Is Prayer Pointless (Philosophically Speaking)?
Even If God Is Immutable, Prayer Still Makes a Difference!
Yesterday at Mass the priest talked about the Resigned Position some Christians have with respect to God and prayer—the idea being that they are so totally resigned to God’s power that whatever comes, they just accept it. They don’t pray, because they don’t think there’s really much use in it.
Now, this was, of course, a homily—not a philosophical treatise—so the subject wasn’t treated with the sort of analytic precision I’m sure many of my Substack readers would have appreciated.1 Nevertheless, the priest appropriately warned against this position and gave what was, I think, generally the right response to it: namely, that God wills certain things to come about because of prayer—and part of the reason for that is that some things are only possible (or at least better) because they’re requested.
What I’d like to do now is generalize the problem a bit and explain that response a little further.
In fact, I should mention that there are at least two ways one might object to the practice, or even the possibility, of prayer—especially in relation to God as understood in classical theism.
First, it might go something like this: If God is perfectly powerful and perfectly good, then God is just going to do whatever is best and prevent whatever isn’t. So if you pray for something and it was already the best thing, God would’ve done it anyway. If you pray for something and it wasn’t the best thing, God won’t do it. Either way, prayer doesn’t make a difference. Even if God hears it, it’s still pointless.2
Alternatively, the objection might go: for God to answer prayer, God would have to somehow respond to us. But classical theists claim that God is immutable—that is, unchanging. And if God cannot change, then God can’t respond to us. So, again, prayer makes no real difference.
The first objection is one that any Christian theist must tackle, while the second is more specifically aimed at classical theists who maintain divine simplicity and immutability. Still, I’m including both here, because I’d like to briefly respond to each.
So: with respect to the objection that prayer is pointless because God is just going to do the best thing anyway, we can naturally ask whether some things are better if they’re brought about by something—or someone—other than God. And indeed, whether some things can only be what they are if they’re brought about by something or someone other than God. (Or, to be more precise: whether they are better insofar as they’re brought about by real secondary causes, and not just directly by God—since, technically, nothing is brought about apart from the concurrent operation of God’s universal causality.)
Both questions can easily be answered in the affirmative. After all, a hug from my daughter can only be a hug from my daughter because she brings it about.3
But obviously, there are certain other things—perhaps even the most valuable things, if Christianity is true—that can only be brought about by prayer: for example, forgiveness, repentance, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and whatnot. These, for the Christian, are among the very best things for us, and they can only come about through an actual desire for them and a request made in prayer.
Anyway, more could be said about this first objection—including plenty of other plausible examples of things that are only possible, or at least better, when brought about by prayer—but what’s been said so far should be enough to defuse the complaint and point people, I think, in the right direction when thinking about it.4
The second objection is, I think, a bit more interesting, if only because it’s more directly related to classical theism. So, let’s tackle that—again, briefly.
The issue here is supposed to be that God cannot be responsive because God is immutable.
But why think that? After all, for God’s action to be responsive, it only needs to occur because of some action we have taken—and that actually doesn’t require anything to change in God. God can be immutable and responsive. Watch:
Say I offer a prayer to God at some point for help. God, being a gracious Father, grants that help—and does so because I prayed for it. My request is (relative to my human action) antecedent to God’s granting the request; or to put it another way, God’s response is consequent to my request. The basic point, for our purposes, is obvious: my act of asking God for help factors into God’s reason for granting it. (And in fact, had I not asked, God may well not have granted it.)
And that’s all that’s required for responsiveness.
The real question now is whether this sort of divine-human dialogue is compatible with divine simplicity and immutability. But given the now frequently endorsed extrinsic model of divine agency, it should be clear that it is—because everything happening here (on the side of creation) is extrinsically denominated.5
That is, all of God’s contingent actions—including God causing me to pray (since a necessary condition of my freely praying is that this action is itself a result of divine activity, given that God is the universal cause of everything apart from Himself), and God granting help in response—are extrinsic to God.6
So all of these actions can involve change, contingency, and real temporal sequence on our side (that is, on the side of creation), without requiring any real, intrinsic change in God. They are all, to use some of the contemporary jargon, mere Cambridge changes with respect to God—that is, the sort of change (namely, a change in relation) that doesn’t require any real, intrinsic change in at least one of the subjects. For example: my son growing taller than me is a mere Cambridge change; I don’t actually change, or need to change, to become shorter than Roan.
Now, I’m not going to pretend this response doesn’t raise a bunch of other questions—including how an eternal and timeless being can have temporal effects or temporally located actions (it can!), or how God’s universal causality is compatible with, and even a necessary condition of, libertarian freedom (it is!). But those questions, important as they are, deserve separate treatment that I don’t have the space (or really, time) to get into here. (Read this book for all the right answers!) For our purposes, though, given what classical theists are already committed to—particularly regarding their extrinsic model of divine agency—the objection concerning prayer or divine-human dialogue doesn’t present any unique or novel challenge. It’s just another instance where the extrinsic model proves its usefulness.
To finish, then: the priest at Mass was absolutely correct to tell his congregation to pray. While certain objections against prayer may seem superficially compelling, a more substantial inspection renders them supremely doubtful. In fact, the best philosophical reasons—not just Scriptural ones (which are, of course, decisive, since we are divinely commanded to pray!)—provide rather strong support for prayer, given the unique value of certain goods that are only good, and only possible, because of prayer.
Nor, do I think, would that have been appropriate!
Inspired by Eleonore Stump, “Petitionary Prayer,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 83–85.
This example borrowed from Caleb Cohoe.
For those interested in looking into this further, we commend Caleb Murray Cohoe, “God, Causality, and Petitionary Prayer,” Faith and Philosophy 31, no. 1 (2014): 3–22. https://doi.org/10.5840/faithphil201312302.
Little technical point: while closely related, “extrinsically predicated” and “extrinsically denominated” are not strictly synonymous. The former refers to how a property is attributed to a subject based on something external to it (e.g., “Pat is taller than Roan”), whereas the latter—more common in scholastic terminology—refers to how something is named or described due to a relation it bears to something else, without any intrinsic change (e.g., a creature being called “known by God”). In many contexts, however—for example, discussions of divine simplicity—the two terms are used interchangeably to highlight that the predication or naming does not signify a real, intrinsic feature or change in the subject.
According to the extrinsic model, there’s more to God’s act of creation than just what’s involved on God’s side, as it were. Which means that if God creates or causes X, that total act involves not just the divine substance but also X and its deep dependence relation upon God. Now, if God had caused Y instead, then His total creative act would have been different—but—and this is critical—the differentiating element, as it were, is located extrinsic to God.
All to say: when it comes to God’s causal activity, not all of it is, strictly speaking, identical to God Himself. Which means His total causal activity can change (or could have been otherwise) without introducing any real difference or change in the divine essence or substance (preserving simplicity and immutability). Said differently, this extrinsic model of divine agency allows God to remain intrinsically invariant across possible worlds.