and how do you do that without introducing the concept of a god? you know, the properties of whom said prayer has to be reconciled with?
Which is indistinguishable from a world without a god and so advances the argument not one jot.
no, with any conversation like that it would have to start with you defining the actual properties of said god and progressing from there. No-one ever does of course.
Thanks for that begbert2. I was having trouble understanding it.
A micro rather than a macro god eh? and of course still absolutely indistinguishable from a complex and chaotic world of multi-trillion actions and interactions with god providing no additional explanatory power at all. The gap that god hides in here is our inability to trace cause and effect reliably in such a chaotic world.
Novelty bubble.
You’re off-topic. I’m not introducing God to the equation. It’s a rebuttal to an argument that presupposes God. This thread isn’t “Prove the existence of God.” It’s “how can God and prayer coexist.” I’m not advancing an argument, I’m rebutting one. I’m not making a claim, I’m simply providing a possible scenario that could logically exist, thus debunking the idea that it is impossible for prayer to affect the world if God is as commonly conceived. It’s not necessary for my scenario to be likely, only possible. Its possibility alone is enough to cast doubt on the original claim.
The fact that the world under my scenario is the world we observe is a strength of the argument, not a weakness. If my scenario requires no deviation or casuistry to reconcile with the observable world it means my scenario is much harder to disprove, thus successfully rebutting the original claim.
It’s like Star Search or reality shows where viewers can call to cast a vote for their favorite to advance. But those votes only account for part of the decision on advancement, the judges also have a role.
God has his plan but if enough people vote by praying then he might change his mind.
Or something.
The OP presumes the existence of God. I don’t see it as anyone’s job to prove that God exists in this thread.
I also don’t see “it’s possible that the world could exist as it is without prayer doing anything!” as useful argument either. Of course the world as it is could exist without prayer; in the world as it is there’s no God either. But we’re not talking about the world as it is; we’re talking about a world that does have a God, and discussing how intercessionary prayer might work or not in such a world.
The goals of this thread would be to either propose a mechanism by which intercessionary prayer could be anything other than a complete waste of time, presuming that a God actually existed - or to argue that the idea of intercessionary prayer being effective is logically incoherent and thus not true. (Arguing that it’s logically incoherent for specific types of gods, like ones that can predict the future, is also interesting.) If there’s no God then of course intercessionary prayer is a waste of time so there’s no point in discussing that.
Fine, if we are asked to assume for the sake of the OP that god does exist (which was not clear from the OP but never mind) then that’s not a fantasy worth discussing.
I don’t think anybody’s going to be praying if they don’t believe (or are at least open to the possibility that) Someone is listening. If no god exists, the questions the OP was asking would be irrelevant.
(A few people in this thread have mentioned ways that prayer can have an effect whether or not there’s any deity listening. But the OP’s main concern, as I understood it, was how God was supposed to respond to prayer.)
My point was not to challenge prayer by opening with the position that there is no God. For the purposes of this discussion please concede that God exists according to the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The way I wrote the OP was a bit rhetorical. It could be rewritten to ask, “If you believe in God, what is the foundation of your theology that makes you think that God will act differently if you just pray for it? Why would an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God give a shit what you pray for, if He’s already got everything all planned out?”
The debate is: “Prayer is useless, God knows better than us what he should do” vs. “God hears our prayers and is moved by them”
Alas, I’m not sure right now where my copy of Martin Gardner’s The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener is right now, but it has a chapter or two on prayer that might be relevant here, judging by what I remember and by the bit I could read on Google Books.
I don’t know the reference, but a few years ago I read (online) about an experiment in which there were two groups of similar patients, and one group was prayed for. The good part: that group did worse in recovery rates than the one without the benefit of prayer.
Maybe it just confirms the old and cynical joke: “Prayers are always answered. The answer is always no.”
I agree with the point made here that there is a contradiction between God’s plan and trying to change God’s plan. Which could explain why prayer does not work.
The butterfly effect argument that prayers have actual consequences that change future outcomes which God then reacts to - I don’t like that one, and here’s why: it presumes a model of determinism/future prediction that I don’t like much. Specifically it presumes a ‘forking future’ sort of determinism: one where the seer can see multiple paths that the future could take, forking at decision points. No one future is certain until it happens but each possible future branch is still foreseen with certainty.
This model is pretty common in fiction as a way to have seers without outright stating that choice doesn’t exist, but the weakness in this model is that if the future isn’t determined then there are necessarily a lot of branches - and the very butterfly effects the prayer explanation relies on mean that the outcomes of different branches can vary wildly. Billions of people and untold trillions of animals and bacteria making decisions constantly the world over would result in an endless cloud of varying possibilities that would make it straight-up impossible to predict even big things like wars decades or centuries in advance. Foresight would be useless.
(Fiction uses a few different ways to deal with this problem, none of which I accept as being applicable to the God situation, but I’m willing to discuss (and attempt to refute) specific ones if necessary.)
So: In my opinion if you have an entity with foresight, a true seer, in my opinion that excludes the possibility that everyone and everything is all the time making possible futures with every choice they ever will make. Which leaves only a few possibilities:
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The future is fixed for everyone, like they’re characters in a book. This would include the god - the only difference being the god knows that it has no choices and can do nothing about it. That sounds like an extraordinarily depressing experience for such a god, but who knows, maybe they’re used to it (or maybe they don’t have a choice because they’re written cheerful).
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The future is fixed for everyone, like they’re characters in a book - except the god, who is writing the book. In this case prayer can’t possibly influence the god because the god is the one making people do the praying, because the god’s the one writing “And then he prayed, and Edna was cured. Deus ex machina baby!”.
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People have compatiblist free will, which means that their decisions are entirely based on their knowledge, preferences, and mental state (rather than on the random garbage that drives non-compatiblist free will). Because people’s knowledge, preferences, and mental state are fixed at the time they make each decision, the outcome of each decision is fixed as well. Presuming that the rest of the universe is deterministic as well, this results in a single, determined future, driven by the decisions of everyone within it.
With one exception - the seer. The seer can see the future, but if they choose to act in a different way than their own foresight predicts then they can do so, because there is no script forcing anyone’s decisions. Presumably their own foresight would react to changes in their own behavior to reflect the new future driven by their own actions. Presumably with a little practice they could ‘try out’ different possible futures, possibly by just making a plan about future actions and seeing what would happen as a result. This would result in them being able to come up with the best future plan that they can think of, presuming they have time to run through and compare the outcomes of their actions in their heads. (If the seer is also omnipotent this could take a while due to the sheer freedom it has in choosing its actions, but presumably it would come up with something it likes eventually.)
It’s important to note that in this model, despite there being true free will, it doesn’t look to the seer like anyone has free will. Whether you choose to pray or not depends entirely on the situation you end up in at the time, and the seer can see that coming decades away. They can fiddle around with that future, your present, by changing various circumstances long before you get to that point - showing you miracles, adjusting your brain chemistry, killing you as a baby. The only limit on the seer’s ability to sculpt your future behavior is it potence. If the seer is potent enough, you’ll only pray if it wants you to.
In this model you could technically say that your prayer has butterfly effects that lead God to save Edna, but in actual fact God only let you pray because he liked the butterfly effects that resulted.
Of course if the god is also perfect, constrained to only act in ways that result in the perfect outcome, then the poor bastard doesn’t even get to play with different possible futures. It already knows the best possible future, and has no choice but to sit back and let it play out, permitting you to survive long enough to pray because that’s perfect, waiting seven years before curing Edna because it’s perfect, only doing anything because it’s perfect.
It’s worth noting that this scenario could also explain a noninterventionist god: the reason why God never does anything more is because he doesn’t have to, he already set the future on a perfect course with his earlier interventions. Like a bowler who rolls the ball and then turns to stride confidently away without watching the strike, the future is already on the perfect path and needs no further interventions from him. The microbe that saves Edna was kicked off towards existence centuries ago - or even during the big bang.
There have been several such experiments done, and there was a link earlier in the thread to a Wikipedia article about them:
However, one might argue that God makes a distinction between sincere prayer and attempts to test or manipulate him, which is what’s going on in an experiment like that. C. S. Lewis made such a point long before most of those studies were done, in an essay called “The Efficacy of Prayer” (PDF here):
Also from that essay, addressing the conflict between “God hears prayers” and “God already knows what is best”:
What Lewis and Pascal are saying here may be similar to what I tried to say earlier in the thread: that somehow, allowing our prayers to influence his actions is one way God grants us the ability to do things that actually matter. And it doesn’t really solve the problem, but it means that it’s not a problem just confined to prayer.
And the response to both the “feed youreself, don’t ask me to feed you” and the “I’m not lifting a finger to save Edna until you jump through the hoops I set” situations is this: It necessarily requires that God not really care all that much about the outcomes either way. A parent might let their child pick what they want to wear, to give the child the experience of having real choices with consequences, but the parent won’t let their child run around naked. A parent might let their child choose what they’ll eat, allowing even junkfood, but they’ll take away the rat poison. If the guardian cares about the consequences in any significant way they won’t allow the negative outcomes.
Note that it’s entirely possible to say that mortality is transient anyway so what happens here is no big deal. Such an argument would justify God sitting back to watch Edna die, to watch hunger and plague ravage cities, to watch people lose their homes and fall into depression, all that. The only minor hiccup to that is that a lot of people, including myself, wouldn’t call that god benevolent - but whether that’s an issue is debatable.