What is the point of prayer?
Some philosophical and practical thoughts on prayer
Many people, whether or not they are religious, have wondered about prayer. What is the point of prayer? If God already knows what will happen, why pray? If I pray for something good to happen, wouldn’t it happen anyway, if God is truly good? This last question has been considered by many philosophers, and is called the divine goodness problem of petitionary prayer.
While there are many other forms of prayer – contemplative, meditative, worship, confession – petitionary prayer is prayer in which a person makes requests of God, for themselves or others. If we assume that humans have freedom of the will, and that God does not predetermine everything, then the problem can be put like this (as Eleonore Stump describes it):
God will not fulfill a request that makes the world worse than it otherwise would have been.
If what is requested in prayer would make the world better, then God would bring that about, even if no one prayed for it.
Therefore,
Petitionary prayer is pointless.
If the second claim in the above argument is true—“If what is requested in prayer would make the world better, then God would bring that about, even if no one prayed for it”—it would follow that God must bring about the best of all possible worlds. It would also follow that petitionary prayer is pointless. But given that logically speaking there may be no such best of all possible worlds, we have reason to doubt this claim. We therefore have reason to doubt this argument for the conclusion that petitionary prayer is pointless.
Why do we have reason to doubt this claim? It is not clear that God must always follow the principle “If x makes the world better, then I must bring about x.” This principle would ultimately lead to the claim that God must create the best of all possible worlds. And there are reasons to question that. As contemporary philosopher Alvin Plantinga puts it, “Just as there is no greatest prime number, so perhaps there is no best of all possible worlds.” Any world full of deliriously happy sentient creatures could be made even better with more deliriously happy sentient creatures. So for any world God could create, you could make it better by adding one more deliriously happy sentient creature. If that is correct, Plantinga concludes that “there just isn’t any such thing as the best of all possible worlds.”
But this only reveals flaws in one specific argument against the claim that prayer has a point. What else can be said about the value of prayer?
First, prayer may be effective in helping humans cultivate friendship with God, as we communicate with God in this way. Many followers of Christ testify that part of the point of prayer, including petitionary prayer, is the joy of talking and communing with God.
Second, I think there are goods which God may only want to bring about in partnership with one or more human beings through prayer. That is, God may only want to accomplish some good things in the world in partnership with us. Perhaps God only wants to bring about certain things in the world in response to our prayers. God may operate this way, respecting our freedom and using these interactions not only to work with us in service to his kingdom, but also to cultivate our individual characters.
Consider an analogy. There are goods which a parent may only choose to bring about in partnership with her children. For example, a child may ask her parent to volunteer at a homeless shelter together, and the parent agrees to do so. The parent may have intended to use that time in a different manner. But because her child asked her, and because she values working with the child to bring about certain goods, she grants the child’s request to volunteer together at the homeless shelter. This can enhance the parent-child relationship, as shared work of this kind between humans has the potential to foster intimacy and deeper knowledge of one another. Ideally, the child may see and appreciate anew (or afresh) the compassion or patience or humility of her parent. And the child herself may grow in virtue.
Similarly, shared work between humans and God has the potential to deliver experiential knowledge of God as loving, patient, humble, compassionate, and generous. In the midst of shared work, particular traits (or different aspects of them) become evident, perhaps in a unique manner. This form of experiential knowledge of God is significant in a way that mere knowledge about God is not. According to many followers of the Way, this knowledge can be acquired as we bring our requests before God in prayer. And in the midst of all this we may also grow in virtues like humility, patience, faith, hope, and love.
So we can pray, and pray that God will change things in the world for the better. Our prayers can be “powerful and effective” (James 5:13-18). But when our prayers are not answered in the affirmative, there are still many goods to be had from a commitment to the life of prayer, including, most importantly, a deeper union with God in Christ.
Sources
Eleonore Stump, “Petitionary Prayer,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Apr., 1979), pp. 81-91.
Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), p. 61.
Photo by Jack Sharp on Unsplash
One non-petitionary value of prayer involves shared attention. Two people can witness the same comedy or sculpture alone. There is a distinctive experience of appreciating a work or experience with someone. In sharing not merely "life together" a la Bonhoeffer, but our loves and likes together, we begin valuing their valuing of the work or experience as well. Placing myself in prayer may involve a type of shared attention which becomes shared appreciation.
One of my favourite philosophers, the Third Earl Shaftesbury, combines this idea of attention and appreciation with admiration. By not just admiring God but admiring God's admiration (anticipating Frankfurt's second-order attitudes) and admiring with God, we become sensitized again to the world of value. I think the three stages of attention, appreciation, and admiration are of the utmost importance in resensitizing ourselves. Mark Noll called a crisis a "scandal of the evangelical mind". Shaftesbury calls us in prayer to a healing of the evangelical heart.
So wonderful Mike. Thanks so much for these thoughts. I cannot help but recall Jesus's prayer (Heb 5:7-9 likely echoing Mk 14:33-36). Clearly it was not in anyone’s best interests for God to grant Jesus’s request and remove the cup, since our very redemption would be jeopardized. There's a profound solidarity we share with Christ whenever our petitions are declined. The fact that Jesus’s prayers were not answered according to his request eminently qualifies him to know and understand what we’re going through when our prayers are not answered in ways we hope. He does feel the depth of our despair whenever the world around us is flying upside down and 'all hell is breaking lose.' With Jesus we all have cried “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” (Matthew 27:46). Somehow, someway, this is our "best possible world" as it was Jesus's. In this we must rest.