Your conjecture appears to result in a world that looks and operates exactly as if there were no supernatural deity at all.
But it hardly has a novel response either. Omnipotence has nothing to do with the claim since there is no need for an omnipotent being to do anything, only have the capability to do something. It’s completely within the properties of omnipotence to sit back and observe. It’s really omniscience that is the problem. If God knows everything, then how can we really say that any choice is real since God knows what choice we will make?
The simplest response is that this is a modal fallacy. It confuses what IS true with what is NECESSARILY true. Simply knowing the outcome of an action is hardly the same as controlling it. We can see this most simply by shifting time scales. Instead of thinking of an action that is in the present or future, let’s think of an action that is in the past. Yesterday, Donald Trump tweeted that Paul Manafort was treated worse than Al Capone. I have knowledge of that fact, but that doesn’t mean that I controlled Trump’s choice or that he had no other choice than to tweet that. It is true that he tweeted it, but it’s not NECESSARILY true. Shifting the timescale from the past to the future doesn’t change that basic argument. Trump has freewill, but I still know what he tweeted. If I were to get into a time machine, go to tomorrow and see what he writes this evening, that doesn’t mean that he lacks the choice of whether or not to write it.
Of course, a compatibilist would get around this argument completely by seeing no inherent contradiction between free will and determinism.
I think that it’s also possible to get into an epistemological argument regarding what knowledge actually is. Could omniscience just be infallible prediction as an example? Does the future actually have a truth value? God could be omniscient and still not know the future simply because the future is not a thing which can logically be known.
How so? I postulate a God that works according to his own nature, but still in a transcendent way. He still can intervene in human affairs in a supernatural way, but would not do an intervention that opposes his own nature. He could ‘lightning bolt an unbeliever’ as an example, but would not do so if that meant that he was violating his essential perfection, but if that were part of his essential perfection, then it would be done. It still allows for a transcendent being, but one bound by his own nature.
I did so really respond to you.
Your argument seemed to presume that prayer has the ability to affect a real change - by some method other than God hearing it and casually changing his mind about whether he should bother to crush/not crush that bug known as Great Aunt Edna. (It can’t be by changing God’s mind because you were quite firm in your premise that God has no ability to choose his actions because he can’t violate perfection, so his preference about matters can’t possibly be swayed by argument.)
So you’re proposing that prayer is quite literally a magic spell that changes the universe so profoundly that it’s no longer perfect to let Great Aunt Enda die.
How in the hell could that possibly work? What mechanisms could it be? Don’t swing any ‘mysterious ways’ business at me, you’re talking about literally changing the perfect outcome of the world regarding someone’s death via crouching down and making some sound waves with your mouth. You’ve already established you can’t be changing the perfect god’s approach to the situation directly, so what’s listening to your prayers and changing the world as a result?
Please describe the attributes of the deity that your hypothesis is designed for. God as commonly described is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. Is the one you are using the same, or just two out of three?
Sorry, I didn’t think you were being serious. Our words frequently change reality in quite tangible ways that don’t have to rely on some concept of magic. If I come home from work and say ‘Woman, where’s the slop that you call dinner? I’m hungry.’ I am likely to experience a very different reality than if I say ‘My darling petite-eclair, I am so lucky to have a wife such as you who goes out of her way to make me happy.’ I guess one could call my words magical, but I’m more inclined to come up with natural reasons why my ‘spell’ works. In a similar way, a prayer changes the nature of reality. If for no other reason than that you’re spending those moments praying instead of doing something else. It’s a choice that makes reality different than what it had been before. If reality is different, then the action that God takes may be different as well. Maybe the vocalization of your prayer makes the balance of Great Aunt Edna’s living an extra two weeks a more positive thing because it causes someone to have greater faith which leads to some positive outcome. Of course, it could also mean that Great Aunt Edna needs to die a bit earlier in order to crush the faith of someone who would use their faith in some objectively negative manner. Either way, that vocalization or even thought process does change reality and that change in reality could conceivably change God’s reaction to it.
For the sake of this argument I’ll go with those. I’ll also add ‘perfect’ in there meaning that he always knows the outcome of his actions and that they always move the universe towards some objective goal. To be honest, I’m not sure that omnipresence is necessary since being omnipotent and omniscient seem to accomplish the same thing in my mind, but we’ll leave it in there for the sake of historical consistency.
So he knows what is going to happen not only because he experiences everything at the same time, but also because he is the source of all that happens in the first place and he doesn’t make mistakes, In fact, because of the latter two he has no need to experience all time at once to know what is going to happen, right?
This requires that there be a sentient entity hearing your words understanding them as something other than a series of grunts and gasps, and changing their opinions as a result, right?
Your God can’t change his opinion on anything; his opinion is already perfect.
So if I’m parsing you right, you’re not proposing that your prayer actually makes it better or worse for Edna to die - you’re actually proposing that God likes the act of prayer in and of itself, and goes around putting people in horrible situations in order to incentivize praying. Okay, that’s a rather sadistic sort of manipulation for a perfect god to be using, but at least it’s logically and mechanistically sensible.
Also elements of your post suggest that God is able to know future events. I think you should be aware that your model explicitly relies on the future being unknown, because if God already knows what you’re going to do that changes everything.
No, I think you’re missing the argument. It doesn’t matter whether God likes or doesn’t like the prayer. Nor does his opinion on the prayer matter either. God is bound to take the ‘most perfect’ action regardless of his personal like or dislike. Your prayer could be to Thor and asking for Great Aunt Edna to die in a pillar of fire. What matters is that it changes the nature of the reality upon which he is acting and that has the potential to change the action itself. I think that the Thor prayer is unlikely to change reality in the direction that you desire, but who knows?
What’s important is not the prayer or the content of the prayer, but rather the action itself since the action changes reality. Maybe it would be easier to understand if instead of a prayer, we talk about a more tangible physical action. Let’s pretend that God is going to heal Great Aunt Edna of her cancer. Instead of praying though, you take a knife and slit her throat. I think it’s fair to say that God is no longer going to heal Great Aunt Edna’s cancer because the reality that now exists precludes that action. You chose an action that changed the reality and changed God’s potential response to that reality. Prayer is just another action that you are doing which alters the reality in which God acts. We don’t necessarily know in which way that changes his actions, but by changing reality itself, we also change the actions which God takes within that reality.
I think I’m lost on this question. I’m not conjecturing a why for omniscience, only assigning it as an attribute to God.
What latter two are you speaking of in the final clause?
No, I understood your argument, I’m just not willing to handwave the difference between all possible actions to the degree that “praying” and “slitting Edna’s throat” are not considered be different in any consequential way.
This thread is about the value of prayer, not the value of any random action (or the value of slitting throats). It’s all well and good for you to suggest that prayer is the sort of action that has a direct mechanical consequence on reality that changes reality in such a way to make Edna’s death undesirable (or to make you a better person, or whatever it is you’re arguing for). However it’s also entirely well and good for me to promptly ask what sort of an effect you think prayer specifically has to cause this change?
That’s a fair question. For starters, it changes your frame of mind and how you might potentially react to the death. By changing your reaction, it has the possibility of changing God’s action as well for obvious reasons. If you have many people praying, then you are alerting others to Edna’s condition and you are changing their responses to Edna’s demise as well. Those changes in response are changes in reality and one could surmise are changes in how God acts in that situation.
How would any of that look different from the world we actually do have?
Why do so many assume that because one believes in God, one believes in predestination and a personal god who controls every aspect of every life? Yes, some Christians believe that, particularly those who belong to denominations with Calvinist roots, but not all do. And, of course, the majority of people who pray worldwide are not Christian.
There are many possible answers to the OP’s question. For simple people with simple faith, faith itself may be the answer. (“I don’t need to understand how it works to believe it does work.”)
For others, simple answers aren’t enough. In his book Miracles, the widely respected Oxford don and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis said,
Lewis believed prayers exist outside of time. Miracles is heavy reading, and a brief passage doesn’t do Lewis’ theory justice. I include it as an example of more complex and abstract beliefs, not as a definitive statement.
Well, if it’s true, then it would look exactly like the world that we do have because it IS the world that we do have.
I would expect it to look like a world in which most things seem to follow a pretty predetermined outcome and every once in a while something pretty amazing happens, but that is the exception and not the rule. So, most of the time I would expect Great Aunt Edna to die and every once in awhile contrary to all expectations she doesn’t.
I would say that the change in your frame of mind is the cause of the prayer, not the result of it; you aren’t religious because you pray, you pray because you’re religious. The act of prayer itself causes nothing because the change you speak of precedes it.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘alerting others’. Presumably you don’t think that ten people quietly praying in the privacy of their homes sends out a notification wave to people on the street. And if you mean that somebody gets up in front of a congregation or something and announces “my Great Gran Edna is dying, let us all pray for her now. Go.”, this again changes nothing - people will pray or not with relative fervency and faith based upon their own emotional states and theological beliefs at the time. Unless you’re proposing that it’s the fact that they’re only now learning that Edna is in dire straits and this revelation causes their faith to change? Because honestly I don’t think that people who aren’t in the loop are going to be swayed much by Edna’s plight.
And I feel I should ask, are you of the opinion that all this praying and people having sudden epiphanies or whatever will lead to God sparing Edna? Or are the consequences of the prayer isolated to the people praying themselves?
Of course if you assume from the beginning that a god does exist then that is the conclusion you’d come to. I don’t think that answers the spirit of the question but never mind.
OK, this is more promising, if the world were completely without an intervening god, what would the difference be?
In a world without god I’d also expect most things to follow the natural order but with remarkable occurrences every now and again. The big differences is that, in order to achieve the same outcome as me, you have introduced a massively complicated sentient supernatural being…and I haven’t.
His argument, as best I understand it, relies on butterfly effect-type consequences of the person praying. Like, I prayed, which (somehow) makes me 14 nanodisciples more spiritual, which slightly alters my life trajectory to lead me to go on a mission to Africa, where I will meet a young man and convert him to Christianity, which will result in him becoming a zealot that spins off a suicide cult which steals an atomic bomb and blows up Poughkeepsie. However in this future it just so happens that Edna, if she’s alive, will accidentally run into him with her car as he’s walking to where he stored the bomb, killing them both. So by sparing Edna now, she can die later saving thousands, many of them Christians - but only if I prayed, because otherwise the seven other people she’s going to run over mean the world is better with her dead.
In a case like that, then my praying could lead to God changing the future. But that sort of thing wouldn’t come up very often, so most of the time you wouldn’t see god intervening due to prayer, because most of the time prayer doesn’t change anything significant enough to change the actions God needs to take for an ideal future.
I’m not introducing anything. The question was not to deduce the presence of God from the world we live in, but rather to reconcile the use of prayer with what the OP thought were the properties of God.
I provided a conjectural scenario that includes God, the observable world and prayer that has an impact on that world. I think it satisfies the question.
If I were attempting to prove God (and I’m an agnostic existentialist, so I don’t think I would except as an Academic exercise,) I certainly wouldn’t start with prayer and move backwards.