod with
the preparation of the Gospel, shield of faith, sword
of the Spirit (the Word of God).

Now, it seems we have a complete set of armor

and weaponry. And if I were writing this passage, I
would say, “Now get out there and fight the battle!”
But interestingly, Paul does not say that. In fact, he
waits until verse eighteen to get to the heavy
artillery of this arsenal of God… persistent prayer.
Notice what he says: “With all prayer and petition
pray . . . with all perseverance and prayer . . . and
pray . . .”
 In two verses, we are commanded to pray five
different times. Do you think he (and God) are trying
to make a point? He is attempting to seize our
attention concerning prayer’s power in the defeat of
Satan and his tactics. Parallel to this text is 2
Corinthians 10:3,4: “For though we walk in the flesh,
we do not war according to the flesh, for the
weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but
divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.”

The weapon of prayer softens up Satan’s fortress.

It is the cannon, reducing the wall to rubble so that
the troops can go through. Too often, the gospel
moves slowly because the softening-up process of
prayer has been neglected. When practiced,
however, prayer “puts the wind at the back” of
Christ’s soldiers.

For example, a few years ago, at a prestigious

American university, one powerful administrator was
blocking the placement of additional full-time
Christian workers on campus because of his own
disbelief in the gospel. The Christian students on
campus resorted first to prayer. Feeling that no one
had the right to keep students from hearing about
Christ, they prayed that God would either change
this man’s heart or remove him from his position. For
six months they prayed faithfully.
 Suddenly, for no “apparent” reason, he was
transferred to a different position and a replacement
named. Among the first questions the replacement
asked was this: “Why aren’t there more Christian
workers on campus?” The workers came, and the
gospel flourished. Prayer is key to fighting this
spiritual battle.
 Prayers for the past
KEVIN TIMPE

Department of Philosophy, University of San Diego,

5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110-2492

Religious Studies 41, 305-322

© 2005 Cambridge University Press

doi:10.1017/S0034412505007766

Abstract: All three of the world's major monotheistic

religions traditionally affirm that petitionary prayers
can be causally efficacious in bringing about certain
states of affairs. Most of these prayers are offered
before the state of affairs that they are aimed at helping
bring about. In the present paper, I explore the
possibility of whether petitionary prayers for the past
can also be causally efficacious. Assuming an
incompatibilist account of free will, I examine four
views in philosophical theology (simple foreknowledge,
eternalism, Molinism, and openism) and argue that the
first three have the resources to account for the efficacy
of past-directed prayers, while the latter does not. I
further suggest that on those views which affirm the
possible efficacy of past-directed petitionary prayers,
such prayers can be 'Impetratory' even if the agent
already knows that the desired state of affairs has
obtained.

Introduction
Consider the following scenario. Allison is an agent
with libertarian free will. While watching the evening
news, she learns that there is currently a tornado
touching down in western Ohio, leaving a path of
devastation and destruction in its wake. Allison's father
lives in the path of the storm. As she runs to the phone
to call him, she offers a prayer that he not be hurt or
killed by the tornado. Allison thinks that God might hear
her prayer and, as a result, intervene in such a way as to
protect her father from harm.'
Scenarios such as this are common, wherein a person
petitions God to bring about a certain state of affairs.
All three of the world's major monotheistic religions
affirm that petitionary prayers can be causally
efficacious in bringing about certain states of affairs.
Dealing with petitionary prayer from a Christian
perspective, David Basinger distinguishes three senses
in which petitionary prayer can be causally efficacious.
(1) Petitionary prayer can beneficially affect the
petitioner herself.

(2) Petitionary prayer can beneficially affect people

who are aware that petitions are being made on
their behalf.

(3) Petitionary prayer affects whether or not God

directly intervenes in the world.'

While I do not intend to downplay the significance of the

first two ways in which a petitionary prayer might be
causally efficacious, it is only the third of these three
senses that presently concerns me.3 Thus, in what
follows, I will leave aside the ways in which petitionary
prayer affects either the one praying or those who are
aware that prayers are being offered on their behalf,
concentrating only on issues related to the third sense of
a prayer's efficaciousness.
Basinger elaborates the third way that prayer can be
causally efficacious as follows: `God has granted us the
power to decide whether to request his assistance and ...
at times the decision we make determines whether we
receive the help desired ... . Divine activity is at times
dependent on our freely offered petitions. '4 According to
Basinger, the heart of the Christian's belief in petitionary
prayer is the belief that `they ask him to bring about
some state of affairs which they believe may not occur
without divine intervention '.5 Peter Geach makes a
similar claim regarding petitionary prayer when he says
that `Christians, who rely on the word of their Master,
are confident that some prayer is impetratory: that God
gives us some things, not only as we wish, but because we
wish.'6 Let us call a petitionary prayer ' impetratory ' if
God's granting of the petition is due, at least in part, to
the petition offered.
Returning to the scenario described above, then, let us
say that Allison's prayer for her father is impetratory if
God keeps him from harm at least in part as a result of
her prayer. As I mentioned above, many theists think
that such situations are relatively common. But let us
slightly change the details of the story. Consider then
the following modified scenario. Allison is watching the
morning news, and learns that a tornado touched down
in western Ohio the previous evening, leaving a path of
devastation and destruction in its wake. The news
anchor reports that seventeen homes were destroyed by
the tornado, and that one individual was killed. Allison's
father lives in the area affected by the storm. As she
runs to the phone to call him, she offers a prayer that he
may not have been the one killed in the tornado. Even
though she knows that the state of affairs she is praying
about is already in the past, and that thus it is already a
fact whether or not her father was killed, Allison thinks
that her prayer might be efficacious in the same way
that prayers for future states of affairs can be.
The difference between Allison's prayer in the original
scenario and her prayer in the modified scenario has to
do with the temporal relationship between the offering
of the prayer and the state of affairs the prayer is aimed
at helping to bring about. The former, or `future-
directed' prayers, are more familiar to us; these are the
sorts of petitions that many religious individuals make
on a regular basis. And most philosophers of religion are
willing to grant that such prayers can be impetratory. 7
But what of prayers similar to the one in the modified
scenario? What are we to make of `past-directed'
prayers in which the prayer is offered at a time later
than the state of affairs it petitions God to bring about?
It is clearly possible for a person to pray such a prayer.
But the question regarding whether such a prayer can
be impetratory still remains. If we take the similarities
between the two scenarios seriously, we might be
tempted to think that both prayers are impetratory.
However, we may be hesitant to think that prayers for
the past can be impetratory for reasons dealing with the
direction of time and causal chains. Can we make sense
of past-direction impetrations without having to
embrace backward causation?
Let us call prayers such as Allison's prayer in the
modified scenario `past-directed impetratory prayers',
or PIPs.8 Such prayers are 'past-directed' insofar as they
are prayers aimed at bringing about a state of affairs
that is already past for the one praying; they will be
impetratory if they contribute to God bringing about the
state of affairs petitioned for. Let us define PIPs as
follows:
PIP = df A petitionary prayer that meets the following
four criteria:
V. the prayer is offered by an agent A at time t2;
VI. the prayer requests that God bring about
some state of affairs S at time t1 (where t1 is
prior to t2) ;
VII.the prayed-for state of affairs S is brought
about by God, at least in part, as a result of
A's prayer; that is, God's knowledge of A's
prayer is one of the reasons He has for
bringing S about; and
VIII. God desires to bring about S only if
A prays for S, such that if A does not pray for
S, then God will not bring it about.9
What is one to make of PIPs? Can such prayers exist?
The first thing to note is that, despite the intuition that
a response needs to follow a request if the response is
to be a result of the request, there is some reason to
think that this intuition is in fact false. If the intuition
were to turn out to be true, then it would be impossible
for PIPs to be efficacious. But is such an intuition really
true? Eleonore Stump, for one, thinks that it is false,
even for human agents. To see this, she asks us to
consider the following example:
If at 3 o'clock, a mother prepares a snack for her little boy
because she believes that when he gets home at 3.3o he will
 ask for one, it does not seem unreasonable to describe her
as preparing the food because of the child's request, even
though in this case the response is earlier than the request."

Later in this paper, I give reason for thinking that mere

belief about the future (even if such belief happens to
be true) is not enough to save the sort of responsiveness
needed for impetratory prayers. However, I think that
the moral of Stump's story can be salvaged if the
mother not only believes that the child will make the
request, but if she also knows that he will." And,
according to many views in philosophical theology,
God does have such knowledge of what free agents
will do.
The second thing to notice is that a PIP is not a
request that God now do something about the past.
The advocate of PIPs need not join Descartes in
thinking that God can change the past once it has
come about.' Rather, past-directed prayers, as I
understand them, are requests for God to have done
something at a time prior to the time of the prayer." As
Gerald Taylor puts the point,
Any present prayer that our son has not drowned must be
interpreted as a prayer that he should not have drowned
two hours earlier if the logical absurdities of changing the
past are to be avoided. When we pray that he has survived
the disaster, what we ask is that our son was not drowned
two hours ago, that he was able to reach a lifeboat, and
perhaps that he is on a lifeboat at this very moment. We do
not ask that God now make our son to have been on a
lifeboat, or now set in motion a chain of events which will
culminate in our son having reached a lifeboat two hours
earlier. For any prayer which asks that something now be
done with respect to the past is necessarily self-
contradictory, and thus incoherent."

What this quotation from Taylor shows us is that PIPs

are not obviously incoherent in the way that one might
initially think But this is not enough to establish the
claim that PIPs are coherent. There may be other
reasons to reject such prayers.
In this paper, I aim to show how certain views in
philosophical theology can intelligibly defend the
existence of PIPs. I am not the first to have done so.
For example, in his treatment of the relationship
between prayer and providence at the end of Miracles,
C. S. Lewis writes:
The event [in question] has already been decided - in a
sense it was decided 'before all worlds'. But one of the
things taken into account in deciding it, and therefore one
of the things that really cause it to happen, may be this very
prayer that we are now offering. Thus, shocking as it may
sound, I conclude that we can now at noon become part
causes of an event occurring at ten o'clock [in the
morning] ... . My free act [of prayer] contributes to the
cosmic shape. That contribution is made in eternity or
'before all worlds '; but my consciousness of contributing
reaches me at a particular point in the time-series.15

I will further show how one's view regarding PIPs

depends on other issues in philosophical theology, namely
the mode of God's knowledge of human free actions and
the related issue of God's relationship to time. It should
be noted that I am in no way commenting on either the
intelligibility or plausibility of the views of God and His
knowledge I deal with below. I am instead interested in
whether these views can make sense of PIPs on their own
terms. Of course, if any of these views are incoherent or
false (as some have claimed), then it does not matter if
they can make sense of PIPs. But the latter, not the
former, is my concern in this paper. However, before I
turn my attention to these matters, I first address a
general objection raised against PIPs that is claimed to
be independent of these issues.
Geach's objection
In God and the Soul, Peter Geach defends the claim
that petitionary prayers can be impetratory. But he does
not think that past-directed prayers can be. He
considers C. S. Lewis's defence of PIPs mentioned
above. Geach correctly captures the thrust of Lewis's
position: 'Lewis argues that God timelessly sees the
whole pattern of events in time and the whole pattern is
subject to God's will: so God can shape an event that
comes earlier to fit in with a prayer that comes later: 16
However, according to Geach, to say of a prayer that
'God brought about situation S because of X's prayer' is
incompatible with the claim that 'God would have
brought about situation S regardless of X's praying or
not praying '.17 As we saw above, to affirm that God
brought about S because of the petition in question is
simply to say that the petition was impetratory. And if S
would not have come about had X not prayed, then it
must be the case, Geach thinks, that S is contingent: `if
we are to be justified in saying that a state of affairs S
came about from somebody's impetratory prayer, then at
the time of the prayer S must have had two-way
contingency: it could come about, it could also not come
about %I-8 So far, so good.
However, Geach immediately continues that `the first
and most obvious conclusion from this is that there can
be no impetratory prayer in regard to things already
past at the time of the prayer '. 16 It looks, then, like
Geach has something of the following sort in mind.
Since S is two-way contingent, that is, it either could
come about or not, it is not possible for the time of S to
be prior to the time of the prayer. But how exactly is
Geach using the notion of `two-way contingency' in this
argument? When Geach first introduces the term, it
sounds as if he might be using it as it is standardly
employed in contemporary metaphysics: a state of
affairs is contingent if and only if it is included in some
possible worlds and precluded by others. But the
contingency of a state of affairs, thus understood, is
unaffected by whether or not that state of affairs has
already been realized. So Geach must have something
else in mind. Perhaps we can infer how he understands
the contingency at issue from what else he says. He
writes, 'It is irrelevant that a past issue was contingent,
if we know that it is now decided and there is no longer
any contingency about it.'"
As I mentioned above, the contingency of a state of
affairs, as standardly understood in terms of possible
worlds, is not affected by its time. If a state of affairs
was contingent, then it remains so. What then does
Geach mean by 'contingent'? I think one can see the
answer to this question by taking seriously the idea
implicit in Geach's statement that there can be a state
of affairs that was contingent but no longer is
contingent. Thus, we might think that a state of affairs
is contingent at a time t only if there is something that
can be done at (or after) t to either bring it about or to
prevent its being brought about. This understanding of
contingency is to be contrasted with what is often
referred to as either accidental necessity, necessity per
accidens or temporal necessity. What Geach needs for
his objection to PIPs, though, is not merely that S, the
prayed for state of affairs, is not necessary in the strict
sense, but also the stronger claim that S must not be
accidentally necessary at the time of the request.
However, if this is what Geach intends, then it hard to
see how he is not merely begging the question against
the possibility of PIPs rather than arguing against their
possibility.21
One might hope for help from Geach's further
comment that 'the contingency of what we may
sensibly pray for arises because it is foolish to try and
obtain by prayer what is either impossible or inevitable
' 22
. The question then becomes whether Geach is using '
impossible ' and ' inevitable ' synonymously. If he is,
then the state of affairs prayed for will be neither,
since, as shown above, the state of affairs will not be
impossible in virtue of its being contingent. On the
other hand, if Geach does think there is a difference
between the two, it is hard to figure out what it is.
Consider an analogous case regarding the future. He
cannot mean inevitable to be that 'whatever will
happen will happen', since that is tautologically true
and of no help to his argument. Even if whatever will
happen will happen, this does not mean that whatever
will happen must happen. Likewise, to say of the past
that it is inevitable is only to say that the past is what it
is, not that it must have been the way it is. Thus, I
conclude that Geach's objection to PIPs fails. There is
no reason at this point to think that PIPs are
impossible. Of course, not having a reason to think
something impossible does not entail that it is possible.
In the following sections, I try to show how PIPs are
possible according to various views regarding God's
knowledge and His relation to the world.
Simple foreknowledge
Let us start with what I take to be the easiest
case. One view in philosophical theology holds that
God is a temporal being and necessarily has complete
and infallible foreknowledge of all future events,
including the actions of free agents, and that He uses
this knowledge to exercise His providential control
over creation. Let us call this the ' simple-
foreknowledge ' view.23 So, for example, God knows at
1.1 that Allison will freely do some action at t2 (where t2
is later than t,), such as decide to adopt a puppy from
the animal shelter.24 According to the simple-
foreknowledge view, it is in virtue of what Allison will
do at t2 that God has true beliefs prior to t 2 about
Allison and her action at t2.
If this is the case, then it is easy to see how the simple-
foreknowledge view can account for PIPs. Suppose that
Allison prays at time t2 that God bring about some state
of affairs S at time t1. As we saw before, this need not be
understood as supposing that God, at t2, brings it about
that S occurred at an earlier time t1, which would require
genuine backward causation. Rather, the defender of
PIPs can grant that the past is now unalterable if we
understand the situation as one in which God knows at or
prior to t1, via His foreknowledge, that Allison will make
the petition in question at t2 and, on the basis of this
knowledge, decides to intervene in the world and bring
about S at t1. As Geoffrey Brown notes,
Causation is, of course, normally understood as a transitive
relation, and so it is true that in this case P at t was a case
of S at t,. But the way in which this is brought about (via the
foreknowledge of God) is such that, provided we can accept
the credibility of divine foreknowledge, there is less oddity
in this account than in one which introduces ' direct'
backward causation.25

If agents like Allison have libertarian freedom and God

has foreknowledge of their free actions, then agents like
Allison have counterfactual power over God's beliefs.
Suppose again that Allison does some action A at t 2. As
we have seen, according to the simple-foreknowledge
view, God knows at t1 that Allison will do A at t2. But what
if, contrary to our assumption, Allison does not do A at t2?
In such a scenario, it is not the case that Allison at t 2
would have caused God to have a false belief at t1. This
would be impossible, for if God is essentially omniscient,
as the proponents of the simple-foreknowledge view
traditionally assume, then God cannot have false beliefs.
Rather, Allison would have caused God to have (at t1)
different beliefs than He actually had (again, at t1). Given
her libertarian freedom, Allison could have done
something such that, had she done it, God would have
had different beliefs than He actually did have.26 Insofar
as the proponent of the simple-foreknowledge view is
committed to free agents having counterfactual power
over certain of God's beliefs, she can use this power to
explain the efficacy of PIPs.27
However, even granting counterfactual power over
God's beliefs, there may be a worry lurking nearby. 28 Let
us assume that state of affairs S obtained at t1. If Allison
does not pray at t2 that God bring about S, then S cannot
be the result of God granting Allison's prayer. But if God
knows at t1 that Allison will offer the prayer in question,
is Allison's future prayer impetratory? One might think
that, since S has already obtained, it does not matter
whether or not Allison offers the prayer. This, however,
does not necessarily follow. Since we are assuming that
God has foreknowledge of what Allison will do at t2,
whether her prayer will be impetratory given that S
obtained at t1 depends on whether the following
conditional is true:
(4) If it was not the case that Allison would offer the
prayer at t2, then God would not have brought about
S at T1.
If (4) is false, and God would have brought about S
regardless of what Allison will do at t2, then even if she
does offer the prayer, it fails to satisfy criterion (iv) of
PIPs given above. In such a case, Allison's prayer is
indeed irrelevant to the obtaining of S. However, on the
other hand, if (4) is true, then God only brought about S
because of what Allison would do in the future, and her
prayer could still be impetratory. Like her counterfactual
power over God's beliefs, if we assume that S has
already obtained, Allison has counterfactual power over
whether God brings about S because of her impetratory
prayer or for another reason. But her having this
additional sort of counterfactual power is no more
objectionable than the type of counterfactual power
required for the simple-foreknowledge view to be true in
the first place.
 This presentation of the simple-foreknowledge view is
brief and incomplete, and I have not attempted to defend
the view from various objections that have been raised to
it in the literature. What I have shown is how this view, if
coherent, can explain the efficacy of PIPs. If God has
foreknowledge of free agents' future actions, then one
can defend the claim that God brought about a state of
affairs in the past relative to the petitioner partly as a
result of her petition.
Eternalism
The second position in philosophical theology I
want to consider is what I will call `eternalism'. Unlike
the simple-foreknowledge view, which asserts that God
is a temporal being, the hallmark of eternalism is the
claim that God is an atemporal being, outside of time as
well as space. Eternalism is the view implicit in C. S.
Lewis's discussion of PIPs mentioned earlier. Speaking
of God, Lewis writes that 'To Him all the physical events
and all the human acts are present in an eternal Now'. 29
Classically defended by, among others, Boethius and
Aquinas, eternalism holds that God has `the complete
possession all at once of illimitable life '.30 Since an
eternal entity is atemporal, there is no past or future
within the life of such an entity; nor can any temporal
event or entity be past or future with respect to such a
life. Nevertheless, an eternal being can have knowledge
of temporal entities. As Aquinas puts the point, 'God's
vision is measured by eternity, which is all at once;
consequently, all times and everything done in them is
subject to his sight. '31- For this reason, Aquinas claims
that God knows things that for us are future in the same
way that He knows things that for us are past: both are
equally present to God in his eternity. 'From the stand-
point of eternity, every time is present, co-occurrent
with the whole of infinite atemporal duration. '32 While a
full treatment of eternalism is beyond the scope of the
present paper, there is one objection to eternalism that,
if sound, would render prayer to an atemporal, and thus
simple, God irrelevant.
One might think that if God is atemporal, then it is
impossible for Him to interact with temporal entities.
But if it is impossible for God to interact with temporal
entities, then God cannot respond to a petitionary
prayer made by a temporal entity. Eleonore Stump, in
her insightful article on petitionary prayer, considers
this sort of objection in a particularly poignant way:
Before a certain petitionary prayer is made, it is the case
either that God will bring about the state of affairs
requested in the prayer or that he will not bring it about.
He cannot have left the matter open since doing so would
imply a subsequent change in him and he is immutable.
Either way, since he is immutable, the prayer itself can
effect no change in the state of affairs and hence is
pointless."

Walter Wink raises the same objection in this manner:

Before that unchangeable God, whose whole will was fixed
from all eternity, intercession is ridiculous. There is no
place for intercession with a God whose will is incapable of
change. What Christians have too long worshiped is the
God of Stoicism, to whose immutable will we can only
surrender ourselves, conforming our wills to the
unchangeable will of deity."

If this objection holds, then the eternity and

subsequent immutability of God would entail that God
cannot respond to petitionary prayers. Defenders of
eternalism, however, think that this sort of objection to
their view misses the mark. Aquinas, for example,
clearly held that God was both atemporal and simple,
yet maintained that not all petitionary prayer is done
in vain," and Stump has discussed the flaw in this
objection at length.36
Assuming then that the defender of eternalism is
correct that it is possible for an eternal and simple
God to respond to temporal beings, eternalism can
also account for PIPs. Consider a scenario
characterized as follows:

VIII. Allison prays at t2 that God bring about

state of affairs S at time t1.
IX. God is eternal is the ways described above.
X. God is nevertheless able to respond to
prayers offered by temporal agents.
XI. In this case, God is both willing and able to
bring about S at time t1, and does so in
response to Allison's prayer at t2.37
 XII. Had Allison not prayed at t2, God would not have
brought about S at t1.
(ii) and (iii) will be true if eternalism is true and if the
position has the resources to respond to the objection
raised earlier. (iv) and (v) are possibly true if there are
impetratory prayers, and will be true if the prayer at
issue is, in fact, an impetratory prayer. Like me here
stipulate that (iv) and (v), as well as (i), are true. It
seems that (i) through (v) jointly establish that Allison
has impetrated an eternal and simple God. But, if this is
the case, notice that these five characterizations say
nothing about the temporal relationship between t 2 (the
time of Allison's prayer) and t1 (the time of the prayed-
for state of affairs). While t2 could be prior to t1 (with the
implication that the prayer is a future-directed
impetration), on the assumption of divine eternity, no
contradiction or absurdity is introduced by the
temporal priority of ti over t2. As with the simple-
foreknowledge view, eternalism can account for the
efficacy of PIPs.
Molinism
The next position in philosophical theology to
consider is Molinism. Molinism has been the subject of
much scholarship in the philosophy of religion in the
past few decades. Molinism, most generally, is an
attempt to explain how it is that God can retain
providential control over a creation that contains liber-
tarian free agents. So, for example, suppose that God, as
part of His providential plan, wants Allison to perform a
particular action, X. If Allison is free in the way
described by libertarians, then how can God make sure
that she freely does X? According to Molinists, the
answer is found in God's middle knowledge (scientia
media), more specifically in His knowledge of
counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, or CCFs. A CCF
is a statement about what a free creature would freely
do in a particular situation, such as the following:
(5) If in circumstance C, Allison will freely do
action X.
So in order to be assured that Allison will freely do X,
God must simply make sure that she is in circumstance
C. It is via this knowledge of true CCFs that Molinists
explain the compatibility of creaturely freedom and
divine governance. God can ensure that Allison does X
without violating her freedom by seeing to it that she
finds herself in C.
With this overview of Molinism in mind, it should be
apparent how the Molinist will account for petitionary
prayers for the past. Thomas P. Flint develops a Molinist
account of PIPs in his book Divine Providence. Flint
claims there that prayers for past events are defensible
because the counterfactuals based upon them are
eternally true (or false) and known to God via His middle
knowledge. Modifying Flint's example to accord with the
case of Allison used in this paper, consider Allison's
situation when she hears the news report of the tornado
near her father's house the night before. Allison is
uncertain whether her father was hurt, or even killed, by
the tornado. Let us again call the state of affairs that is
Allison's father being unhurt by the tornado, S. Let us
further assume that S obtains, that is, that her father
was not hurt in the storm. And while there are many
factors that might influence Allison's decision to pray for
her father - such as her love for him, her desire to spend
the next holiday with him - if Allison is in fact uncertain
as to his current health, then it cannot be among her
motivations for praying. In other words, even if S had not
obtained, there is no reason to think that her decision to
pray would have been any different.
It looks then like some parts of the circumstances
Allison finds herself in are relevant to her decision to
pray for her father's safety, while others are not. Let us
call those parts of the circumstances that are
counterfactually relevant to Allison's decision to pray, R.
R will include, among other things, her belief in a God
that listens and responds to prayers, her love for her
father, etc. Members of R are those parts of the
circumstances that `it is reasonable to think that her
activity wouldn't have been exactly the same had they
not been present'.38 Let us call those parts of the
circumstances that are not counterfactually relevant to
Allison's free decision, T. Members of T might include the
fact that Allison is currently wearing a green striped
shirt, or the fact that her dog is currently sleeping on her
bed, or the fact that Franklin Pierce was the fourteenth
president of the United States. T will include lots of
states of affairs. But on the assumption that Allison is
unaware that her father is currently safe, that is, that she
is unaware of S, presumably S will also be a member of T,
rather than R.
The conjunction of R and T is then the complete
circumstance in which Allison finds herself. Let us
assume that in this complete circumstance, Allison
decides to pray for the safety of her father. In other
words, let us assume that the following CCF is true:
(6) [(Allison is in R) and T] —> Allison prays for the
safety of her father.
Since the conjunction of R and T is the complete
circumstance Allison is in, (6) is a CCF and, if true, would
be know by God via His middle knowledge. If, as we
assumed above, T includes all those circumstances that
make no difference to her decision to pray, the following
condition will also be true:
(7) [(Allison is in R) and —T] —Allison prays for the
safety of her father.
Like (6), (7) is also an element of God's middle
knowledge. (6) and (7) together entail:
(8) (Allison is in R) —> Allison prays for the safety of
her father.
Since (8) is a contingent truth entailed by two elements
of God's middle knowledge, it too is something that God
knows via His middle knowledge. Thus,
(9) [(Allison is in R) —> Allison prays for the safety
of her father] => God has middle knowledge
that [(Allison is in R) —> Allison prays for the
safety of her father].
But (8) also entails that
(m) (Allison is in R) —> [(Allison is in R) —>
Allison prays for the safety of her father].
(9) and (10) together entail that:
 (1) Allison prays in R —> [God has middle
knowledge that (Allison is in R —> Allison
prays for the safety of her father)].
In other words, if it is in fact true, as we have been
assuming, that Allison prays in R, then God knows via
His middle knowledge that she would so pray if in R.
And if God has such knowledge, then assuming that
He knows that Allison will be in R, He can use that
knowledge of the true counterfactual expressed by
(10) to bring about the safety of Allison's father as a
result of her future prayer."
Openism
The final position I want to consider is called
`open theism' or open-ism '. 40 As others have noted,
however, this is a very misleading title because
perhaps the most distinctive tenet of the view is not a
claim directly about either God or His attributes, but
rather about the existence or nonexistence of certain
true propositions." The view is not the claim, as some
of its opponents would suggest, that there are truths
that God does not know, such as what Allison will do
fifty years from now. Rather, the view is a claim that
neither of the following propositions is now true:
(12) Allison will freely do A fifty years from
now.
(13) Allison will freely refrain from doing A
fifty years from now (either by doing something
other than A or by doing nothing at all).
If neither of these propositions is now true, then it is not
a limitation of God's omniscience to say that He does
not know which one is true, much in the same way that
it is not a limitation of God's omnipotence that He
cannot do something that is logically impossible to do
(again, Descartes' view notwithstanding). As such, the
view presently under consideration is a view about what
there is to be known; the view is thus compatible with
the traditional understanding of omniscience according
to which God knows all and only true propositions.
According to openism, God is a temporal being and
knows at a particular time, via His omniscience, all and
only the propositions that are true at that time. Let us
say that a presently contingent future proposition is a
proposition about the future whose truth-value is not
determined by any presently existing objects, states of
affairs, or events. Cases of agents' free actions in the
future will be examples of such presently contingent
future propositions." Since presently contingent future
propositions do not now have a determinate truth-value,
such propositions are not among the objects of God's
knowledge.
How does one understand petitionary prayers on the
model of openism? That agents like Allison are
presently maldng petitions, or have made petitions in
the past, is something that God can know and use in
His providential control of the world. So some prayers
could be impetratory. But what of PIPs ? Along the lines
of openism, Terence Peneihum suggests perhaps past-
oriented prayers can be impetratory:
In giving men freedom of choice, God makes it genuinely
uncertain what they will do, and in consequence (since
men's actions are uncertain before they happen) even He
does not know what their actions will be before they do
them. Yet the fact that Jones's doing A rather than B is
never certain before it happens does not show that his
doing A is no more likely than his doing B before it
happens. If this is true, there is nothing absurd about the
suggestion that the laws of nature incorporate answers to
likely prayers. And since it seems necessarily true that
more likely things happen than unlikely ones, we have a
good reason for expecting that a majority of likely prayers
will in fact be offered and can thus be provided for.43

Penelhum, like the openist, thinks that the most God can
know of future actions is the probability of their
occurrence." Furthermore, Penelhum thinks that this
knowledge is sufficient for God to be responsive to
prayers. Unfortunately such a suggestion will not work
for an account of past-directed prayers.
Consider the case that God knows at t1 that it is likely
that Allison will pray at t2 for God to bring about a state
of affairs, S. Let us further suppose that God does bring
about S at 1-1. On the chance (no matter how miniscule)
that Allison does not make the petition at t2, then God
could not have brought about S, even in part, because of
Allison's prayer, since there is no such prayer.
Furthermore, even if Allison does make the petition in
question, God could not have brought about S, even in
part, because of her petition at t2, because prior to t2
there was no fact of the matter about what she would do
at t2, and condition (iii) of the definition of PIPs is
violated.
Thus, if God is a temporal being, and if one rejects God
having foreknowledge of the future (either through
having simple foreknowledge or through the conjunction
of His middle knowledge and creative act) as the openist
does, then it appears that one cannot defend the efficacy
of PIPs. The most that can be said is that God brings
about state of affairs S because of His belief that an
agent might or probably or in all likelihood will pray at
some point in the future that God bring S about. Insofar
as this fails to meet the definition of PIPs given above,
openism cannot account for the efficacy of past-directed
impetratory prayers.
A further implication

Gerald Taylor objects to a defence of PIPs given

by Michael Dummett as follows :
The problem which Dummett faces is that he is unable to
explain how the casual efficacy of a present retrospective
prayer becomes located in the past ... . On Dummett's
analysis, we must simply accept, without any hope of
explanation, the fact that the causal efficacy of a present
retrospective prayer is located in the past."

I have argued in the previous pages that a number of

views in philosophical theology can account for PIPs,
and have shown how such prayer can be causally
efficacious in a way that presumably Taylor thinks
Dummett has not. Whether a view can account for such
prayers depends on its understanding of God's
knowledge of free actions, which in turn is related to
God's relationship to time.
Such a conclusion will, no doubt, strike many as
peculiar. Nevertheless, I think that the above
discussion is also suggestive of what many will take to
be an even more startling claim. Most defenders of
PIPs restrict PIPs to cases where the praying agent
does not know what the outcome of the state in
question is. That is, Allison does not know at time t 2
(the time of the prayer) whether or not S obtained
earlier at t1. Eleonore Stump, for example, only wants
to consider PIPs where the praying agent does not
know whether God has already brought about the
state of affairs in question.46 Similarly, Flint writes that
'where we are genuinely unsure whether the prayed-
for event occurs, though, praying often seems
appropriate, whether the event be in the future or in
the past ... . Of course, were we certain concerning the
occurrence of the past event in question, things might
be different.'47 But it seems to me that the above
discussion gives us reason to question this limitation.
Might it not be possible for a prayer for the past to be
efficacious in whatever way petitionary prayers are
even if the agent knows that the outcome for which
she is praying has already happened? Can Allison's
prayer for her father only be efficacious if she does not
know whether he was hurt or not? What if she instead
already knows his status?
There is clearly one sense in which it does not make
sense to pray for the past if one already knows how it
turned out: cases where one knows that the desired
state of affairs has not obtained. C. S. Lewis
approached this topic in this way:
If we can reasonably pray for an event which must in fact
have happened or failed to happen several hours ago, why
can we not pray for an event which we know not to have
happened? e.g. pray for the safety of someone who, as we
know, was killed yesterday. What makes the difference is
precisely our knowledge. The known event states God's will.
It is psychologically impossible to pray for what we know to
be unobtainable; and if it were possible the prayer would sin
against the duty of submission to God's known will.48

I am less certain than Lewis is as to what is

`psychologically impossible' for us to do. Such a prayer
would definitely be irrational (though, I would note, we
do lots of irrational things). Stump has similarly
described such a prayer as absurd: `It is obviously
absurd to pray in 1980 that Napoleon win at Waterloo
when one knows what God does not bring about at
Waterloo:46 Regardless of whether it is possible for an
agent to make such a prayer, what is clear to me is that
it is not possible for such a prayer to be impetratory.
Consider the following situation: at t2, Allison is
deliberating whether to petition God to bring about
some state of affairs SA at t1. If Allison knows that S did
not obtain, then she should also know that her prayer
for S, should she decide to make it, cannot be
impetratory. If God does not bring about S, then a
fortiori He did not bring about S as a result of Allison's
prayer. So a prayer for a previous state of affairs S
cannot be impetratory if one knows that S did not
obtain.
But what about cases where the state of affairs Allison
is considering petitioning for ' tracks ', so to speak, what
she knows already occurred? Can Allison's prayer that
God bring about S help bring about S even if she knows
that S already happened? Again, Stump suggests that
such a prayer would be absurd: 'The only appropriate
version of that prayer is "Let Napoleon have lost at
Waterloo ", and for one who knows the outcome of the
battle more that a hundred and fifty years ago, that
prayer is pointless and in that sense absurd: 5° Stump, I
believe, is mistaken here. Why think that a prayer that
otherwise would have not been pointless is made to be
so simply by the addition of the praying subject's
knowledge that the result was already granted?
To see that such a prayer could be impetratory,
consider again the simple-foreknowledge view. Assume
that Allison will pray at t2 that her father be spared from
the tornado at t1. Given His omniscience, God knows this
prior to t2 and can thus bring about the safety of her
father at t1. So long as Allison prays that God bring
about S, and God is able and willing to bring about S,
then it does not matter whether or not Allison already
knows that S obtained (that is, so long as what God
foreknows is that Allison will pray for S even though she
already knows that S obtained). And a similar conclusion
will be reached on both eternalism and Molinism.0 So it
looks like a past-directed prayer can be efficacious even
if the one praying knows that the prayed-for state of
affairs has already obtained. This is a stronger, and more
counterintuitive, conclusion that has been reached by
other defenders of PIPs.
At this point, one might object that if the praying
subject knows the desired result has already obtained,
then she no longer has any motivation for offering the
prayer." Suppose that Allison knows that her father was
not hurt or killed in the tornado. She might think to
herself, 'Wait, even if I don't pray, my father will be safe
from the tornado - God's not going to change the past
because I don't pray. My prayer is clearly not needed on
this score. And given that, it would be more worthwhile
for me to do something else with my time, such as pray
for something else, or just thank God for bringing it
about he is safe.'
I agree with the objector that Allison's not praying that
God protect her father will not cause it to be the case
that her father is hurt (since he already was not, in fact,
injured). It is further true that knowing that her father is
safe might undercut Allison's motivation to pray that
God keep her father safe. But this does not mean that
such a prayer, if offered, cannot be impetratory. There is
no reason to think that God cannot answer a petitionary
prayer that is offered by an individual who does not have
sufficient motivation for making that prayer. If Allison
has reason to believe that God is the sort of deity who
responds to petitionary prayers and that it is good for
her to make such prayers, then she may have reason for
offering a prayer for a state of affairs that she knows has
already obtained. And, as we have seen above, there is
reason to think that, on certain views in philosophical
theology, such prayers can actually be efficacious."

Endnotes
1. It is not my intention in this paper to defend the claim that petitionary prayers are
efficacious. Since my concern is with whether prayers about the past can be efficacious in
the same way that prayers for the future are, I simply assume here that some petitionary
prayers are efficacious. I am also not addressing why God might require prayer in order to
intervene when it seems that He could intervene apart from the petition.
2. David Basinger The Case for Free Will Theism (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 105f.
3. In a previous paper, I criticized accounts of prayer according to which petitionary prayer is
efficacious in only the first two senses. See Kevin Timpe 'Toward a process philosophy of
petitionary prayer', Theology & Philosophy, 12 (2000), 397-418.
4. Basinger The Case for Free Will Theism, 106,108.
5. Idem 'Why petition an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God?', Religious Studies, 19
(1983), 25-42, 25. Petitionary prayers will differ from other merely necessary causal factors in
that prayers, as a free action of agents possessing libertarian freedom, are beyond the direct
control of God, whereas presumably the other necessary causal factors are not.
6. Peter Geach God and the Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 87. Furthermore, as Geach
notes, 'to say that God brought something about because of a man's prayers is not at all to say
that, once the prayer had been said, God could not but grant them'; ibid.
7. Where they differ is how such prayers are causally efficacious.
8. Geach calls such prayers ' ex post facto' prayers (Geach God and the Soul, 90), and Michael
Dummett calls then 'retrospective prayers' in 'Bringing about the past', The Philosophical
Review, 73 (1664), 338-359.
9. This later clause means that overdetermined and necessary state of affairs cannot be the
results of PIPS. Furthermore, God's desire to bring about certain states of affairs only as the
result of petitions will be closely connected with His reasons for responding to petitionary
prayers in the first place.
10. Eleonore Stump Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 154.
11. If Stump does have knowledge, rather than mere belief, in mind here, then there may be
an inconsistency between this illustration and what I say later about openism, for openism
denies that anyone can have knowledge of what agents will freely do in the future. But I think
that there is good reason to think that the mother does not have knowledge in such a case.
Insofar as the mother is not an omniscient agent, it is extremely plausible that her belief will be
the same regardless of whether the child actually does make the request. If he does not, then
her belief will not track the truth. But if she has the same belief whether or not he makes the
request, then even in the case where he does make the request, her belief will not track the
truth in the way required for knowledge.
12. Geoffrey Goddu has recently argued that it is logically possible that we can
change the past. See his 'Time travel and changing the past: (or how to kill yourself
and live to tell the tale)', Ratio, 16 (2003), 16-32.
13. For a discussion of this point and its relation to causation, see Gerald Gilmore
Taylor 'Dummett on retrospective prayer', Franciscan Studies, 50 (1990), 309-323.
14. Ibid., 319. I should state that I, unlike Taylor here, am not willing to say that backward
causation is 'necessarily self-contradictory'. I do not here defend the claim that backward
causation is possible; rather what I want to defend in this paper is the weaker claim that
PIPS can be explained without the need for backward causation. Of course, if backward
causation is possible, then it would provide another way of understanding PIPS.
15. C. S. Lewis Miracles (New York NY: Collier Books, 1947),179f. I return to the
conception of eternity that Lewis's defence of PIPS presupposes in a later section.
16. Geach God and the Soul, 90. Part of Geach's objection is to Lewis's endorsement of
the doctrine of divine eternity. For a defence of the doctrine of divine timelessness that
shows where Geach's objection is mistaken, see Eleonore Stump Aquinas, particularly
ch. 4.
17. Geach God and the Soul, 88.
18. Ibid., 89.
19. Ibid., 89.
20. Ibid., 93f.
21. Geoffrey Brown has independently come to a similar criticism of
Geach: 'If he is not denying contingency, in the ordinary sense, to past
states of affairs, but only means that there is nothing which can now
be done which can form part of their causal nexus, then the argument
boils down to no more than a flat denial of what Lewis is affirming [i.e.
the possibility of PIPs]. What looked like a premise supporting the
negation of Lewis's thesis now appears as a mere unsupported
contradiction of that thesis. Geach is (trivially) correct in holding that
a prayer can only be a cause of a state of affairs if it is uttered in
circumstances which permit it to enter into a causal nexus of that
event: but what those circumstances are is precisely the point of
disagreement ... . One is tempted to think [as Geach apparently does
that] "If God has already made up his mind and acted, then it makes
no difference whether I pray now or not". But this ignores the very
point at issue: that on Lewis's view, God's mind has been made up
taking into account what I am about to do - I may not know this yet
myself, but God does, and always did'; Geoffrey Brown 'Praying about
the past', The Philosophical Quarterly, 39 (1985), 83-86, 84. Despite
my general agreement with Brown's evaluation of Geach's argument,
my treatment of PIPs differs from his in two ways. First, whereas
 Brown discusses PIPs from only one theological perspective, in the
present paper I relate such prayers to a number of philosophical
positions. Second, at the end of the present paper I show how my
account of PIPs has a stronger conclusion than that reached by Brown.
22. Geach God and the Soul, 94.
23. The simple-foreknowledge view should be distinguished from the
stronger claim that it is in virtue of God's knowledge that free
agents like Allison do what they do, that is, that God's knowledge
causes Allison's actions. It is hard to see on this stronger view, often
called 'theological determinism', or 'Augustianism,' how an agent
could be free in a libertarian sense.
24. In this paper, I intend to remain agnostic about how God knows
what He knows, though I will speak at times in terms of God knowing
propositions to be true. For an argument that God has de rebut not de
dicto knowledge, see William Alston 'Does God have beliefs?', in idem
Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical
Theology (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 178-193. For an
argument that God has de dicto as well as de re knowledge, see
William Hasker 'Yes, God has beliefs!', Religious Studies, zi. (1988),
385-394.
25. Brown 'Praying about the past', 85.
26. See George Mavrodes ' Prayer', in E. Craig (ed.) Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000),
http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/Ko7oSECT2: 'The divine
foreknowledge may anticipate human action in the order of time, but it
cannot substitute for that action, in the sense of making it irrelevant
whether the action is actually done. For if the action were not done,
then the divine knowledge would have been different from what it
actually was. This applies to prayer as much as to anything else.'
27. The debate regarding the hard fact/soft fact distinction is also
relevant here, as the simple foreknowledge view depends upon free
agents having the type of counterfactual power over God's beliefs that is
typical of soft facts. If one sides with the opponents of the hard fact/soft
fact distinction and thinks that counterfactual power over God's beliefs
involves backward causation, then one is likely to belief that the simple
foreknowledge view requires backward causation to affirm the efficacy
of PIPs.
I believe that one can maintain the hard fact/soft fact distinction,
though I do not argue for that conclusion here. For a recent argument
against counterfactual power over God's beliefs, see Alan G. Padgett
'Divine foreknowledge and the arrow of time: on the impossibility of
retrocausation', in G. Ganssle and D. Woodruff (eds) God and Time:
Essays on the Divine Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
65-74.
28. An anonymous referee for Religious Studies suggested this worry.
29. Lewis Miracles,177•
30. Boethius 'The consolation of philosophy', in H. Stewart, E. Rand,
and S. Tester (eds) The Theological Tractates and The Consolation
of Philosophy (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1973), 422.5-424.21.
31. Thomas Aquinas Disputed Questions on Truth, J. McGlynn (tr.)
(Chicago IL: H. Regnery Co., 1952), q. 12.6.
32. Stump Aquinas, 143.
33. Idem ' Petitionary prayer', in E. Stump and M. Murray (eds)
Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions (Malden MA: Blackwell
Publishers, 1999), 358.
34. Walter Wink Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of
Domination (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 301.
 35.Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae, Fathers of the English Dominican Province (tr.), la, Ilae,
q. 83.
36.Stump Aquinas, ii5ff.
37.Note that God is bringing it about that S occurs at t1, not that God is bringing it about at ti that S
occurs. Since, according to (ii) God is atemporal, it does not make sense to say that one of God's
actions occurs at a time; rather, it is accurate to say that the one of the effects of God's eternal
and timeless act of willing occurs at a time.
38.Thomas P. Flint Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press,
1998), 245.
39. God could either ensure that Allison finds herself in R by weakly actualizing R
via His knowledge of other CCFs, or by strongly actualizing R.
4o. Gregory A. Boyd's Satan and Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare
Theodicy (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 20m) is a very interesting and
thorough, though philosophically inconsistent, defence of one openist's view.
41.Two other central tenets of openism are the belief that humans (and perhaps other agents)
have libertarian free will, and the belief that God is also a temporal being (contra eternalism).
However, insofar as these other tenets are also thought true by one of more of the other
positions canvassed here, I take the tenet about the extension of truth to be the primary
demarcation of openism.
42.There will also be presently contingent future propositions that do not involve the action of
free agents. Propositions dealing with whether particular atoms of a radioactive isotope will
degrade at a particular time in the future are also examples of presently contingent future
propositions. According to openism, God does not know the truth-value of any presently
contingent future proposition (since they do not now have a truth-value to be known), and not
just those regarding free human actions.
43. Terence Penelhum Religion and Rationality (New York NY: Random House, 1971),
as quoted in Robert Young 'Petitioning God', American Philosophical Quarterly, n
(1974), zoo.
44. It is for this reason that Penelhum and openism differ from the example given
from Stump in the first section of this paper.
45.Taylor 'Dummett on retrospective prayer', 32o.
46.Stump 'Petitionary prayer', 365, n. 1.
47.Flint Divine Providence, 23o.
48.Lewis Miracles, 180.
49. Stump
Aquinas, 5o5, n.
78. 5o. Ibid.
51.Actually, the Molinist account of PIPS given above will need to be reworked, since the
presentation given there assumes ignorance (i.e. it assumes that Allison's knowledge
belongs to T rather than R). I think that a Molinist account of PIPS can be worked out
even if the agent's knowledge regarding S belongs to R rather than T, though I will leave it
to the reader to reconstruct the counterfactuals involved.
52. Various versions of this objection have been raised by Mike Murray, Mike Rota,
Matt Zwolinski, and an anonymous referee for Religious Studies.
53.I would like to thank Mike Murray, Mike Rota, Lincoln Stevens, and two anonymous referees
for Religious Studies who provided valuable comments and criticisms on earlier versions of
this paper. A preliminary draft was read to the Philosophy Department at the University of
San Diego, where I benefited from many insightful questions. The writing of this paper was
made possible by a fellowship from the Center for the Philosophy of Religion at the University
of Notre Dame.
 Response to a Statistical
Study of the Effect of
Petitionary Prayer
*This response to the Benson study was first
published (in a more-or-less identical form) in
Science and Theology News, 7 April 2006,
http://www.stnews.org/Commentary-2772.htm.

[A large-scale statistical study purporting to show

whether petitionary prayer for recovery from illness
has any effect, the 'Benson study' was published in
April 2006. Patients who had had coronary artery
bypass graft surgery at 6 US hospitals were
randomly assigned to one of three patient
groups.One patient group received intercessory
prayer (for an uncomplicated recovery) after being
informed that they may or may not receive prayer;
one patient group did not receive prayer after being
so informed; and one patient group received prayer
after being informed that they would receive prayer.
Individuals were prayed for by their first names only,
and their identity was not known to those praying.
Those praying belonged to one of three Christian
groups. Compications occurred to 52 per cent of the
first patient group, to 51 per cent of the second
group, and to 59 per cent of the third group. The
virtually identical figures for the first and second
group, both of whom were uncertain whether they
would receive prayer, was regarded as a 'negative
result' showing that intercessory prayer has no
effect. (The figure for the third group was regarded
as a statistical freak.) ]

Humans pray to God for many and various

outcomes, good and bad; but among the most
frequent petitionary prayers are surely prayers for
the recovery of someone else from illness. But, as
everyone knows, most illnesses follow a (statistically)
largely predictable course, apparently independently
of this stream of prayer. Theodicy provides good
explanations of why God sometimes (for some or all
of the short period of our earthly lives ) allows us to
suffer pain and disability.
Although they are intrinsically bad states, pain and disability often
serve good purposes for the sufferer and for others. My suffering
provides me with the opportunity to show courage and patience. It
provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and help to
alleviate my suffering. And it provides society with the opportunity to
choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure
for the particular kind of suffering. A good God gives us a deep
responsibility for ourselves, each other, and the world (for whether and
how we flourish); and the free choice of how to exercise that
responsibility. And it is very good for us to have this responsibility.
Although of course a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest
concern is surely that each of us shall show patience sympathy, and
generosity, and thereby form a holy character. Some people badly
NEED to be ill for their own sake; and some people badly need to be ill in
order to provide important choices for others. Only so can some people
be encouraged to take serious choices about the sort of person they are
to be. For other people,illness is not so valuable.

But it is a Christian doctrine that God hears our

prayers, and answers them (if it is good for us) in a
way best for us. Yet when we pray for another
person, God knows far better than we do whether it
will be best for that person and others affected by
him, that he should recover immediately or later or
not at all. Many Christians are aware of this when
they pray for those in need that God would answer
the prayer 'as may be most expedient for them; and
a well-known prayer adds to this the clause 'granting
them in this world knowledge of thy truth, and in the
world to come life everlasting'. No sign of all that in
the secular orientation of the prayer used by those
praying in the Benson study 'for a successful surgery
with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications'!
God seeks better goals for all of us; and may well
provide them for those prayed for despite the
poverty of the petitionary prayer. After all, Christians
believe that the salvation of the world was brought
about partly by God's failure to answer the prayer of
his Son in the Garden of Gethsemane, 'Father, if you
are willing, remove this cup from me' (Luke 22:42).
( The cup was that is of the Crucifixion.)

But, that point having been made, a quick healthy

recovery without complications is clearly as such a
good thing, even if there are better things; and if the
former can be provided without loss of the latter,
God would surely provide it anyway, whether we
pray or not. So what is the point of petitionary
prayer? The answer must be that sometimes,
perhaps often, it is equally good that what we should
pray for should occur as it should not occur; and that
God wants to interact with us by answering our
requests, so long as we ask for a right reason. God
surely wants to do for the person praying what that
person wants just because that person wants it for a
right reason. One right reason is that he prays for a
particular sufferer out of love and compassion for
that sufferer. In the Benson prayer study, the people
praying were NOT praying out of love and
compassion for the particular sufferer for whom they
were praying- they did not even know who that
sufferer was.

Although the form of their prayer might

(dishonestly) suggest that they wanted the well-
being of the patient for its own sake, that was not
why they were praying. They were praying in order
to test a scientific hypothesis. Why should a good
God pay any attention to these prayers?(You might
say: in order to show us more evidentially that he
exists. But if there is a God, he does not need to
answer such prayers in order to do this - if he wanted
to do so, he could fill the world with super-miracles.
But there is quite a lot of evidence anyway of God's
existence, and too much might not be good for us.)
The negative result of the Benson study is entirely
predictable on the hypothesis of a loving God who
sometimes answers prayers of genuine compassion.

That what I have written is not an ad hoc

hypothesis postulated to save theism from
disconfirmation, can be seen by an analogy. Suppose
that I am a rich man who sometimes gives sums of
money to worthy causes, and that I am very well
informed and I know just how useful (or not) different
gifts would be. I receive many letters asking me to
give such gifts. Some foundation wants to know if
there is any point in people writing such letters to
me - do they make any difference to whether I give
money to this cause or that? So the foundation
commissions a study. Many people are enrolled to
write letters to me on behalf of several causes rather
than others in order to see whether subsequently I
give more to those causes rather than to the other
causes. In fact, let us suppose, I am normally moved
by such letters; I think that the fact that many
people take the trouble to write to me on behalf of
some cause about which they care a lot is a reason
for giving to that cause. But I now discover why I am
suddenly bombarded with a stream of letters on
behalf of certain causes; and I realise that on this
occasion, unlike on other occasions, the letter writers
have no deep concern for the causes for which they
write. So of course on this occasion I pay no
attention to the letters. (For the reasons why God
allows suffering , see my IS THERE A GOD?, Oxford
University Press, 1996, chapter 6; and for fuller
discussion see my PROVIDENCE AND THE PROBLEM
OF EVIL, Oxford University Press, 1998. For the
substantial evidence of God's existence, see my IS
THERE A GOD? and more fully THE EXISTENCE OF
GOD, second edition, Oxford University Press, 2004.
For the reason why too much evidence might not be
good for us, see pp. 267-71 of that book.)