Davison, Scott Alan - Petitionary Prayer - A Philosophical Investigation-Oxford University Press (2017)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/12/2016, SPi
Petitionary Prayer
Petitionary Prayer
A Philosophical Investigation
SCOTT A. DAVISON
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Preface
I would like to thank the following persons for reading or commenting

on material that later became parts of this book (in no particular
order): Eleonore Stump, Timothy O’Connor, Randolph Clarke,
Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder, Kevin Timpe, Ronald L. Hall,
Michael Rea, Michael Bergmann, Joshua Smith, George Pappas,
Thomas P. Flint, David Basinger, Nicholas Smith, Alexander Pruss,
William Rowe, Jeff Jordan, Michael Murray, Ronald L. Hall,
Paul Draper, William Hasker, Kate Rogers, the Rev. Donald Klop,
Winifred Klop, Teena Blackburn, and George Mavrodes.
I would also like to thank participants in the 2006 Meeting of the
Society for Philosophy of Religion (Charleston, South Carolina),
participants in the 2009 University of Texas at San Antonio Work-
shop for Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion (San Antonio,
Texas), participants in the 2012 Society for Philosophy of Religion
meeting (Savannah, Georgia), and participants in the 2015–16 weekly
seminar series in the Analytic Theology for Theological Formation
program at Fuller Seminary (Pasadena, California). At these venues,
versions of some of the arguments that appear here were presented
and discussed, much to my benefit.
Special thanks are due to William Hasker, J. Caleb Clanton, and
two anonymous referees for Oxford University Press, who read early
drafts of the entire manuscript and provided very helpful comments
and challenges that resulted in significant changes in the main con-
clusions of the book. I would also like to thank students in my spring
2012 Philosophy 399 class at Morehead State University, which was
devoted to the subject of petitionary prayer. I have almost certainly
forgotten others who helped me along the way, but I am grateful for
all of the support I have received.
Thanks to all of this help from other people, I was able to remove
many errors from earlier versions of the manuscript, but I’m sure that
many others remain, for which I alone bear responsibility. For a
variety of reasons, I was not able to address, to my satisfaction,
every critical comment I received during the writing of this book;
vi Preface
I will indicate here and there my uncertainty about issues that seem to
require further attention.
Release time from teaching to pursue the research and writing of
this book was provided by a sabbatical leave semester from Morehead
State University in the spring of 2013, during which I enjoyed a
Research Fellowship in the Moore Institute at the National University
of Ireland in Galway. I am grateful to both of these institutions for
their support.
This book is dedicated to my wife Becky, who is a positive presence
to everyone she meets, and who enables me to enjoy so many of the
things that make our common life wonderful. During the past six
months, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, underwent surgery,
and completed chemotherapy treatments before starting hormone
suppression drugs. We have three children between 10 and 15 years
of age, and we are all deeply immersed in the life of a small town,
playing various roles in a number of community organizations, includ-
ing a Christian church. Throughout this time, we have been gener-
ously supported by our friends, family, students, colleagues, and even
others whom we know only as acquaintances. In creative and helpful
ways we could never anticipate, let alone request, these people have
shared our burdens and helped us to arrive at the place where we are
today, where Becky’s prognosis for future health is very positive.
In recent months, our religious friends and family have told us
many times over that they prayed to God for us in the petitionary
way, and we are deeply grateful for these acts of love. Did they make a
difference in the outcome of Becky’s case? Would things have
gone worse for us, had those prayers not been offered? We don’t
really know; maybe we will never know. Or maybe someday, we will
discover that these prayers really did make a difference, and we will be
even more grateful for them.
At the same time, our non-religious friends and family told us many
times over that they were thinking about us, sending us positive
energy, hoping for the best, and wishing us well. As before, we are
deeply grateful for these acts of love. Did they make a difference in the
outcome of Becky’s case? Would things have gone worse for us, had
people not had those thoughts? We don’t really know; maybe we will
never know. Or maybe someday, we will discover that they really did
make a difference, and we will be even more grateful for them.
Contents
Introduction 1
1. Challenges and Defenses 7

2. Petitionary Prayer Characterized 24
3. Divine Freedom Challenges 43
4. Epistemological Challenges 62
5. Epistemological Defenses 78
6. Divine Goodness and Praying for Others 96
7. Responsibility-Based Defenses 114
8. Self-Directed Petitionary Prayer and New Defenses 130
9. Practical Questions and the Nature of Faith 147
10. Conclusion 163
Bibliography 171
Index 185
Introduction
Last year, while I was working on this book, my 12 year old son Drew
and I went on a camping trip with some relatives in the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan. We drove to the Sylvania Wilderness Area,
packed all of our gear into canoes, and paddled to our campground.
The next day, in the middle of the afternoon, Drew was in a tent with
the door zipped closed. I told him that the rest of us were all going
fishing in the canoes, and that we would return shortly. But when we
returned, he was gone.
We searched everywhere. The people camping at the next site,
some distance away from ours, had not seen him, but insisted that they
would have seen him if he had gone in that direction. We hiked the
other way, shouting, but could not find him. My brother-in-law
paddled his canoe back to the car back at the boat ramp, but they
did not find him, either. I began to grow desperate. I ran out of things
to do. So I called 911, and they said that they would send help, but we
were in such a remote location that it might take quite a long while
before anyone arrived—we were many miles from the nearest town,
and our location was accessible only by canoe. As it became late in the
afternoon, I worried about what would happen after darkness fell.
I remembered that Drew did not drink water with his lunch, and
I imagined that if he were dehydrated from hiking, he might be unable
to respond even if he heard us calling.
I sent a text message to my wife, who was at work back home, many
hundreds of miles away. I apologized profusely for the whole situation
and asked her to join me in praying for Drew, because I didn’t know
what else to do. And I did pray for Drew myself, asking God to return
him to safety.
About half an hour later, Drew appeared, hiking down the trail. He
had been asleep in the tent when I told him that we were going fishing,
so he never heard me. (I was wrong to assume that he knew where we
were—I thought he had acknowledged me, but he had not.) When he
woke, he could not see us in the canoes, so he assumed we had traveled
2 Petitionary Prayer
across land to the next lake over. Although he had never been to this
camping area before, let alone the next lake over, he decided to hike in
that direction to see if he might catch us. He did reach the next lake,
and stayed at the beach for a while, and then hiked back to our
campsite.
Drew never felt that he was in danger, because he knew exactly
where he was and how to get back. But for all I knew, he was in grave
danger. In my mind, I started to feel that I had lost him forever.
Fortunately, my wife did not check her phone until after I had sent her
two more text messages—one announcing Drew’s safe return and
another joking that it was a good thing that she didn’t check her
phone very often, because she was spared the agony of worry in
between the first and second messages.
Was this an answer to prayer? If I had not prayed, would things
have turned out differently? Was my prayer somehow responsible for
Drew’s return to safety? In order for God to answer a prayer like this,
would God need to foreknow my free choices in advance? These are
some of the questions I consider in this book.
When I was younger, I was deeply involved in an evangelical
Christian church that stressed the importance of petitionary prayer.
I kept prayer lists that included specific requests for specific people,
and made sure to note which prayers were answered and which ones
were not. I came to see the world in ways that were very similar to
those described by T. H. Luhrmann in her important empirical
studies of communities in which petitionary prayer plays important
roles (Luhrmann 2012).
Later in life, I became more skeptical about many things. Was
this skepticism a result of my advanced studies in philosophy, or
were my advanced studies in philosophy a natural outgrowth of my
skepticism?—I don’t really know; perhaps the truth lies somewhere in
the middle. In any case, I began to doubt my previous conviction that
whenever I had asked God to bring about something specifically, and
it had come to pass, then my prayer had been answered by God.
I started to wonder if the truth might be more complicated, and this
drove me deeper into theological and philosophical studies.
The original title of this book was “On the Pointlessness of Petitionary
Prayer,” and the main conclusion I had planned to defend was
that the philosophical arguments showed that almost no petitionary
Introduction 3
prayers could influence God’s action in the world. But as my study of
the arguments progressed, and new ways of understanding how things
might work became clear to me, I discovered that I simply could not
defend this conclusion philosophically. I am still anxious to give the
challenges to petitionary prayer their proper philosophical due, as you
will see, but in the end, my conclusion is best described as lying in
between the view that all petitionary prayer is pointless and the view
that none of it is. I think I have been able to develop some new
challenges to petitionary prayer that go beyond previous ones in
interesting ways, but I have also been able to develop some defenses
in promising new directions.
I still have many questions. The issues involved here are deep and
complicated, and although I have tried in this book to chart most of
the terrain, my discussion is not comprehensive, and there is a lot of
work left to do. I share Christopher Hamilton’s view of philosophy,
according to which it
…should churn people up. It’s not about providing answers, but
making people uncomfortable and making them reflect. I’m much
less interested in finding answers than in finding the right questions to
ask. We may all be confused by the end—but we can share our
confusion in a productive kind of way. (Hamilton 2009)
The views I defend here are clearly not the only reasonable ones to
hold—there is a lot of room for debate, as one would expect. I hope
this book will lead others to further investigation, to develop new
arguments and new positions, from which I too can learn in the future.
The God of traditional theism is the all-powerful, all-knowing,
perfectly good creator of the world who is worshiped by Jews, Christians,
and Muslims.1 In this book, for the sake of convenience, I speak as if
the God of traditional theism exists. But in my arguments, I do not
mean to assume that God exists, and I do not argue for this position in
1
I recognize that there are many specific formulations of theism that have a
legitimate claim to the label “traditional,” and that there are debates about
whether or not such approaches are the best ways of explaining what people
believe when they say that they believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob. But I do not want to enter into disputes about this—I do not regard this
label as a term of praise; I use it instead as shorthand for the cluster of views that
contemporary philosophers of religion often assume when framing their questions.
the book, either. I have my own religious beliefs, but I will not discuss
them here very much, because I do not want them to be the focus of
the investigation, which should be open to everyone.2 For the most
part, I write as a philosopher trying to be responsible to what we know
from reason about metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory, and
this book is designed to be an exploration of the topic of petitionary
prayer in light of those things.
I have friends who are philosophers and religious people, some of
whom will be disappointed to see that I do not defend petitionary
prayer more vigorously in this book. But I also have friends who are
philosophers and non-religious people, some of whom will be disap-
pointed to see that I do not attack petitionary prayer more vigorously
in this book. I invite anyone who is interested in these issues to engage
with the arguments, whether or not they agree with my personal
beliefs—I am not trying to influence anyone else’s personal beliefs in
this book, let alone anyone’s petitionary prayer practices—this book is
not intended to offer any practical advice.
I do discuss in the book specific doctrines about petitionary prayer
from traditional theistic religions, especially Christian ones. But I am
not a theologian or a scriptural scholar, so I tread very lightly around
these doctrines, and I recognize that there is a great deal more to be
said about them than I can say. I will not even mention many of the
issues that are raised by the theological doctrines that I discuss,
including issues of authority with regard to scriptures, practices, and
traditions. Typically I will defend my conclusions by appealing to
philosophical reasons that could be appreciated by anyone, reasons
that do not require accepting the teachings of any specific religion, but
obviously specific religious doctrines are very important in connection
with this topic. Without argument, I will assume that the adherents of
these traditional religions are typically justified in accepting their
doctrines, but I will raise some questions about how to interpret
these doctrines and about what we should think about petitionary
prayer, given the total evidence available to all of us. Hopefully what
2
I tell my students often that like the popular American ice cream store (Baskin
Robbins), there are at least thirty-one flavors of Christianity, and perhaps mine is
another one; I would still describe myself as a Christian, but those who accept some
of the other thirty-one flavors would not.
Introduction 5
I say will clarify and advance the philosophical debate concerning
these questions, both for those who embrace specific religious teach-
ings and for those who do not. I will offer the best arguments I have to
answer the questions that I raise, but I recognize that not everyone will
find those arguments persuasive and I look forward to future dialogue
concerning these issues.
My main question can be seen as hypothetical: Assuming that the
God of traditional theism exists, is it reasonable to think that God
answers specific petitionary prayers? This question is interesting not
just for those who accept (or reject) traditional theism, but also for
those who are interested in the coherence of traditional theistic doc-
trines (for whatever reason), and for those who are interested in the
concepts of goodness, freedom, responsibility, knowledge, and so on.
I recognize that my main question is an artificial philosopher’s ques-
tion, divorced from the specific beliefs and practices of most people
who pray regularly in the petitionary way. I recognize also that
someone who asked only this question about petitionary prayer
might be defective from the perspective of ideal religious faith. But
the focus of this book is the philosophical debate concerning petition-
ary prayer, not these other things. At the end of the book, I will discuss
the larger question of whether or not petitionary prayer is pointless all
things considered, and not just with regard to influencing God’s action
in the world in some specific way.
This is not a book about how to pray—I am the last person who
should write such a book. And this is not a book about theology or
scripture, either—I am not qualified to write such a book. This is a
book about the philosophical puzzles and questions surrounding the
idea of petitionary prayer—but it is not a book based upon a careful
historical study of those things, either. It is a study of the issues and
questions, defined in a particular way, using the tools of analytic
philosophy in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and value
theory. There are many ways to approach these issues, and these
other books would certainly be worth writing and reading, but this
is the only book that I am in a position to write.
Some parts of this book are explanatory, designed to convey the
relations among key ideas clearly, including the accounts of provi-
dence, challenges, and defenses in chapter 1, along with the account of
freedom in chapter 2, the account of knowledge in chapter 4, and the
discussion of responsibility in chapter 7. Other parts of the book are
critical, designed to show that a given argument or position is inad-
equate, including the discussions of most of the defenses of petitionary
prayer in the literature in chapters 5 through 8. Finally, some parts are
constructive, designed to develop new accounts that go beyond the
current literature, including the contrastive reasons account of
answered prayer in chapter 2, the metaphysical and epistemological
discussions in chapters 3 and 4, the resource relative approach to
petitionary prayer defended in chapter 8, and the account of faith and
petitionary prayer described in chapter 9.
In chapters 1 and 2, I will try to describe, in a neutral way, a basic
theoretical framework for approaching my main question. In chapters
3, 4, and 5, I will try to press new challenges to petitionary prayer as
strongly as I can. In chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9, I will try to test critically
defenses of petitionary prayer from the existing literature as stringently
as possible. What survives these efforts, I believe, is an improved
approach to the defense of petitionary prayer (described in chapters
8 and 9) that leads to a positive but restricted answer to my main
question, as I will explain in chapter 10. At the end of the day, I expect
that my conclusion will satisfy few readers, but I hope that the discus-
sion sheds new light on the philosophical issues, leads others to inves-
tigate them in further detail, and raises new questions for further study.
1
Challenges and Defenses
1.1 The Question Clarified

When we say that something is pointless, typically we mean that it fails
to accomplish its intended purpose—we don’t mean that it has no
effects at all. (Everything makes a difference, of course, no matter how
small.) So if we ask whether or not petitionary prayer is pointless from
the point of view of traditional theism, we are not asking whether it
has any effect at all. Clearly it has many effects, some of which are very
positive1—it changes the person who prays,2 unites people in a com-
mon cause, and communicates important values to others, to name
just a few examples. But one of the primary purposes of petitionary
prayer, according to those who practice it, is to influence God’s action
in the world, and that purpose is the focus of attention in this book.3
My main question is this: assuming that the God of traditional theism
1
Petitionary prayer may also have negative effects, including encouraging
people praying for things when they should be taking practical steps instead
(such as seeking medical care or helping others—thanks to an anonymous reviewer
for these examples); for a discussion of guilt and responsibility for bad things not
prevented by petitionary prayer, see chapter 7.
2
As C. S. Lewis says, “Instead of being merely known, we show, we tell, we
offer ourselves to view” (Lewis 1964, p.21); for more on the positive effects of
petitionary prayer, see chapter 10.
3
For more on the other functions of petitionary prayer, see the insightful
discussion in Phillips 1981. Phillips himself argues that the purpose of petitionary
prayer is not to influence God’s action in the world (see his chapter 6), but this does
not seem to be faithful to the experience of many people who pray this way, or to
the arguments of those who insist that such prayer is important. For critical
discussion of Phillips on this score, see Baelz 1968 (chapter 4), Allen 1972,
Cohn-Sherbok 1989 (chapter 4), van Herck 2007, and Brümmer 2008 (chapter 2).
exists, is it reasonable to think that God answers specific petitionary
prayers? Or are those prayers pointless in the sense that they do not
influence God’s action? For reasons that will become clear later, I will
focus primarily on petitionary prayers that are specific, and for the
sake of simplicity and clarity, I will typically discuss individual peti-
tioners rather than groups.
Immediately, it seems natural to object that I have created an
artificial philosopher’s question, by distinguishing different reasons
for offering petitionary prayers, some of which involve the possibility
of God’s answering those prayers, and some of which do not. If one’s
religious tradition teaches that one should offer petitionary prayers,
but does not explain why, then why should one care about the
philosopher’s question whether petitionary prayers should be offered
for the specific reason of influencing God’s action in the world?
When I ask about what is reasonable to believe here, what else am
I assuming? How can a person of faith take up the perspective I am
taking up in this book, by raising the artificial philosopher’s question?
In response to these worries, I admit freely that I am posing an
artificial philosopher’s question. But one need not assume some par-
ticular faith commitment (or lack thereof ) to take up the investigation
of this question. Instead of arguing for this point in an abstract way,
I will illustrate it as I go—the proof will be in the pudding, as the
saying goes. I will return to this question in chapter 9, when I discuss
the relationship between faith and petitionary prayer.
When I talk about what it is reasonable to believe, I have nothing
mysterious in mind. After exploring the significant challenges and
defenses of petitionary prayer in the literature to date, I will offer
what I take to be a well-informed judgment about what it is reason-
able for us to believe about my main question—and you will have the
same information I have, so you will be in a position to make a well-
informed judgment, too.
I do not regard my judgments as the only reasonable ones—there is
room for significant differences of opinion here. I am not trying to
settle this question once and for all. I expect that there will be new
arguments, more challenges, and more defenses, and so there will be
more information for us to consider as these questions are investigated
in the future by other people—this is the nature of philosophical
inquiry.
Challenges and Defenses 9

1.2 Answered Prayer
What counts as a petition? Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder argue
that one must believe that a petition could make a difference to the
one petitioned in order for it to count as a petition at all (see Howard-
Snyder and Howard-Snyder 2010, p.46). But I think this is not quite
right. Suppose that I find myself exchanging messages over the inter-
net in a customer support chat session that seems to involve another
living person. Because I know that there exist many computer pro-
grams that are capable of carrying on such conversations in settings
like this, I have reason to doubt whether I am interacting with a living
person. Imagine that I receive a message asking for my telephone
number, and I decide to provide it. For all I know, I could be sharing
my phone number with a computer program that compiles data for
the purpose of targeted commercial advertising, and not with a living
person. In this case, let’s stipulate, I do not believe that I am sharing
my phone number with a living person, but I don’t believe that I am
not, either—I don’t believe either way. But suppose that in fact, I have
been talking with a living person, who receives my number and
eventually contacts me for some good purpose. It seems right to say,
in this case, that I trusted this other person by sharing my phone
number, even though I did not believe, at the time, in the existence of
this person.4
In the same way, one could offer a petitionary prayer to God
without believing that the petition could make a difference to God,
since one could offer a petitionary prayer to God without believing
that God exists. One might be on the fence about God’s existence, so
to speak, but still offer a petitionary prayer, perhaps in desperation:
“God, I don’t know if you exist, but if you do, please save my son…”
For various reasons, we might criticize this prayer or the one offering
it, but it seems clear that the person in question has offered a peti-
tionary prayer. So the Howard-Snyders’ position on this issue seems
too restrictive.
Often people say that God answers all prayers, even though some-
times God’s answer is “No.” Is this right? If God says “No,” does this
4
Thanks to Dan Howard-Snyder for helping me to achieve clarity on this point
in correspondence.
count as God’s having answered the prayer, or does it count as God’s
merely providing a negative reply (but not an answer) instead? The
terminology is confusing here, because the word “answer” is used
differently in different contexts. In ordinary cases, “No” constitutes
both an answer and a reply to a request. For example, if I ask a
colleague to read one of my papers for me, I might receive the answer,
“No.” In this context, “No” counts as both an answer and a reply to
my request, even though the request was denied, not granted—
clearly, it would be false to say that my colleague did not answer or
reply to my request.
But sometimes people insist very strongly that God has answered
particular petitionary prayers, often in dramatic ways. Some even
argue that answered prayers provide compelling evidence for the
existence of the traditional theistic God.5 When people make these
kinds of claims, they are talking about cases in which the object
requested in the petitionary prayer came to be, not cases in which
God simply said “No.” In this sense, the “answered” in “answered
prayer” signifies a kind of success, unlike other uses of the same word
in other contexts. So I will distinguish God’s responding to a prayer, on
the one hand, from God’s answering a prayer, on the other hand. If
God simply says “No” to a petitionary prayer, then I will count this as
a case of God’s responding to the prayer, but not as a case of God’s
answering the prayer. In order for God to answer a prayer, as I will use
this expression, it is necessary that God bring about the object of the
prayer, that which was requested by the petitioner. So according to
my use, all cases of answered prayer are cases of God’s responding to
prayer, but not all cases of God’s responding to prayer are cases of
answered prayer.6
5
See the discussion in Veber 2007, pp.178–9, for example.
6
I recognize that there is space in between God’s answering a prayer by
providing what was requested, on the one hand, and God’s simply replying
“no,” on the other hand. For example, if I ask God to win the lottery so that
I can pay my debts, and in response to my prayer, God provides instead a big tax
refund based on some prior government mistake, then this should be counted as an
answer to prayer as well. I will ignore this complication in what follows for the sake
of simplicity, but of course it is important to note that God’s answers to petitionary
prayers need not be restricted to the exact descriptions under which petitioners
request things.

This means that St Paul’s description of God’s refusing to grant his
request to remove a “thorn in the flesh” would count as a case of
God’s responding to a prayer, but not a case of God’s answering it,
according to my terminology (see 2 Corinthians 12:7–9). Of course, if
God responds to a prayer without answering it, this doesn’t mean that
one should not feel grateful for God’s response—it might even be the
case that God did not answer the petitionary prayer because answer-
ing it would not be good for us.7
There are several positions that one might hold concerning answered
petitionary prayer. For instance, one might hold that no petitionary
prayers are answered, either essentially or contingently, or that only
certain types of petitionary prayers are answered. In order to make a
list of available positions here, one would need to supply a typology
of petitionary prayers, which I will do in chapter 2, section 2.1. Of
course, it is also possible to be agnostic, either with regard to the
effectiveness of all petitionary prayers or with regard to some types but
not others. So the number of possible positions that one might hold
here is rather large. I will return to the idea of answered petitionary
prayer in chapter 2, where I will try to provide a precise account of
this concept. First, though, I will explore the main positions that
traditional theists hold concerning divine providence, and then I will
provide a classification of challenges and defenses.
1.3 Divine Providence

According to traditional theism, God is all-powerful and all-knowing.
Also, God did not create the world on a whim—there is a divine
purpose for creation, a providential plan that is unfolding as the world
7
For more on the question of gratitude, see Davison 2012, chapter 7; for more
on prayers of thanksgiving, see chapter 9, section 9.4. As an anonymous reviewer
has pointed out, there could be other reasons why God might say “no” to a
petitionary prayer, and it might be difficult if not impossible for us to know
which reason is in play in specific cases. The author of the book of James may be
talking about this here: “You do not have because you do not ask God. When you
ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend
what you get on your pleasures” ( James 4:2–3, New International Version). For
more on unanswered prayers that would be bad for us, see the discussion of Flint in
chapter 2, section 2.3.
moves through time. In the most basic sense, one exercises providence
over something just in case one exercises control over it, based upon
knowledge, for good purposes.8 So God’s providence involves three
elements: power, knowledge, and good purposes.
With regard to power and providence, it is helpful here to consider
the traditional theistic view of creation, which involves three different
things. First, there is creation out of nothing, which refers to God’s
freely bringing the world into being at the beginning of time. Accord-
ing to this first aspect of creation, the world would not have existed at
all if God had not brought it into being. Second, there is conservation,
which refers to God’s sustaining the world in being from moment to
moment. According to this second aspect of creation, the created
world does not exist of its own accord, and would fall into nothingness
if it were not supported by God at every moment. Third, there is
concurrence, which refers to God’s cooperating with the activities of
every created thing. According to this third aspect of creation, even
the basic powers of created beings cannot be exercised without God’s
causal cooperation, such as the ability of fire to heat something, the
ability of animals to move, and the ability of human beings to choose.9
With regard to knowledge, although traditional theists agree that
God knows every necessary truth, they disagree about the extent of
God’s knowledge concerning the contingent future (if indeed the
future is contingent, since not every traditional theist holds that it is).
They agree that God knows everything that can be known,10 but
disagree about what can be known. For example, according to the
position known as Open Theism, if created persons will perform free
actions11 or omissions in the future, then nobody can know about
them in advance, not even God. This is because those free actions
and omissions are yet-to-be determined; at present, there is no fact
of the matter concerning which way such free agents will decide in
8
For more on the notion of providence, see Davison 1999b.
9
For more on this three part view of creation, see Morris 1988 and Freddoso
1991; for more on freedom, see chapter 3, and for more on responsibility, see
chapter 7.
10
Here I ignore the view that God chooses not to know certain things (see
Lucas 1970 and Pinnock 1986, for example), since it strikes me as incoherent.
11
In the libertarian sense—for a discussion of this, see chapter 3, section 3.2.

12
the future. This means that in creating a world containing free
creatures, God took various risks, not knowing exactly how things
would turn out.
By contrast, there are traditional theists who hold that God exists
outside of time altogether, and so sees all events in time simultaneously
in the eternal present. According to this view, God does not really
foreknow what free creatures will choose to do or to omit, because one
foreknows something only if one knows it before the fact, in time. Instead,
God eternally knows what each person will do or omit to do at every
time; for this reason, often this position is described as Eternalism.13
Finally, proponents of Molinism14 claim that God does know the
future in all of its detail, including any contingent parts, based upon
other things that God knows. In order to explain how this view works,
it helps to draw some distinctions. On the one hand, there is God’s
natural knowledge, which concerns necessary truths that are beyond
God’s control. On the other hand, there is God’s free knowledge,
which concerns contingent truths that are within God’s control. In
between these two kinds of knowledge, according to the Molinist view,
lies God’s middle knowledge, which concerns contingent truths that are
beyond God’s control. The most important elements of middle know-
ledge, from the point of view of divine providence, are truths con-
cerning what every possible creature would freely do (or omit to do) in
every possible situation.15 If God possesses this middle knowledge,
then on the basis of God’s free knowledge of which situations will
become actual, God can infer with certainty what free creatures will
do in the future. So according to Molinists, what God knows about
the future free choices of creatures depends on what they would
12
Here I ignore a different strategy for defending Open Theism (see Davison
1991b), which admits that there is a fact of the matter about future free choices,
but insists that nobody can know such things, not even God. For defenses of Open
Theism, see Rice 1985, Basinger and Basinger 1986, Pinnock 1986, Basinger et al.
1994, Hasker 1989 and 2004, and Sanders 1998.
13
See Timpe 2005, e.g.; for defenses of God’s timeless eternity, see Stump and
Kretzmann 1981, Leftow 1991, and Helm 1988.
14
Molinism is named after Luis de Molina, the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit
theologian who first clearly articulated this position: see Molina 1988.
15
Here I am using the word “free” in the incompatibilist’s sense—see chapter 3
for further discussion.
choose—and although this is something that God knows, ultimately it
is not something that is up to God.16
In comparing these three positions, it is helpful to ask the following
question, which often arises in discussions of petitionary prayer: in
order to answer a prayer, must God perform a miracle?17 In order to
avoid technical debates about the nature of miracles, which could take
us far afield, let us simply stipulate that a miracle is an event that is not
part of the natural course of events. From the point of view of Open
Theism, assuming that a petitionary prayer is offered freely, it seems
safe to say that God could not have known in advance that it would be
offered. So God could not have arranged the world in advance in
response to the petitionary prayer, in order to ensure that the thing
requested in the prayer would occur as part of the natural course of
events. So if the thing requested was not part of the natural course
of events, and God brings it about in response to petitionary prayer,
then it looks like a miracle.
On the other hand, if the thing requested happened to be part of
the natural course of events, then it need not be a miracle at all from
the point of view of Open Theism. One might wonder, though,
whether the occurrence of the thing in question would be a mere
coincidence, and not an answer to prayer. It seems to me that the
Open Theist could say that there are two possible cases here, depend-
ing on the answer to this question: Would God have brought about
the thing requested, at least in part because it was requested, had it not
been part of the natural course of events? If the answer here is “yes,”
then it seems appropriate for the Open Theist to count this as a case
of answered petitionary prayer.18 If the answer here is “no,” then it
16
Even though God knows what you will do in the future, according to this
picture, it is still up to you. In fact, when you make a free choice, you have the
ability to do something such that were you to do it, God would have always known
something different from what he knows in fact. (This is often described as having
“counterfactual power” over the content of God’s knowledge: for further discus-
sion, see Flint 1998.) For defenses of the middle knowledge position, see Craig
1987, Flint 1998, and Molina 1988.
17
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the consideration of this
question.
18
For a more detailed account of the notion of answered prayer, see the
extended discussion in chapter 2.

seems like a coincidence that the thing requested occurred after the
petitionary prayer was offered, in which case this would not count as a
case of answered prayer. So the Open Theist need not say that all
answered prayers involve miracles after all.
By contrast, there is a sense in which the Eternalists and Molinists
would both claim that God could arrange the natural course of events
so that they included those things God knew would be requested in
petitionary prayer. In the case of Eternalists, God would know from
eternity which petitionary prayers would be offered, whether they
would be offered freely or not.19 In the case of Molinists, God
would know via middle knowledge what all persons would freely do
in any situation in which they could be placed, and God would know
which situations in which they would be placed, so God would know
which petitionary prayers would be offered.20 So Eternalists and
Molinists are not committed to the claim that all answered prayers
require miracles.
Which position is the correct one, the Open Theism view, the
Eternalist view, or the Molinist view? Traditional theists disagree
sharply about this, and there is no reason to think that the controversy
will be resolved any time soon; despite my previous work in this area,
I am anxious not to enter into these disputes here, so I will try to avoid
making any assumptions about the extent of God’s knowledge wher-
ever possible. Where necessary, I will remind the reader that there are
at least three different approaches to divine providence, depending on
these three different accounts of God’s knowledge.
However, it is important to note that traditional theists recognize
that God’s action is limited not just by God’s knowledge but also in
other ways.21 For instance, God cannot do that which is logically
impossible (such as create a plane figure that is a round square),
God cannot do that which is contrary to essential moral perfection
(such as engage in cruelty for its own sake), and God cannot do that
which is contrary to what God has promised in the past. There are
also things that God could do, but will not, because they do not fit into
19
For a helpful account of this that includes prayers for the past, see Timpe
2005.
20
For a much more detailed account of this idea, see Flint 1998.
21
See the discussion in Hoffman and Rosenkrantz 2012, for instance.
God’s providential plan for the world. In order for a specific petition-
ary prayer to be a viable candidate for being answered by God, then,
it must not request something that violates any of these restrictions—
speaking rather elliptically for now, we might say that there must be
space among God’s reasons for the offering of the petitionary prayer
to play the appropriate role in order for it to be answered.22
This means that many popular assumptions about petitionary
prayer are simply mistaken. Many people assume, for instance, that
since God is all-powerful, God can answer any coherent petitionary
prayer. They also assume that the offering of petitionary prayers
automatically offers God a strong reason to answer those prayers,
but this need not be the case—it depends on the circumstances.
Finally, people often assume that whenever the object of a petitionary
prayer comes to pass, the prayer in question has been answered, but as
we will see, this is not necessarily the case, either.
At this point, we are in a position to explain the nature of challenges
and defenses concerning petitionary prayer.
1.4 Challenges
In the history of debate concerning the pointlessness of petitionary
prayer, a number of challenges have been developed, where a chal-
lenge is an argument designed to show that some link in the chain of
things required for prayers to be answered cannot be satisfied for some
reason. Challenges vary along two dimensions. First, they vary with
regard to the scope of their conclusions. Some challenges, for example,
target only those petitionary prayers that are directed at the welfare of
other persons, whereas other challenges target only those petitionary
prayers that concern the past. I will call such challenges domain-specific
in scope. By contrast, some challenges target petitionary prayer in
general, without any restrictions; these challenges I will call unrestricted
in scope.
Second, challenges vary with regard to their basis. Some are based upon
claims concerning the natural world, some are based upon claims con-
cerning created persons, and still others are based upon claims concerning
22
I will develop a much more detailed account of this idea in chapter 2.

God. In what remains of this section and the next one, I will illustrate these
different types of challenge. My brief discussion here is not intended to
provide an exhaustive catalog of challenges, but I will discuss the most
prominent types. In later chapters, I will discuss in detail those challenges
that I regard as most serious, and therefore deserving of more detailed
attention.
First, let us consider challenges based upon claims concerning the
natural world. Typically, these challenges allege that something nat-
ural prevents the answering of petitionary prayers with regard to the
restricted domain of created persons and other events in the natural
world. For example, someone might claim that every event in the
natural world is determined by prior events plus the laws of nature, so
that not even God can answer petitionary prayers related to created
persons or the natural world. Since the advent of quantum physics in
the twentieth century, according to which there is indeterminacy in
nature, this kind of challenge has lost a great deal of appeal (see
Earman 1986 and Hoefer 2010, for example). A slightly different
natural-world-based challenge to petitionary prayer would assert
that whether or not it is deterministic, the natural world is a closed
system into which God cannot intervene, miraculously or otherwise.
Although this view has received some support from theological circles,
philosophers of religion have argued persuasively that the concept of
God’s acting in the world is perfectly coherent, so I will not dwell on
this line of challenge, either.23
Created-person-based challenges to petitionary prayer are argu-
ments for the conclusion that something about created persons pre-
vents the answering of petitionary prayers. These can be either
unrestricted or domain-specific in scope. For instance, in discussing
the question whether God would fail to aid one person in order to
teach something to someone else, David Basinger argues that it would
be morally inappropriate for God to use the life of one person as a
means to the end of instructing another (Basinger 1983, pp.30–2, 34).
This line of argument shows that the idea of human dignity could
provide the basis for a domain specific challenge to petitionary prayer
23
See the articles in Morris 1988, Russell et al. 1993, 1996, 2002, Russell and
Hallanger 2006, and the discussions in Brümmer 2008 and Plantinga 2011.
(although this would not strike me as a particularly compelling
challenge—for further discussion, see chapter 6, section 6.3).
Others have developed arguments that point in the direction of
an unrestricted form of a created-person-based challenge to peti-
tionary prayer. For instance, Richard Swinburne claims that “if God
answered all prayers for the removal of bad states of affairs promptly
and predictably, that would become evident,” and this would be
bad because it would eliminate the “epistemic distance” between
ourselves and God. He thinks that such distance is necessary in
order for us to have a free choice between good and evil, otherwise
we would be like the child whose mother is watching, for whom
the temptation to do wrong is “overborne”: “The more uncertainty
there is about the existence of God, the more it is possible for us to be
naturally good people who still have a free choice between right and
wrong” (Swinburne 1998, pp.118, 206–7). Although Swinburne him-
self defends the practice of petitionary prayer for other reasons (see
section 1.5 below), it is easy to see how one might turn his arguments
into an unrestricted, created-person-based challenge to petitionary
prayer (although this would not be a very plausible challenge, in my
opinion).
A very different kind of created-person-based challenge concerns
not the concept of answered prayer per se, but rather what we can
know about answered prayer. As we will see, epistemological consid-
erations appear to undermine some of the most popular defenses of
petitionary prayer offered in the literature to date, so I will postpone
discussion of these considerations until chapters 4 and 5.
A final set of created-person-based challenges has to do with the
motivation to pray and the choice of one’s object of petitionary prayer,
given the net impact of all of the other challenges and the teachings of
one’s religious tradition. Since this set of issues will be the focus of
chapter 9, I will postpone discussion of this kind of challenge also.
By contrast, divinity-based challenges to petitionary prayer are the
oldest and most common ones. Under this heading, one can find
appeals to divine providence, knowledge, impassibility, freedom,
and benevolence. In chapters 3 and 6, I will discuss in detail challenges
based upon divine freedom, rationality, goodness, and love. So here
I will discuss only those divinity-based challenges that stem from other
considerations.

John Calvin famously held that God’s providence is so complete
and detailed that everything that happens in the world is not just
known with certainty but also determined from eternity:
From furthest eternity, [God] ruled on what he should do, according to
his own wisdom, and now, by his power, he carries out what he decided
then. So we maintain that, by his Providence, not only heaven and
earth and all inanimate things, but also the minds and wills of men are
controlled in such a way that they move precisely in the course he has
destined. (Calvin 1987, p.74)
To be fair, one might fully accept this view of providence and still
defend the importance of petitionary prayers by arguing that God has
ordained that certain things will come about only as a result of offered
prayers (which themselves are ordained by God to be offered).24 But
many people would see here instead a challenge to petitionary prayer,
since God’s ruling from eternity is doing all of the work in determining
what happens, without any independent contribution on the part of
the petitioners.25 For traditional theists who are theological determin-
ists like Calvin, this is a serious challenge to the idea that our petition-
ary prayers could make an independent contribution to the character
of the world. But many traditional theists these days are not theo-
logical determinists or, if they are, they are not much troubled by such
challenges to petitionary prayer, so I will not discuss this argument
further.
In a slightly different vein, God’s knowledge can be seen as gener-
ating an unrestricted challenge to petitionary prayer. If God already
knows the future, for instance, then how can petitionary prayer make
a difference? The future, after all, is just the set of things that will
happen. If God knows the future in all of its detail, then it seems that
there is no room for petitionary prayers to be effective: either the thing
requested in prayer is something that God already knows will come to
be, or it is something that God already knows will not come to be, and
24
This is roughly how Stump interprets St Thomas: see Stump 1979 (in Timpe
2009, pp.406ff ), and see the follow-up discussion in Basinger 1983, pp.27–8.
25
For arguments concerning a closely related theme, see the discussion of
responsibility for answered petitionary prayer in chapter 7.
either way, it looks like the prayer can make no difference (see Cohn-
Sherbok 1989, p.103).
However, it is extremely controversial to say that complete divine
foreknowledge precludes freedom or contingency in general; intense
debate concerning this question in the past thirty years or so has failed
to produce any kind of consensus. In my humble opinion, there are no
sound arguments for the conclusion that God’s complete knowledge
of the future would preclude freedom or contingency in the world.
Since I have nothing new to add to these debates, I will not discuss
them further here.26
Finally, traditional theists have often said that God is both immut-
able (cannot change) and impassible (cannot be affected by anything
external). These ideas are related to one another, but not identical: if
God is immutable, then God is impassible. But just because God is
impassible, it does not follow that God is immutable—God might be
able to change without being affected by any external source. If God is
both immutable and impassible, though, it seems that no petitionary
prayers are effective, because they cannot make a difference to God.
This challenge is clearly unrestricted in scope.
A number of responses to this challenge are available to traditional
theists. Some have argued that there are independent reasons for
saying that God is neither immutable nor impassible. For example,
if God is both compassionate and forgiving, this seems to require
being responsive to the actions of others, in which case perhaps we
should not say that God is immutable or impassible after all (see
Wainwright 2010). A different response would involve characterizing
the concepts of divine immutability and impassibility so that they do
not rule out the effectiveness of petitionary prayers. This is an inter-
esting philosophical project in its own right, but its prospects for
success fall beyond the scope of this brief survey of challenges.27
A third response would be to argue that petitionary prayers make a
26
For interesting discussions of this question, see Fischer 1992, Borland 2006,
Zagzebski 2011, and Swartz 2004. Brümmer argues that divine timelessness per se
poses a distinct and insuperable challenge to petitionary prayer (2008, p.47), but
provides insufficient detail to be convincing.
27
See the discussions in Creel 1985, Wainwright 2010, Brümmer 2008, and
Leftow 2011.

difference not by changing God, in the sense of causing God to be
different than before, but instead by bringing it about that God has
always known that the prayer would be offered.28
This completes my brief survey of challenges to petitionary prayer.
In later chapters, I will consider more challenges in detail, and
consider how traditional theists might respond to them. But before
closing this chapter, it seems important to describe the other side of
the debate, namely, defenses of petitionary prayer.
1.5 Defenses of Petitionary Prayer

A defense of petitionary prayer is an argument for the conclusion that
it is possible that petitionary prayers be effective.29 Typically, a
defense of petitionary prayer will argue that God has good reasons
for withholding certain goods from created persons unless petitionary
prayers are offered for them, but the nature of these reasons will vary
considerably from defense to defense. In order to be successful, the
premises of such an argument need not be known to be true, but they
must be plausible. In general, we can say that the more plausible the
premises, the stronger the defense.
In addition, petitionary prayers are often regarded as important
when they request aid for other persons, especially in serious situations
(often these are called intercessory prayers). A really successful defense
of petitionary prayer would explain why one might expect God to
answer petitionary prayers on behalf of others when significant things
are at stake. As before, my discussion in this section is not intended to
provide an exhaustive catalog of defenses, but I will mention all of the
prominent types in the literature to date, and I will discuss some of
them in detail in later chapters. Generally speaking, we can distin-
guish two main types of defense.30
28
See the brief appeal to timelessness in Stump 1979 (reprinted in Timpe 2009,
p.405), and the discussion in Flint 1998, pp.222ff.
29
Plantinga famously distinguishes theodicies (which attempt to specify God’s
actual reasons for permitting evil) from defenses (which attempt to specify what
God’s reasons for permitting evil might possibly be): see Plantinga 1974b, p.28.
30
For a similar distinction regarding theistic responses to the problem of evil,
see Tooley’s essay in Plantinga and Tooley 2008.
First, deontological defenses argue that God is justified in withholding
certain goods unless and until petitionary prayers are offered because
God is morally required to do so, regardless of the consequences.
For example, Basinger discusses the view that human freedom is so
valuable that God cannot intervene in the lives of created persons in
certain ways without being invited to do so (and in any case, not very
often31). In a similar vein, Vincent Brümmer argues that the “two-way
contingency” required for efficacious petitionary prayer is also an
essential part of having a genuine personal relationship, the sort of
relationship with God to which free, created beings seem entitled in
virtue of their nature as persons.32 Finally, Daniel Howard-Snyder,
Frances Howard-Snyder, and Alexander Pruss argue that unless spe-
cial exclusions occur, when someone asks God for a good thing,
this gives God a reason, all by itself, for responding favorably to the
request.33
By contrast, most defenses of petitionary prayer are consequentialist
defenses, which argue that God is justified in withholding certain
goods unless and until petitionary prayers are offered because of the
consequences at stake in the situation. For example, in her ground-
breaking article on this subject, Eleonore Stump argues that God uses
petitionary prayer as a kind of buffer in the divine–human friendship,
in order to prevent God’s spoiling or oppressively overwhelming a
created person.34 Brümmer argues that petitionary prayer is an essen-
tial ingredient for developing the ability to see God’s action in
the world and prevents a depersonalization of the divine–human
relationship.35 Michael Murray and Kurt Meyers argue that God’s
requiring petitionary prayers helps to prevent idolatry, increases
gratitude, teaches us things about God’s purpose and nature, and
creates interdependence and the sharing of needs among members of
31
See the discussion of Stump 1979 in Basinger 1983, pp.30–2.
32
Although these are not exactly his words: see Brümmer 2008, chapter 1;
similar arguments appear in Geach 1969, p.88, and Adams 1987, pp.22–3.
33
Howard-Snyder and Howard-Snyder 2010 (pp.47–51) endorse the argu-
ment in Cupit 1994; see also Pruss 2013, p.16.
34
See Stump 1979 (reprinted in Timpe 2009, pp.407–11).
35
See Brümmer 2008, chapter 5, and Brümmer 1984, p.47, cited in Murray
and Meyers 1994, p.323.

36
a community. Finally, Richard Swinburne, Isaac Choi, Nicholas
Smith, Andrew Yip, and the Howard-Snyders all argue that petition-
ary prayers give created persons more responsibility for their own
well-being and the well-being of others, which God correctly believes
is a good thing.37 Rather than examining these defenses in detail here,
I will postpone discussion of them until later chapters, where they can
receive the attention they deserve.
At this point, we are in a position to examine in more detail the
nature of petitionary prayer itself, and to take a closer look at what it
means for a prayer to be answered. This is the topic of chapter 2, to
which we may now turn. In later chapters, I will present new versions
of various challenges, including one based on divine freedom and
rationality (in chapter 3), and explore epistemological concerns (in
chapters 4 and 5) because of the implications they have for other
defenses. I will also refine and explore a challenge based upon divine
goodness (in chapter 6). To date, the contemporary philosophical
literature on petitionary prayer has tended to favor the development
of defenses rather than challenges, but as I shall argue, nearly all of
these defenses face serious if not crippling obstacles. (I will also argue
that with a little modification, some of these obstacles can be over-
come.) Chapter 9 will be devoted to various practical challenges and
defenses, prayers of gratitude, and the nature of faith.
36
See Murray and Meyers 1994 and Murray 2004; Choi makes a similar point
about learning things about God through answered prayer in Choi 2003, p.12.
37
Swinburne 1998, p.115, Choi 2003, pp.9–10, Smith and Yip 2010, pp.1–2,
Howard-Snyder and Howard-Snyder 2010, pp.51ff.; an earlier version of this idea
also appears in Allen 1972, pp.2–3.
2
Petitionary Prayer Characterized
2.1 Types, Tokens, and Parts

It is helpful to distinguish petitionary prayer types, which are general
kinds of petitionary prayer, from petitionary prayer tokens, which are
specific actions performed by particular persons at definite places and
times. A single petitionary prayer type might be offered at different
times and places, for example, but this is not possible for petitionary
prayer tokens, which are non-repeatable, singular occurrences.
Petitionary prayer tokens involve at least three components. To
illustrate them, let’s use the example described in the Introduction to
this book, in which I prayed for my son Drew’s safe return. First, there
is the petitioning subject, the one who makes the request.1 In this case,
I am the petitioning subject. Second, there is that which is requested,
which I will call the object of the petitionary prayer.2 In this case, the
object of the prayer was my son Drew’s safe return. Third, there is the
action of the subject’s requesting that something or someone actualize
the object, whatever it might be. In this case, the action was my silent
mental action, directed at God, requesting that God return Drew
safely to me.
When we distinguish petitionary prayer tokens from one another,
we appear to use the same strategies that we use to individuate actions
1
As St Thomas Aquinas says, petitionary prayers are acts of reason, so only
certain kinds of creature are capable of offering petitionary prayers; see the
discussion of commands and requests below (and also Summa Theologiae 2a2ae,
question 83, article 11, respondeo).
2
I use the vague expression “object” here in order to accommodate the fact
that petitionary prayers can involve requests for just about anything, including
substances, events, states of affairs (even impossible ones and ones that have
already obtained or failed to obtain), etc.
Petitionary Prayer Characterized 25

3
in general. But how do we individuate petitionary prayer types?
Some prayers are confident and others are hesitant, some are verbal
and others are silent, some are public and others are private, etc. So
what do we mean when we say that two different people have offered
the same petitionary prayer, as we often do? If you pray confidently
and verbally and publicly for world peace, and I pray hesitantly and
silently and privately for world peace, then it seems clear that these are
tokens of the same type of petitionary prayer. By contrast, if you pray
confidently and verbally and publicly for world peace, and I pray
confidently and verbally and publicly for the healing of the sick, then it
seems clear that you and I do not offer the same type of petitionary
prayer. This shows that our ordinary way of individuating petitionary
prayer types tracks only the object of the request; differences involving
what we might call the accidental elements of a petitionary prayer
token (namely, its mode, method, and context) are not sufficient by
themselves to distinguish two prayer tokens with regard to type.
Sometimes a petitionary prayer is such that simply by offering the
prayer, its object thereby comes to be actualized. As D. Z. Phillips
says, in such cases, the offering of the prayer is “not external” to the
way in which the object comes to be:
One cannot distinguish here between the asking for and the receiving,
as one can between the asking for, and the receiving of, a loan. To ask
God for something in the above examples is already to have begun
receiving. To ask in prayer to overcome a weakness is to begin over-
coming it. (Phillips 1981, p.125)
Under this heading, Phillips himself includes prayers for greater faith,
increased devotion, and the overcoming of envy.4 I will call petition-
ary prayers whose objects are actualized by the offering of the prayers
alone “self-answering” in order to distinguish them from prayers in
which the object of the prayer is distinct from and not guaranteed
by the offering of the prayer all by itself. Although they are very
3
See Davidson 1963, Goldman 1970 and 1971, Thomson 1971, McCullagh
1976, Bratman 1978, Chisholm 1982, Dretske 1988, Mackie 1997, and Davison
1999a.
4
Phillips 1981, pp.124–6. One might wonder about some of these examples,
but I will not discuss their merits here.
interesting in their own right, since self-answering petitionary prayers
do not generate the interesting philosophical puzzles that non-self-
answering petitionary prayers do, I will not discuss them further in
this book.
It is helpful to draw yet another distinction, this time in terms of
objects requested by petitionary prayers. It is not easy to draw a sharp
distinction here, but I will use the phrase “self-directed” to refer to
a petitionary prayer whose object primarily involves one’s own
self, “other-person-directed” to refer to a petitionary prayer whose
object primarily involves another person or persons, and “non-person-
directed” to refer to a petitionary prayer whose object is neither one’s
own self nor any other person.5 Of course, the objects requested by
petitionary prayers can also be characterized in more or less specific
ways, as we will see in chapter 7 in connection with responsibility-
based defenses.
As we saw in chapter 1, different challenges arise for different kinds
of petitionary prayers, and some defenses apply in a straightforward
way to some types of petitionary prayers, but not to others. Exploring
these relationships in detail is one of the main tasks to be accomplished
in this book. But first, it is important to get clear about the nature of
answered prayer in general.
2.2 Answered Prayer

When should we say that a given prayer token, offered by a
certain person at a certain time and in a certain place, has been
answered by God? Many discussions of petitionary prayer in the
literature have ignored the complexities involved in providing an
adequate answer to this question. Suppose that someone prays for
an event to occur at a given time, and that it occurs at that time.
Clearly this is not sufficient for God’s having answered the person’s
prayer, because it could be a coincidence that the event occurred after
the person prayed for it—God might not have brought about the
5
For earlier ancestors of the taxonomy provided here, see Basinger 1983, p.25,
and Murray 2004, p.246.

6
event in response to the prayer at all. So we can set aside what we
might call a pure correlation account of answered prayer, because it
requires too little.
Consider instead a counterfactual dependence account: a person’s
prayer for some event is answered by God if and only if had the person
not prayed for it, the event in question would not have occurred. Most
discussions of petitionary prayer in the literature endorse or assume
something like the counterfactual dependence account, but it is not
satisfactory, either.7 On the one hand, the counterfactual dependence
requires too much. Imagine for the sake of the argument that I pray to
be healed from a serious illness, and that God heals me primarily
because I prayed for this. But suppose that as it happens, had I not
prayed for this, then you would have prayed for the same thing in my
place, and God would have answered your prayer by healing me in
exactly the same way. Clearly we should not say that my petitionary
prayer was not answered by God in the actual sequence of things just
because the recovery in question would have happened even if I had
not prayed for it. So in order for a prayer to be answered, it is not
necessary that if the person had not prayed for the event in question,
then it would not have occurred.8
6
Some will say that since God brings about everything that happens, in one
way or another, apparent coincidences are merely apparent, and this kind of case
should be viewed as a case of answered prayer; for discussion of a closely related
idea, see section 2.5 below, which concerns Pruss’s notion of omnirationality, and
section 4.1. Here and in the remainder of the book, I speak as if God’s decision
process has stages that occur sequentially in time, but this is a dispensable
convenience—without changing the argument, we could imagine instead that
God sees from eternity or knows by middle knowledge what a person will or
would pray, and takes this into account when deciding what to do.
7
For instance, see Geach 1969 (p.88), Stump 1979 (reprinted in Timpe 2009,
p.402), Hoffman 1985 (p.21), Swinburne 1998 (p.115), Forrest 1998 (p.43),
Murray 2004 (p.243), Basinger 2004 (p.255), Veber 2007 (pp.179–82), Brümmer
2008 (chapter 30), and Smith and Yip 2010 (pp.4–5). Stump 1997 contains a
slight twist, according to which “as a result of the prayer God does what he
otherwise might not have done” (p.581). The exception to the rule here is Flint,
who sees that a counterfactual account is inadequate as it stands: Flint 1998,
p.227, fn.22.
8
The structure of this counterexample is due to Harry Frankfurt’s well known
attack on what he called the principle of alternate possibilities: see Frankfurt 1969.
On the other hand, the counterfactual dependence account also
demands too little. Suppose that I pray for something to happen, and
it does, and it would not have happened if I had not prayed for it to
happen. This is not sufficient for saying that my prayer was answered,
because there is more than one way in which it might be true that the
event in question would not have happened had I not prayed for it to
happen. For example, it might be the case that the event in question
was caused by the very act of praying, without being a self-answering
prayer. Lawrence Masek provides an example of this in the following
passage, which is about helping distant victims of a hurricane:
Perhaps my prayer for the hurricane victims makes me more aware of
their suffering, which leads me to donate money to help them. My
friend might see this action and donate money, and his friend might see
his action and do likewise. Hence, my prayer can lead to comfort for
the hurricane victims that would not have occurred without my prayer.
(Masek 2000, p.279)
If something like this were to happen, then it would be true that the
event in question would not have happened had I not prayed for it.
But in this kind of case, we should not say that my prayer was
answered by God, since the very act of praying for the victims
would have led to comfort for the hurricane victims all by itself,
even if God did not exist.9 So in order for a prayer to be answered,
it is not sufficient that had the person not prayed for the event in
question, it would not have occurred.
2.3 Changing the Circumstances

Thomas P. Flint recognizes the insufficiency of counterfactual depend-
ence for answered prayer. Although he does not offer an alternative
characterization per se, he offers a “tenable defense” designed to explain
why God might not answer prayers for apparently good things, at least
in some cases.10 Flint’s discussion of prayer is part of a larger project
9
For a discussion of conditional statements with impossible antecedents, see
Davison 2012, chapter 7.
10
A tenable defense, according to Flint, includes premises that are least plaus-
ible, unlike mere or minimal defenses (which can include premises that are possible
but actually false: see Flint 1998, pp.222ff.).

designed to illustrate how a Molinist view of providence can shed light
on a number of traditional theological concerns.11 As we said in
chapter 1, according to the Molinist picture, God knows every true
subjunctive conditional proposition of the form “If person S were in
circumstances C, then S would freely perform action A,” for every
possible person S, circumstances C, and action A. Molinists also hold
that God knows these propositions pre-volitionally, which means that
their truth or falsity is independent of any choice on God’s part. As we
noted in chapter 1, such propositions are called items of “middle
knowledge,” since they are contingent truths beyond God’s control,
located in between God’s natural knowledge (of necessary truths beyond
God’s control) and God’s free knowledge (of contingent truths within
God’s control).
Flint argues that if God possesses middle knowledge, then we can
explain how petitionary prayer might make a difference to God’s
actions in the world by changing the circumstances in which God
acts. For example, in the Christian scriptures, St Peter is described as
telling a man lame from birth to rise up and walk (see Acts of the
Apostles, chapter 3). Flint suggests that this involves an implicit peti-
tionary prayer on St Peter’s behalf, and that the offering of the prayer,
together with the public command from St Peter (“In the name of
Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise and walk”), changes the circumstances in
such a way that God now has a number of reasons to heal the lame
man that would not have been present had the prayer not been
offered.12 He suggests that for all we know, God could have possessed
the following items of middle knowledge: if this situation were to occur
and St Peter were to pray freely for the healing of the lame man and
God were to heal him, then the lame man would freely praise God,
onlooker X would listen to St Peter more seriously, and onlooker
Y would become a Christian. Then he suggests that God might also
11
These concerns include papal infallibility, prophecy, petitionary prayer, and
praying for the past; see Flint’s elucidation and defense of Molinism (Flint 1998,
part III).
12
Or better yet: “the prayer, by becoming part of the causal history of the
world, becomes part of the circumstances in which future actions take place. In a
sense, then, it might be more accurate to say that prayer helps to create those
circumstances than to say that it changes them” (Flint 1998, p.222, fn.16).
know, in the same way, that if this situation were to occur and St Peter
were to pray freely for the healing of the lame man and God were
to refrain from healing him, then the lame man would turn from
God, onlooker X would decide to ignore St Peter, and onlooker
Y would decide not to follow Christ (Flint 1998, pp.224–5). In this
way, Flint argues, St Peter’s prayer could change the circumstances in
which God acts, and thus make a clear difference to what happens in
the world.13
As noted above, Flint is not trying to characterize the concept
of answered prayer in general. So he does not provide a general
principle that would enable us to decide which cases of changing the
circumstances in which God acts should be classified as cases of
answered prayer and which should not. But it is instructive to examine
his example closely, because it will help us to clarify the nature of
answered prayer. This is because in Flint’s case, it seems to me, God is
responding not to the object of St Peter’s implicit petitionary prayer,
but rather to those accidental elements that explain the change in
circumstances. It is helpful here to follow St Thomas and to compare
prayers, which are requests, to commands.14
Suppose that a person is commanded to perform some particular
action, and that the person subsequently performs this action. All by
itself, this is not sufficient for saying that the person has obeyed the
command. In order to say the person has obeyed the command, we
need to know why the person performed the action. For example, if
you were in a Chinese airport and a police officer yelled at you to take
cover (“Wéixiǎn, pāxià!”) and you did, it might be the case that you
performed this action not because it was commanded by the officer,
but because you were frightened and did not know what else to do.
This interpretation would be confirmed if we discovered that you did
not speak a word of Chinese, and hence did not understand what the
officer said. In this case, the accidental elements of the command (the
13
The clear difference, to be precise, is that in the scenario imagined, St Peter
has counterfactual power over God’s freely healing the lame man: see Flint 1998,
pp.226–7.
14
“Prayer is an act of reason, and consists in beseeching a superior; just as
command is an act of reason, whereby an inferior is directed to something”
(ST 2a2ae, question 83, article 11, respondeo).

manner, the appearance of the person commanding, and the place)
explain why you acted as you did, but the object of the command
played no role in explaining your behavior, since you were not
aware of it.
In order for an action to count as obeying a command or answering
a request, then, we should insist that the action in question be
explained, at least in part, by the actor’s recognition of the object of
the command or request, plus the desire to comply with it.15 This
requirement is not satisfied with respect to God’s healing of the lame
man in the case that Flint describes because the changes in circum-
stances that provide God with reasons to act stem from St Peter’s
confident and public command to the lame man, not from the object
of his implicit prayer to God. Let me explain.
Although Flint represents St Peter’s “act of calling upon God to
cure the lame man” by using the letter “P,” suggesting that St Peter
here performs a unified, single action, it is important to distinguish the
two parts of this action. The implicit prayer to God is distinct from the
public command to the lame man. We can see that this is so if we note
that one could have occurred without the other (and vice versa). But
only the public command to the lame man results in changing the
circumstances by providing God with the reasons to act that Flint
mentions; the implicit prayer to God is not doing any work in this
situation, at least as described.
In order to see that this is so, notice that St Peter’s companion,
St John, could have offered privately a petitionary prayer token of the
same type that St Peter offered (that is, a petitionary prayer with the
same object, the healing of the lame man) before St Peter issued his
public command, but John’s silent prayer would not have changed the
circumstances in any of the ways described by Flint.16 Or consider a
different variation on this case: suppose that neither St John nor
St Peter offered a petitionary prayer, but despite this, St Peter rashly
commanded the lame man to rise up and walk, without asking God to
15
For a related point, see the helpful discussion of one person’s replying to
another in Alston 1985, especially pp.156–7.
16
Of course, the offering of the silent prayer would have changed some circum-
stances, especially those related to the petitioner: every difference makes a differ-
ence, no matter how small.
heal him. This would have changed the circumstances by providing
God with the same three reasons to act that Flint mentions in his
original case, but without involving any petitionary prayers.
In private correspondence, Michael Rea has defended Flint against
this line of criticism in the following way:
Why think that the circumstances could be changed in the same way
apart from the offering of prayer? And why think that that matters,
anyway? Compare: The sergeant yells “March!”, so the soldiers march.
But now you point out: Had the same “change in circumstances” been
made in another way—perhaps by a captain yelling “March!”—the
soldiers would have marched anyway. How does it follow from this that
the soldiers don’t march in response to the sergeant?
Like my comparison of Flint’s original case with the case of St Peter’s
rash command, Rea’s analogy involves two things that change the
circumstances in much the same way. But in both of Rea’s cases (the
case of the sergeant yelling “March!” and the case of the captain
yelling “March!”), the soldiers act in response to the object of the
command in question—they recognize this object, and perform the
action in question because they desire to follow the command. By
contrast, in Flint’s original case, God’s healing of the lame man is not
a response to the object of St Peter’s prayer at all, but rather a
response to the change in circumstances due to the public command
(“In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, (rise and) walk!”). So Rea’s
analogy of the marching soldiers fails to be sufficiently similar to the
original case.17
More importantly, even if Rea is right to insist (in further private
correspondence) on the general claim that “it doesn't follow from the
fact that X doesn’t depend counterfactually on Y that X isn’t a
response to Y,” the problem remains in Flint’s original case that the
object of the petitionary prayer does not seem to play any role in
changing the circumstances. Although St Peter’s public command to
the lame man certainly changes the circumstances and thereby pro-
vides God with a reason to act, this is not sufficient for saying that this
is a case in which God answers St Peter’s implicit prayer. So it is not
clear that this is a case in which petitionary prayer per se makes a
17
Thanks to Joshua Smith for helping me to achieve clarity on this point.

difference. The moral we can draw from the examination of this case
is that in order for a person’s prayer to be answered, God must bring
about the thing in question at least in part because the person prays
for it, where this involves God’s recognition of the object of the prayer,
and the desire to respond to it, not just the accidental elements that
happen to accompany it.
2.4 Pruss and Divine Omnirationality

Alexander Pruss has a clever suggestion that would solve our difficulty
here by providing a clear description of the conditions in which we
should regard a petitionary prayer as having been answered by God.
He proposes that God is omnirational in the sense that God performs
every action on the basis of “all and only those reasons that are
unexcluded (good) reasons for that action” (Pruss 2013, p.4). By an
“unexcluded” reason, Pruss means a reason that has not been
excluded by some higher-order reason.18
Pruss provides four arguments for the conclusion that God is
omnirational in this sense (Pruss 2013, pp.6–7ff.). The fourth one is
the one that interests us here, namely, that God’s omnirationality
solves two problems, a problem about the nature of explanation (in
the philosophy of science) and a problem concerning both answered
prayer and theodicy (in the philosophy of religion). With regard to
petitionary prayer, here is how the explanation goes:
A request for a good always provides the requestee with a reason to
provide the good, at least barring some exclusionary reason.…. There-
fore, if a good is requested from God, and God provides the good, then
unless the request based reason was excluded, the good was provided at
least in part because it was requested. So all we need to know is that x
prayed for a good and x obtained the good to know that the good came
at least in part due to prayer.
(Pruss 2013, pp.16–17, italics in the original)
18
For example, an authoritative command or a valid promise to do X would
provide me with a higher-order reason to do X that would exclude my personal
preference not to do X from figuring into my deliberations, if I am rational; here
Pruss relies on Raz 1990 (see Pruss 2013, pp.2–3).
Pruss’s account of omnirationality generates an elegant solution to our
questions.19
But even if God is omnirational, as Pruss argues, it is not clear that
we should agree with this account of answered prayer. To see why,
notice that his account implies that if God has conclusive reasons for
bringing about some good thing E independently of one’s petitionary
prayer for E, God’s bringing about E would still count as an answer to
one’s prayer (Pruss 2013, p.17). This means that Pruss’s account does
not explain the sense in which a petitionary prayer must make some
kind of difference in order to count as having been answered by
God.20 I agree with him that we would require too much to insist
that a petitionary prayer is answered only if God brought about the
requested good solely because of the prayer. But we should not say that
the offering of a petitionary prayer’s being among God’s reasons for
bringing something about is sufficient all by itself for saying that the
prayer is answered; there is room in between these two extremes. Let
me explain this point with reference to some hypothetical examples.
Suppose that my neighbor asks me to trim my tree, since it hangs
over his driveway, and I agree to do so. Imagine that I wanted to do
this anyway, in order to impart a shapely shape to my tree, but
suppose also that today I am enjoying a friendly relationship with
my neighbor, so that his request gives me a new, strong reason to trim
the tree. We could say that this new reason to trim the tree exists just
because the neighbor asked me to do so. It is not the case that the
neighbor’s asking me to trim the tree provides me with a new reason
for trimming the tree that involves someone or something else—for
example, it is not the case that my neighbor’s asking me to trim the
19
In fairness to Pruss, it should be noted that his claim is not really about whether
a prayer is answered or not, but instead about whether or not something occurs at
least in part due to prayer. Pruss has indicated that he thinks that asking whether or
not a prayer has been answered is analogous to asking whether or not one thing is the
cause of another, which is a question that has no interest-independent answer (in
personal correspondence). As indicated in section 1.1, though, it seems important to
me to clarify what counts as an answered prayer, since people often claim that their
prayers have been answered and sometimes appeal to this as evidence for God’s
existence.
20
See the discussion of a similar point in Geach 1969, p.88 and Timpe 2005,
p.417.

tree gives me a new reason to do so because I want to irritate my wife,
who finds it frustrating when I respond immediately to my neighbor’s
requests but ignore hers. Let’s say that a complete list of all of my
reasons for trimming the tree includes my desire to comply with my
neighbor’s request, my aesthetic preference with regard to the shape
of the tree, and nothing else.
Now suppose that as before, my neighbor asks me to trim my tree,
since it hangs over his driveway, and I agree to do so. Imagine again
that I wanted to do this anyway, in order to impart a shapely shape to
my tree. But this time, suppose that although my neighbor’s request
does give me an additional reason to trim the tree, as it did in the first
case, this time it gives me a very, very slight reason. This is because
today I am largely indifferent to my neighbor’s preferences. So my
neighbor’s request hardly plays any role at all in my decision to trim
the tree; had my neighbor not made this request, I would have
trimmed the tree today anyway, on the basis of my aesthetic prefer-
ence alone. Once again, let’s agree that a complete list of all of my
reasons for trimming the tree includes my desire to comply with my
neighbor’s request, my aesthetic preference, and nothing else.
Clearly there are important differences between these two cases. In
the first case, for instance, it seems plausible to say that I trim the tree
in response to my neighbor’s request. This is because although I have
independent reasons for doing so, the neighbor’s request plays an
important role in my decision to trim the tree. By contrast, it is not
plausible to say this about the second case. But the complete list of all
of my reasons for trimming the tree is the same in both cases. So
having the desire to comply with someone’s request among one’s
reasons for doing something is not sufficient, all by itself, for saying
that one’s action counts as a response to that request.
What we really need here, in order to explain the difference
between these two cases, is not just a complete list of reasons, but
something like a weighted list of those reasons, where this indicates the
relative importance of reasons in terms of the role that they played in
contributing to the agent’s decision. Roughly speaking, we could
stipulate that the weighted list of reasons in the first case would
apportion 50 percent of the weight to my aesthetic preference and
50 percent of the weight to my desire to comply with my neighbor’s
request. By contrast, we could stipulate that in the second case, the
weighted list of reasons in the second case would apportion 95 percent
of the weight to my aesthetic preference, and only 5 percent of the
weight to my desire to comply with my neighbor’s request. This would
explain more clearly why the trimming of the tree counts as a response
to my neighbor’s request in the first case, but not in the second case.
Now consider a different kind of situation. Suppose that the mayor
of a city has decided to repeal a city tax for a variety of reasons. Let’s
say that there were some reasons in favor of keeping the tax, but the
mayor judged that reasons in favor of repealing the tax were much
stronger. The reasons that carried the most weight in the mayor’s
decision were reasons concerning what would be best for the city as a
whole, reasons having to do with negative effects of the tax on the local
economy, the cost of collecting the tax, and fairness. The mayor also
happened to receive a letter from a private citizen asking that the
tax be repealed for reasons having to do with this person’s own
financial situation, which the mayor did read, but since the mayor is
a good one, the letter did not carry much weight at all in the mayor’s
decision. In fact, had the letter never been delivered to the mayor, the
mayor would have made the same decision on the basis of the very
same reasons.
In this case, the mayor did what the author of the letter requested,
but not because that person requested it. Of course, a complete list of
all of the mayor’s reasons for deciding to repeal the tax might include
reference to the letter, but this does not imply that the mayor’s action
counts as answering the request contained in the letter. In order for
that to be true, the request would need to play a more important role
in the mayor’s decision. In fact, if we wanted to understand why the
mayor acted, we would probably prefer an incomplete, weighted list
of reasons to a complete, unweighted list, since the weighted list would
enable us to explain why the mayor decided to repeal the tax, whereas
the complete, unweighted list would not.
Finally, consider the following case. Imagine that God has created a
material universe that contains no sentient being at the present
moment, but will contain sentient beings, along with other structures
and relations too wonderful to describe, at some point in the very
distant future. Let’s stipulate that all of God’s strong reasons for
preserving this material universe in existence now have do with
future developments, not with presently existing things. However,

100
this material universe does contain 10 non-sentient, microscopic
living creatures, including amoeba A. Assuming that God has a reason
to preserve in existence things like amoebae,21 and assuming that God
is omnirational in Pruss’s sense, we can say that a complete list of all of
God’s reasons for sustaining in existence the material universe at the
present moment includes the fact that A exists. But the existence of
A carries very little weight among God’s reasons for doing this. In fact,
had A divided moments ago into distinct amoebae A1 and A2, then
there would have been a different complete list of all of God’s reasons
for sustaining in existence this material universe now, a list that made
no reference to A at all (since A would no longer exist now, having
divided into A1 and A2, neither of which is identical to A). But the
incomplete, weighted list of all of God’s strong reasons for sustaining
in existence the material world would have remained the same, since
all of those reasons concern the future. So the fact that A’s existence is
included in the complete list of all of God’s reasons for sustaining in
existence this material universe is not sufficient for saying that A’s
existence plays any interesting role in explaining why God does this
rather than not.
Finally, suppose that God has a million strong reasons to sustain in
existence the current world, the world in which you and I exist right
now. Imagine that I pray that God would continue to sustain in
existence this current world for the next five minutes, and that God
does so. Should we say that God has answered my prayer? Had I not
prayed, the incomplete, weighted list of all of God’s million strong
reasons for sustaining in existence the current world would have
remained unchanged (although the complete list of all of God’s
reasons would have changed, if Pruss is right). Since my prayer carries
virtually no weight in God’s decision to sustain in existence this current
world over the past five minutes, we should not say that God has
answered it, contrary to Pruss—his account requires too little.22
21
For a defense of the claim that everything that exists is intrinsically valuable
to some degree, see Davison 2012.
22
Again, I hasten to point out that Pruss’s account was not originally intended
to explain whether or not a petitionary prayer has been answered (a question for
which, he suggests, no interest-independent answer is available). In helpful per-
sonal correspondence, Pruss has suggested that one could account for a weighting
2.5 The Contrastive Reasons Account
Like Pruss’s account, a successful account needs to convey the idea
that the offering of the petitionary prayer is among God’s reasons, so
that God acts in part, at least, because of a desire to grant the request.
Like a counterfactual dependence account, a successful account of
answered prayer needs to explain the sense in which petitionary
prayer makes a difference. But if Pruss’s account requires too little
and a counterfactual dependence account requires too much, how can
we find the middle ground?
A successful account needs to make clear the role that the petition-
ary prayer plays in explaining why God brought about the object
of the prayer rather than not doing so. Explanations that tell us
why one thing happened rather than another are called contrastive
explanations. Unlike some other kinds of explanations, contrastive
explanations need not be causal explanations, and do not require
that the thing to be explained is necessitated by the thing that explains
it.23 Consider what I will call the contrastive reasons account of
answered prayer, which seems to provide the best account of those
conditions in which it is the case that a petitionary prayer has been
answered by God:
CRA: S’s petitionary prayer (token) for an object E is answered by
God if and only if God’s desire to bring about E just because
S requested it plays an essential role in a true contrastive explan-
ation of God’s bringing about E rather than not.
A few words of explanation are in order. First, CRA says that God’s
desire must play an essential role in a certain explanation. Let’s say that
something X plays an essential role in an explanation of Y if and only
of reasons (by saying that God did A in response to C to a degree proportional to

how much relative weight C holds to the on-balance reason in favor of doing
A provided by God’s other reasons). But without further clarification, this would
not answer our question, either, as I will explain in the next section.
23
I have nothing to add to the extensive literature concerning what, in general,
constitutes a successful explanation, but I will say more about this in discussing
Clarke’s views in section 3.2.

if the explanation would fail to explain Y if X were deleted from it.24
Second, CRA says that God’s desire to bring about E just because
S requested it must play a certain role in explaining why God brought
about E rather than not. It would not be sufficient to say simply that
S’s act of requesting object E plays this role because of the problem
mentioned above in connection with Flint’s example, in which the
accidental elements of the token of requesting were doing all of the
work. It must be the case that God desires to bring about E just
because S requested it, but CRA does not require that this desire
explain all by itself why God brought about E rather than not. In
addition to God’s desire to bring about E just because S requested
it, there can be other reasons for bringing about E that figure prom-
inently in the complete weighted list of God’s reasons.
In fact, we can distinguish a number of possible ways in which the
offering of a petitionary prayer might figure among God’s reasons in
cases of answered prayer:25
(a) God had no reasons for bringing about E independently of S’s
petitionary prayer, so God’s bringing about E was due solely to
S’s prayer.26
(b) God had other reasons for bringing about E independently of S’s
petitionary prayer, but not conclusive ones, and S’s prayer for
E “tipped the scales” to make God’s total reasons in favor of
bringing about E conclusive.27
24
So God knows whether a given explanation of God’s action is successful or
not, and hence whether or not a given prayer was answered; whether or not
human beings could know this as well is the topic of chapters 4 and 5.
25
My list is based on personal correspondence with Pruss (for which I am
grateful) and his discussion of the possibilities in Pruss 2013 (pp.17–18), but I omit
the case in which God has conclusive reasons for bringing about E independently
of S’s prayer, since that strikes me as a clear case in which the prayer has not been
answered by God (see the discussion of this point in section 2.4 above).
26
Whether or not this kind of case is really possible depends on a number of
questions that are beyond the scope of this inquiry, but I list it here for the sake
of completeness; see Pruss 2013, p.17.
27
For a discussion of the question of divine freedom and reasons in relation to
petitionary prayer, including a discussion of the contrastive explanation of free
action, see chapter 3.
(c) God had other reasons for bringing about E independently of S’s
petitionary prayer, but not conclusive ones, and S’s prayer was
necessary but not sufficient, in those circumstances, for God’s
bringing about E (because God’s total reasons favoring E were
not conclusive, despite the additional reason provided by S’s
petitionary prayer).
By requiring that God’s desire to bring about E just because S
requested it be an essential part of a weighted list of God’s reasons
that explains contrastively why God brings about the object of that
prayer rather than not, CRA requires more than Pruss’s account.
However, CRA requires less than the counterfactual dependence
account rejected above. To see this, return to the case described
earlier that led us to abandon it: I prayed to be healed from an illness
and God healed me primarily because I prayed for it, but had I not
prayed for it, you would have done so instead, and God would have
answered your prayer in my place. (So it is false that had I not prayed
to be healed, God would not have healed me.) In this case, God’s
desire to bring about the healing just because I requested it plays an
essential role in a true contrastive explanation of God’s bringing it
about: if we were to delete God’s desire from this explanation, then it
would no longer explain God’s healing me, since God did this pri-
marily because I prayed for it. Of course, in the alternative sequence,
in which you offer the prayer for healing in my place, God’s desire to
bring about the object of your prayer would play the same role in a
true contrastive explanation of God’s bringing about the healing that
God’s desire to bring about the object of my prayer plays in the actual
sequence. But in the actual sequence, since you did not in fact pray for
my healing, God’s desire to bring about the object of your prayer
cannot play any role in the actual explanation of God’s bringing about
my healing. So the counterfactual dependence account requires too
much in this case, whereas CRA correctly classifies it as a case of
answered prayer.28
28
CRA is also compatible with the general contours of Flint’s account, accord-
ing to which petitionary prayer changes the circumstances in which God acts by
providing God with a new reason for doing so (see section 2.3 above).

CRA correctly diagnoses a number of other hypothetical cases as
well. For instance, consider the following one:
(d) S’s petitionary prayer provided God with some reason to bring
about E, but God had independent and conclusive reasons for
bringing about E; God’s desire to bring about E just because
S requested it did not play an essential role in any true contrastive
explanation of God’s bringing about E. However, it could have
easily been the case that God’s independent reasons for bringing
about E were not conclusive, and if that had happened, then
God’s desire to bring about E just because S requested it would
have “tipped the scales” to make God’s total reasons in favor of
bringing about E conclusive.
This is close to a case of answered prayer, because God’s desire to
bring about E just because S requested it could have easily played the
right kind of role in explaining God’s bringing about E. But since it
did not, in the actual sequence of things, CRA correctly classifies this
as a case in which S’s prayer for E was not answered by God.29
To be sure, CRA does not provide sharply defined criteria that
would enable us to classify all possible cases with certainty and preci-
sion. But this strikes me as a virtue of the account, rather than a flaw;
this is because we can devise hypothetical borderline cases in which it
is not clear what should be said, so that an account that implied that
such borderline cases are not possible would be disconfirmed as a
result. For example, consider the following case:
(e) God had a conclusive reason for bringing about E independently
of S’s petitionary prayer, but S’s petitionary prayer for E provided
God with a second conclusive reason in favor of bringing about E.30
29
Could God have more than one conclusive reason for bringing about E, for
example by having one conclusive reason based on S’s petitionary prayer and
another based on independent reasons? It is hard to see how this could be because
if God has a conclusive reason for bringing about E because of S’s petitionary
prayer, then this reason will stem from God’s desire to bring about E just because
S requested this, but I will consider this next.
30
Something like this case is mentioned in Stump 1979 (reprinted in Timpe
2009, p.404).
There seems to be no reason, in principle, to claim that God could not
have more than one conclusive reason for doing something, so this
case seems to be a possible one. In this case, is CRA satisfied? In other
words, does God’s desire to bring about E just because S requested it
play an essential role in a true contrastive explanation of God’s
bringing about E rather than not?
It is not clear to me what to say about this case. On the one hand,
there can be more than one true contrastive explanation of a single
event, for a variety of reasons. So the fact that God has a conclusive
reason for bringing about E independently of S’s petitionary prayer
does not, all by itself, preclude the existence of a true contrastive
explanation of God’s bringing about E in which S’s prayer plays an
essential role. On the other hand, just because God could have more
than one conclusive reason for doing something, it does not follow that
God could act equally on the basis of more than one conclusive
reason. I suspect that there might be a fact of the matter with regard
to which of the two conclusive reasons in question actually moved
God to bring about E, in which case we would need more information
in order to classify this case correctly. But that is all I can say; intuition
simply fails me here. Perhaps others will think differently about this.
As indicated earlier, though, this does not strike me as a problem with
CRA—we should expect there to be rare cases in which it is not clear
what to say.
In conclusion, CRA escapes all of the objections described above in
connection with other accounts, and meets all of the desiderata
outlined in our discussion so far. In what follows, I will generally
assume that it is correct, although not all of my arguments will
presuppose this. However, one might wonder whether it is reasonable
to expect contrastive explanations of God’s action in the way that
CRA requires, especially if God is free in some libertarian sense. This
is the subject of chapter 3, which is devoted to divine freedom critiques
of petitionary prayer, to which we may now turn.
3
Divine Freedom Challenges
3.1 Determinism
In this chapter, I will explore in detail several challenges to petitionary
prayer based upon considerations related to divine freedom. These
are unrestricted, divinity-based challenges involving metaphysical issues.
They have been formulated clearly only recently, and have received
little attention in the literature to date. Even if these challenges are not
decisive in the end, a careful investigation will help us to understand
some of the important issues at stake in the larger debate. In order to
frame the issues properly, it will be helpful first to introduce some
standard terminology from the recent history of debates concerning
human freedom and determinism. (There are finer ways of drawing
the distinctions I am about to draw, but these will be adequate for our
purposes here.)
What is it for something to be determined? As G. E. M. Anscombe
points out (Anscombe 1971), the basic idea is that the available
possibilities are somehow narrowed down to one. But what is it that
does the narrowing? Here I will follow Peter van Inwagen’s idea that
determinism is the thesis that “the past determines a unique future”
(van Inwagen 1983, p.2). But how exactly is the past supposed to
do this?
Some people define determinism in terms of universal causation,
the thesis that every event has a prior, sufficient cause,1 but this is
inadequate—these two claims are logically distinct. As van Inwagen
notes, in order to derive determinism from the thesis of universal
causation, we would need to assume some additional, controversial
1
For example, see Fischer 1979, Aune 1985, and Cornman, Lehrer, and
Pappas 1987.
premises, including a highly disputed claim about the kind of necessity
involved in causation.2 It is also far from obvious that we could derive
the thesis of universal causation from determinism.3
If we can’t define determinism in terms of universal causation, can
we appeal instead to some kind of ideal predictability? It seems not.
Alvin Goldman has argued persuasively that predictability in principle
is not necessary for something’s being determined.4 And John Martin
Fischer has noted (Fischer 1982) that predictability in principle is not
sufficient for something’s being determined, since something can be
inevitable even though it actually comes about in an indeterministic
way. So the project of characterizing determinism in terms of some
kind of ideal predictability seems doomed to fail as well.
Van Inwagen’s preferred approach involves the notion of the state
of the world at an instant, a notion that is subject to the following two
constraints: the fact that the world is in a certain state at a certain time
implies nothing about the state of the world at any other time, and
observable changes in the world must be reflected in changes of the
state of the world.5 The notion of a law of nature also figures prom-
inently in van Inwagen’s definition of determinism. Although he has
no definition of this concept to offer, he does specify some constraints:
2
Van Inwagen, pp.4–5; Young 1975, p.44, makes essentially the same point.
3
For example, an occasionalist (for whom God alone is the only “true cause”:
Malebranche 1980, p.450) might claim that although every event involving cre-
ated substances has a cause, the causes of such events are not to be found in created
substances themselves, but rather in God’s free creative activity alone (which
activity is not itself caused by anything else). This is a kind of determinism without
universal causation (as that view is customarily formulated).
4
Given the possibility of certain kinds of restrictions on the “mode” of predic-
tion: see Goldman 1970, chapter 6.
5
Van Inwagen 1983, pp.58–9. He restricts this to the state of the physical world
(p.58), but perhaps this is not wise (couldn’t there be natural, non-physical sub-
stances whose activities are determined?). The first constraint is similar to the
notion of a conjunction of the so-called “hard facts” about a time, which would
have the effect of screening out God’s foreknowledge of future contingents (if God
has it): see Adams 1967 and 1983, Chisholm 1981, Freddoso 1983, Fischer 1983,
Hoffman and Rosenkrantz 1984, and Plantinga 1986. The second constraint
implies that the state of the world is not the same as the quantum-mechanical
state of the world (van Inwagen 1983, p.60).
Divine Freedom Challenges 45

first, laws of nature are propositions whose lawhood does not depend
upon what “scientists or others happen to believe or happen to have
discovered,” and laws of nature constrain human abilities so that “It is
necessary that, for every [human] person x and every proposition y, if
y is a law of nature, then x cannot render y false.”6
Given these characterizations, we can understand van Inwagen’s
proposed definition of determinism:
For every instant of time, there is a proposition that expresses the state
of the world at that instant; [and] If p and q are any propositions that
express the state of the world at some instants, then the conjunction of p
with the laws of nature entails q. (van Inwagen 1983, p.65)7
This is a characterization of unrestricted, universal determinism, but
we can easily modify it to arrive at a restricted notion of past-to-future
determinism:
DET: If P is a proposition expressing the state of the world at any
time prior to time T, and L is the conjunction of all laws of nature,
then E is determined to happen at time T if and only if (P & L)
entails the proposition that E happens at T.
This approach has become something like a standard characterization
of determinism in the literature, and it is sufficiently accurate for my
purposes, so I will assume it in what follows.
3.2 Freedom
Suppose that a particular person S performs an action A at a time T;
under what conditions would such an action constitute a free action?
We can use our characterization of determinism (DET) to classify
6
van Inwagen 1983, pp.6, 63. However, laws of nature need not be true
propositions; the falsity of a proposition counts against its status as a law of nature
only if its falsity is “due entirely to the mutual operations of natural things, and not
if it is due to the action of such an ‘external’ agent upon Nature” (p.14).
7
One problem faced by this definition involves the possibility of God’s miracu-
lous intervention in nature (see Flint 1987, p.424); there are a number of ways to
deal with this difficulty, but since it will not bear upon the arguments to follow,
I will ignore this complication.
possible answers to this question. Consider the following claim, which
expresses incompatibilism about freedom and determinism:
IC: If a person S’s action A is determined to be performed, then S’s
action A is not free.
Compatibilists about freedom and determinism, by contrast, accept the
denial of IC, namely, that it is possible that there be a free action that
is determined to be performed. Consider now the following claim:
AD: Every action of every existing person is determined.
Hard determinists endorse both AD and IC, and hence claim that
there are no free actions. By contrast, soft determinists endorse AD
and the denial of IC. Libertarians endorse IC and, believing that some
actual persons perform free actions, they deny AD.
Now consider the following claim:
FDO: Person S freely performs action A at time T only if S could
have performed a different action B at T in those very same
circumstances.8
This claim, which concerns the Freedom to Do Otherwise, is not entailed
by IC (although traditionally, those who have endorsed IC have also
endorsed FDO). Hence we should distinguish two kinds of incompa-
tibilist about freedom and determinism: strong incompatibilists, who
accept both IC and FDO, and weak incompatibilists, who accept IC
and reject FDO. Weak incompatibilists often support their position by
appealing to cases like those first described by Harry Frankfurt, in
which a potential intervener A is poised to prevent another person
B from doing something, yet A need not interfere at all because
B performs the desired action on his or her own. In such cases, a
person seems to act freely without being able to do otherwise.9
8
It is no easy matter to specify precisely the circumstances that are relevant
here. For one thing, if God has foreknowledge of God’s own actions, it must not be
included in the circumstances in question; see Flint 1983, Davison 1991b, and the
references in fn. 9 above.
9
See the landmark discussion in Frankfurt 1969, which spawned a huge
literature; for the tip of the iceberg, see Fischer 1982, Fischer and Ravizza 1998,
Rowe 1991, and Davison 1999a.

Given these distinctions, we should also distinguish strong libertarians
(namely, those strong incompatibilists who are libertarians) from weak
libertarians (namely, those weak incompatibilists who are libertarians).
More distinctions could be drawn here, but these are sufficient for our
purposes.
3.3 Two Views of Divine Freedom

In response to the problem of evil, many prominent traditional theists
have followed St Augustine by arguing that God has good reasons for
creating finite persons who are able to choose freely between good and
evil in some strong libertarian sense.10 But what should traditional
theists say about divine freedom?
Wes Morriston asks why it is necessary for human beings to possess
the ability to choose between good and evil in order to be praise-
worthy or blameworthy, but not for God (see Morriston 2000). Here
we must be careful to distinguish two different possibilities, though—
the possibility that God has the ability to choose between good and
evil, on the one hand, and the possibility that God has the ability to
choose between more than one good alternative, on the other hand.
Those who claim that God is free in the strong libertarian sense are
committed to the latter, but not to the former, and it is open to them
to argue that God’s praiseworthiness does not require the former.11
Traditional theists have often claimed that God is free in the strong
libertarian sense, at least with regard to some actions. For example,
during the middle ages, most Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theolo-
gians insisted that the creation of the world was free because God
could have refrained from creating any material world at all. They did
this, in part, to distinguish traditional theism from the highly influen-
tial account of emanation developed by Plotinus, on the one hand,
and the growing influence of Aristotelian accounts of causal necessity
in nature, on the other hand (see Burrell 1993). This has led a number
of authors to declare that God’s freedom in creation is a matter of
10
For example, see Plantinga 1974a and 1974b, Swinburne 1979, van
Inwagen 1988 and 2006, and Augustine 1993.
11
For further discussion of this point, see Rowe 2004, Bergmann and Cover
2006, Wierenga 2007, and Howard-Snyder 2009.
orthodox belief for traditional theists (for example, Flint 1998, pp.30,
55, and Leftow 2007, p.195). Here is an argument in this vein from
St Thomas Aquinas, for example:
Accordingly as to things willed by God, we must observe that He
wills something of absolute necessity: but this is not true of all that
He wills. For the divine will has a necessary relation to the divine
goodness, since that is its proper object. Hence God wills His own
goodness necessarily, even as we will our own happiness necessarily.…
[But] since the goodness of God is perfect, and can exist without other
things inasmuch as no perfection can accrue to Him from them, it
follows that his willing things apart from Himself is not absolutely
necessary. (Summa Theologiae, I q.19, a.3, quoted in Garcia 2009)12
This argument is echoed in the First Vatican Council’s condemnation

of the view “that God did not create by his will free from all necessity,
but as necessarily as he necessarily loves himself.”13 Others have
argued that, assuming God is a necessary being, if God could never
do otherwise, then there would be only one possible world, which
seems absurd.14 So there are some impressive reasons for traditional
theists to be strong libertarians with regard to divine freedom with
regard to some actions.
As noted above, weak libertarians typically reject FDO because of
hypothetical cases like those described by Harry Frankfurt. In these
cases, a potential intervener A is poised to prevent another person B
from doing something, but A need not intervene because B performs
the desired action on his or her own. Most people seem to agree that
B acts freely in these cases without being able to do otherwise. But
obviously there could be no such scenario involving the traditional
theistic God in B’s position, since it would be impossible for anyone to
intervene in God’s process of deliberation or action (see Morriston
2000, p.349).
However, many traditional theists reject strong libertarianism with
regard to divine freedom for other reasons. To return to the question
12
For commentary and exposition of St Thomas on this point, see Leftow
2007.
13
First Vatican Council, Session 3, Canon 1.5.
14
Flint 1998 (pp.30, 55), Flint 1983, Garcia 1992 (p.191), Hoffman 1985
(p.27); see also Rowe 2004 and Wierenga 2007.

posed by Morriston: why is the ability to choose between good and
evil necessary in order for human beings to be free or praiseworthy,
but not for God? Perhaps the best reply here involves specifying the
important differences between the two with regard to the origins of
action. Timothy O’Connor argues that for created persons,
There can be no freedom in actions that wholly reflect fixed features of
the nature it was endowed with, or a combination of nature and
nurture. For these factors are ultimately attributable elsewhere.…
Thus, it is crucial to human freedom that we have a wide scope of
options over time. (O’Connor 2005, p.213)15
By contrast, things are different for God. As C. S. Lewis remarks,

Whatever human freedom means, divine freedom cannot mean inde-
terminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. Perfect
goodness can never debate about the end to be obtained, and perfect
wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it.
The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than
Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them—
that His own goodness is the root from which they all grow and
His own omnipotence the air in which they all flower.
(Lewis 1962, p.35)16
So traditional theists also have some reasons to reject strong libertar-
ianism with regard to divine freedom.
The dispute here concerning the nature of divine freedom is a large
and complicated one; I will not try to resolve it here. To cover both
possibilities, I will consider first the idea that God is free to answer a
given petitionary prayer in the strong libertarian sense, which gener-
ates an interesting challenge. Then I will consider the possibility that
God answers a particular petitionary prayer freely, but not in the
15
For similar defenses of the asymmetry alleged here, see Wierenga 2002,
Bergmann and Cover 2006, Talbott 2009, and Timpe 2013; a different explan-
ation of the difference is provided in Mawson 2005.
16
Lewis 1962, p.35; quoted in Talbott 1988 and Wierenga 2007, p.210; see
also Fales 1994. Williams and Visser (2001) and Rogers (2008) find the asymmetry
between divine and human freedom in St Anselm, and Couenhoven (2012) argues
that an Augustinian framework favors a similar conclusion about divine freedom.
strong libertarian sense; this possibility leads to a different kind of
challenge.17
3.4 A Strong Libertarian Challenge

This challenge to petitionary prayer, based upon strong libertarianism
about divine freedom, begins with the claim that although it is possible
to provide true contrastive explanations of human actions performed
in response to requests (where these actions are free in the strong
libertarian sense), it is not possible to provide such explanations for
God’s free actions taken in response to petitionary prayers (where
these actions are also viewed as free in the strong libertarian sense).
Together with the contrastive reasons account of answered petitionary
prayer defended in chapter 2 (CRA), this seems to imply that no
petitionary prayers are ever freely answered by God (in the strong
libertarian sense). Let’s call this the strong libertarian challenge.18
In order to understand this challenge, it will be helpful to start with
a possible objection that one might lodge from the outset. Some
prominent philosophers have argued that it is impossible to provide
true contrastive explanations of any undetermined events, including
free choices in the strong libertarian sense.19 If this is so, then it seems
that this challenge to petitionary prayer cannot even get off the
ground. But Randolph Clarke has argued persuasively that this is
not the case, that true contrastive explanations are actually available
in the case of free human actions.20 After presenting Clarke’s arguments
17
Of course, a hybrid combination is also possible: perhaps God answers some
prayers freely in the strong libertarian sense, and answers others in another way;
I will ignore this possibility in what follows.
18
A less carefully developed version of this challenge appeared in Davison
2009, pp.291–2.
19
Including Thomas Nagel and Robert Kane; see the discussions of their
arguments in Clarke 1996 and O’Connor 2000, pp.92ff. O’Connor argues that
reasons can explain free actions (non-contrastively) without causing them
(O’Connor 2000, chapter 5); see the critical discussion of O’Connor’s account in
Clarke 2003, pp.138–44.
20
Including Thomas Nagel and Robert Kane; see the discussions of their
arguments in Clarke 1996 and O’Connor 2000, pp.92ff. O’Connor argues that
reasons can explain free actions (non-contrastively) without causing them

for this conclusion, I will explain why it is not possible to provide the
same kinds of explanations for God’s free answering of petitionary
prayers.
Clarke identifies a “core view” concerning the nature of casual
explanation that most philosophers of science accept.21 According to
this core view, causal explanation involves providing information
about the causal history of the event to be explained, typically by
citing one or more of the causes in the process that produced it. This
core view, as such, does not preclude the explanation of indetermin-
istic events, including improbable ones.22 For example, suppose that
someone contracts the bubonic plague, is treated with antibiotics, and
survives. Untreated bubonic plague causes death 50 to 90 percent of
the time, but when it is treated with antibiotics, it results in death only
5 to 10 percent of the time. We can explain why this person survived
instead of dying by citing the antibiotic treatment, even though it did
not guarantee survival, and even if the causal processes involved in the
antibiotic treatment are indeterministic (see Clarke 2003, pp.41–2).
Clarke’s account of contrastive explanation begins with the citation
of Peter Lipton’s “Difference Condition”:
“To explain why P rather than Q, we must cite a causal difference
between P and not-Q, consisting of a cause of P and the absence of a
corresponding event in the history of not-Q” (Lipton 1991, p.43), where
a “corresponding event” is roughly “something that would bear the
same relation to Q as the cause of P bears to P” (Lipton 1991, p.44).23
(O’Connor 2000, chapter 5); see the critical discussion of O’Connor’s account in
Clarke 2003, pp.138–44.
21
Clarke 2003, pp.34–7; the example is due to Humphreys 1989 (p.100).
22
Objecting that these explanations do not tell us why things had to happen
involves making a false presupposition in the context of explanation (see Clarke’s
citation (2003, p.36) of David Lewis (Lewis 1986) in this regard). Hitchcock argues
persuasively that reluctance to accept non-deterministic contrastive explanations is
often due to a residual attachment to determinism (to which he refers as a “demon”
to be exorcised: see Hitchcock 1999).
23
Clarke 2003, p. 41. Not every causal difference has contrastive explanatory
relevance, though; the relation in question must also be contrastively explana-
torily relevant. To provide principles that might help to specify what is
explanatorily relevant, Clarke suggests that people generally do what they
Turning now to the explanation of actions by reasons, a successful
contrastive explanation of an action would tell us why an agent
did A rather than B. Borrowing some helpful terminology from
John Martin Fischer, let’s suppose that an agent performs A in the
actual sequence, and would perform B in the alternative sequence
(Fischer 1982). Clarke claims that even if all of the events occurring
prior to A in the actual sequence are numerically the same events as
those in the alternative sequence in which the agent does B instead, all
by itself this does not imply that we cannot provide a contrastive
explanation of why the agent did A rather than B in the actual
sequence. For there may be differences in the two sequences in terms
of relations among these same events, such as differences concerning
which of these events actually caused A and which of these events would
have caused B in the alternative sequence (Clarke 2003, pp.41–2).
For example, Clarke imagines that in the actual sequence, Lisa
chooses to change jobs because prior to her decision, she judges that it
would be better to change jobs, all things considered. Her making this
judgment “causes and bears an explanatorily relevant relation to her
actual decision that that no actual occurrence would have borne to
her deciding not to change, had she made that alternative decision
instead.”24 So it is possible to offer a contrastive explanation for Lisa’s
decision. And this will be the case, Clarke claims, whether or not her
decision was free. By contrast, if she had decided otherwise, then we
could not offer a contrastive explanation of her decision in terms of
her judgment that changing jobs would be better, all things con-
sidered, since in the alternative sequence, this judgment would not
bear an explanatorily relevant relation to her decision.25
judge to be better, and tend to follow the motivationally stronger reasons that
they have: see Clarke 2003, p.46.
24
Clarke 2003, p.43. Clearly Clarke assumes here that not all causation is
deterministic, since he assumes that Lisa could have chosen otherwise in these
circumstances, which include her having all of the reasons she has; I will say more
about this shortly.
25
There might be a different contrastive explanation of her action in that case,
or there may be a non-contrastive explanation in terms of her reasons instead. I do
not assume here that all free decisions can be contrastively explained: see Clarke
2003, p.44, and O’Connor 2000, p.93.

Clarke’s account involves the idea that free actions are (indetermi-
nistically) caused by one’s reasons. This applies in a straightforward way
to event-causal libertarian accounts, according to which free actions are
produced by events involving the agent’s reasons (for example, see van
Inwagen 1983 and Kane 1985). It also applies in a straightforward way
to “integrated” agent-causation accounts like Clarke’s, according to
which an agent’s action is both agent-caused by the agent and event-
caused by the agent’s reasons.26 But it does not apply in a straightfor-
ward way to more traditional agent-causation accounts, according to
which agents agent-cause their actions for reasons, but without those
reasons causing their actions.27 Clarke himself thinks that such trad-
itional agent-causation accounts fail to provide an adequate account of
acting for reasons.28 But rather than take sides in this dispute, let us
suppose that traditional agent-causation theorists would embrace a
non-causal contrastive explanation of actions in terms of reasons, how-
ever exactly that should be spelled out.29
3.5 Divine Action and Contrastive Explanation

Suppose that S prays to God to bring about E, and that God’s desire
to bring about E just because S requested it plays an essential role in a
true contrastive explanation of God’s decision to bring about E; this
satisfies the contrastive reasons account of answered prayer (CRA)
defended in chapter 2. Following Clarke’s account, this means that
26
It is worth noting that although Clarke finds such an integrative account to
be the most plausible, ultimately he is skeptical about the coherence of the notion
of agent causation (see Clarke 2003, chapter 10), and hence cannot rule out the
possibility that libertarian free will is impossible (p.221). Traditional theists typic-
ally embrace the concept of agent causation as applied to God (for example, see
Flint 1998, p.30).
27
For example, see Taylor 1966, Chisholm 1966, Donagan 1987, Rowe 1991,
and O’Connor 2000.
28
Including O’Connor’s (2000) account: see Clarke 2003, chapter 2 and
pp.138–44. By contrast, O’Connor argues that event-causal libertarian theories
cannot explain how agents can determine which available option to choose: see
O’Connor 2000, p.89.
29
O’Connor provides an account of non-causal contrastive explanation for his
non-integrated, agent-causal libertarian account: see O’Connor 2000, pp.93ff.
God’s desire plays a role in explaining God’s decision to bring about
E in the actual sequence that nothing would have played in God’s
decision not to bring about E in the alternative sequence. Finally, let’s
suppose that God is free to bring about E or not to bring about E, in
the strong libertarian sense. Is this a coherent scenario?
Here is the problem: God is essentially rational.30 Whatever it
means to be rational, we should not say that someone is rational
who acts contrary to conclusive reasons. Suppose that R is the sum
total of the reasons on the basis of which God decides to bring about E.
Given what we have said so far, R includes S’s petitionary prayer
requesting E, but may include other reasons also. If R presents God
with a conclusive reason for bringing about E, then it seems that God
must decide to bring about E, in which case God is not free with respect
to bringing about E in the strong libertarian sense.
By contrast, suppose that R does not present God with a conclusive
reason for bringing about E. Since we are supposing that God’s decision
to answer S’s petitionary prayer by bringing about E in the actual
sequence is free in the strong libertarian sense, there must be an
alternative sequence in which God decides not to bring about
E instead. In this alternative sequence, God must be acting rationally
also, since God is essentially rational. Since God’s desire to bring about
E just because S requested it provides God with a reason for bringing
about E in the actual sequence, there must be some other reason (or
reasons) for God not to bring about E, on the basis of which God
decides not to bring about E in the alternative sequence—otherwise,
God would be ignoring a good reason for bringing about E, and for no
good reason, which is incompatible with divine rationality. Let us
suppose that R* is the set of God’s reasons for not bringing about E.
As noted above, in order for God’s bringing about E to count as
answering S’s petitionary prayer, according to CRA, it must be the
case that God’s desire to bring about E just because S requested it
plays a role in explaining God’s decision to bring about E that nothing
would have played in God’s decision not to bring about E in the
30
So the fact that human beings sometimes make irrational decisions
(O’Connor 2000, p.89) or suffer from weakness of will (O’Connor 2000, p.94)
may help to explain human freedom, but not divine freedom; for more on this, see
Mann 1988.

alternative sequence in which God chose instead not to bring about
E. But R* does exactly that: R* explains why God decides not to bring
about E in the alternative sequence, in accordance with God’s ration-
ality. So R* plays the same role in explaining God’s decision not to
bring about E in the alternative sequence that R plays in explaining
God’s decision to bring about E in the actual sequence. This means
that there is no true contrastive explanation of God’s decision to bring
about E rather than not in the actual sequence, which means (accord-
ing to CRA) that God’s decision does not count as an answer to S’s
petitionary prayer after all. This is the strong libertarian challenge to
petitionary prayer.
The strategies that libertarians typically employ to explain how
human action can be both rational and free in the strong libertarian
sense are not useful in this connection. For instance, O’Connor con-
siders (and rejects) Galen Strawson’s claim that if an agent S does not
believe that S’s reasons favor decisively some course of action, then that
course of action would be irrational or at least arbitrary.31 O’Connor
points out that there are at least three different types of situation in
which no single action is clearly rationally preferable to its alternatives:
(1) choosing among alternatives that are equally preferable or equally
reasonable (such as choosing among indistinguishable cartons of milk);
(2) deciding how to resolve a conflict between duty and desire (such as
choosing whether to attend to a friend in need or to devote oneself
excessively to work); (3) choosing in cases where different kinds of
motivations are on a par, including cases in which the agent has
incommensurable values that point in different directions (such as
Sartre’s well-known example of the man who must choose between
fighting in the resistance or staying home to take care of his mother).32
Returning to the case of petitionary prayer again, it is clearly
unacceptable to say that God is deciding how to resolve a conflict
31
O’Connor 2000, pp.89. Strawson’s argument appears in O’Connor 1995,
pp.13–31.
32
O’Connor 2000, pp.89–91; these examples seem to be based upon the
discussion in van Inwagen 1989. O’Connor’s point here is that the agent-causation
libertarian is not committed to the view that our only free choice in life is whether
to act in accordance with reasons or not; see also his discussion of the frequency of
so-called “Buridan’s Ass” cases on pp.101ff.
between duty and desire, since God presumably experiences no such
conflict (O’Connor’s (2)). Could it be instead that God’s decision
whether or not to answer a prayer is a matter of choosing among
alternatives, each of which is equally preferable or equally reasonable
(O’Connor’s (1)), or a matter of choosing between different kinds
of motivations that are on a par, such as cases in which the agent
has incommensurable values that point in different directions (this is
O’Connor’s (3))? It is hard for me to see how the sum total of
God’s reasons could produce ties like this, but let’s suppose that it
is possible.33
Even if this kind of tie among God’s reasons is possible, it will not
help us to escape from the challenge at hand. This is because con-
trastive explanations are simply not possible for free actions involving
the sorts of “toss-up” cases involved in O’Connor’s (1) and (3).34 So we
cannot appeal to the ways in which human free actions can be
contrastively explained in order to explain how God’s decisions
might constitute answers to prayer and be free in the strong libertarian
sense at once. This challenge to petitionary prayer is not a problem for
strong libertarianism generally (as some have claimed to me in private
correspondence). Instead, it stems from the combination of strong
libertarianism about divine freedom, the contrastive reasons account
of answered petitionary prayer (CRA), and God’s essential rationality.
In response to this challenge, a colleague has suggested (in private
correspondence) that the problem can be solved in a straightforward
way, but saying that God chooses freely to adopt a general policy
about answering prayers, and as a result, later follows that policy (but
not freely) as situations arise that fit the policy. This suggestion is
similar to Aristotle’s strategy for explaining one’s responsibility for
events over which one has no control by pointing to earlier voluntary
33
In response to William Rowe’s arguments for the conclusion that God
cannot be free at all (Rowe 2004), Edward Wierenga suggests that God may
have faced this kind of situation in deciding which feasible possible world to
actualize (see Wierenga 2007, pp.214ff.). It seems to me that such occasions
would be very infrequent, though, and in any case, traditional theists would find
it highly problematic to suggest that God is able to answer a prayer only if the
reasons that favor doing so are precisely equal to those that favor not doing so.
34
As Carl Ginet (1989) notes (reprinted in O’Connor 1995, p.79); see also the
discussion in Clarke 2003, p.292.

35
choices that led to those later events. It is worth noting that if either
Eternalism or Molinism were true, there would be no need for God to
adopt such a general policy, because God would know “in advance”
(to use a temporal metaphor) all of the specific cases in which peti-
tionary prayers would be offered. (It should come as no surprise, then,
that the colleague who offered this suggestion is a prominent defender
of Open Theism.)
But this reply does not really resolve the challenge. It is true that
agents can be responsible for things over which they have no current
control in virtue of earlier free actions that led to those later things.36
But being responsible is not the same as being free. If God adopted a
general policy with regard to answering petitionary prayers, and then
a situation arose in which God’s adopted general policy applied,
would God have any choice about whether or not to follow the
general policy adopted earlier? If the answer is yes, then we are
back to the same problem; if the answer is no, then God’s answering
petitionary prayers would not be free. (I will explore this possibility in
more detail in the next section.)
The same colleague has suggested (in correspondence) that when
we consider God’s freedom, we should follow libertarian accounts of
human action by including the idea that an agent not only controls
which option to take in the end, but also controls the weights of the
reasons that factor into the decision.37 This raises a large and inter-
esting question about God’s relationship to the good, a question
I cannot address responsibly here.38 I myself find it exceedingly odd
to imagine that God, who is omniscient, perfectly rational, and perfectly
good, could decide the degree to which a given reason should figure
into a divine decision. Let me explain why, with reference to an
example involving petitionary prayer.
35
This point is often made in the context of discussing Frankfurt-style counter-
examples to the so-called principle of alternate possibilities; see Strasser 1988, Gosselin
1987, Odegard 1985, van Inwagen 1983, Yandell 1988, and Zimmerman 1982 and
1984.
36
For more on degrees of responsibility, including questions about foreseeabil-
ity, see the discussion of responsibility-based defenses in chapter 7.
37
For a helpful account of this idea, see Nozick 1981.
38
But see the discussion of challenges related to divine goodness in chapter 6.
If God is deciding whether or not to answer my petitionary prayer,
and the fact that I requested something is among God’s reasons
answering the prayer, how would God decide how much that specific
reason should weigh in the divine decision? If God could do this, then
there could be two different situations involving petitionary prayer
that were identical in every relevant respect, except that in one case,
God decided to answer the prayer in virtue of having decided to weigh
the petition heavily, whereas in the other case, God decided not to
answer the prayer in virtue of deciding to weigh the petition lightly.
What would explain the difference? Would it be an inscrutable, brute
fact about the divine mind? Wouldn’t this mean that there is an
unacceptable element of luck involved, a tossing of the divine coin?
What would explain the scope of divine discretion in terms of how
high or how low a given reason could be weighed in divine deliber-
ations? These questions do not amount to an argument against the
idea that God could decide how to weigh various reasons before
making a decision, of course, but they do point to some of the
difficulties that suggest themselves in this direction.
I conclude that the strong libertarian challenge constitutes an
unresolved, divinity-based challenge to petitionary prayer for trad-
itional theists who embrace the combination of strong libertarianism
about divine freedom, the contrastive reasons account of answered
petitionary prayer (CRA), and God’s essential rationality. This chal-
lenge is unrestricted in its scope.
3.6 Another Challenge

Of course, as noted above, traditional theists need not embrace strong
libertarianism concerning divine freedom at all, despite the pressures
pointing in that direction. So the strong libertarian challenge, even if it
is successful, does not mean that all petitionary prayers are pointless.
In fact, some might even think that the rejection of strong libertarian-
ism with regard to divine freedom would help a responsibility-based
defense of petitionary prayer to succeed, since responsibility seems to
diminish if a causal chain involves intermediate agents.39 But as
39
For more on responsibility-based defenses, see chapter 7.

Michael F. Zimmerman has shown, this is not necessarily the case—
full responsibility can pass through a causal chain that includes inter-
mediate agents, even agents who are free in the strong libertarian
sense (see Zimmerman 1985).
If traditional theists embrace a less robust view concerning divine
freedom with regard to answered petitionary prayers, though, a
different kind of challenge awaits them. Suppose again that S prays
to God to bring about E, and that God’s desire to bring about E just
because S requested it plays an essential role in a contrastive explan-
ation of God’s decision to bring about E; this satisfies the contrastive
reasons account of answered prayer (CRA) defended in chapter 2.
Instead of supposing that God is free both to bring about E in response
to S’s request and not to bring about E despite S’s request, as the
strong libertarian would say, let us suppose that there is no alternate
sequence in which God decides not to bring about E.
In keeping with the spirit of those traditional theists who deny
strong libertarianism with regard to divine action, is it important to
note that we are not imagining here that God is determined to bring
about E by anything external—instead, we are to suppose that this
decision flows from God’s nature, which is not imposed upon God by
anyone or anything. Also, we need not assume that the sum total of
God’s reasons for bringing about E, including S’s petitionary prayer,
is conclusive—perhaps God can act on less than conclusive reasons.40
As noted in chapter 2, in order to count God’s bringing about E as a
case of answered prayer, CRA does not require that God’s desire to
bring about E just because S requested it explain God’s decision
to bring about E all by itself. God can have additional reasons for
bringing about E, as long as God’s desire to bring about E just because
S requested it plays an essential role in a contrastive explanation of
God’s decision to bring about E. Assuming that God’s decision to
bring about E in response to S’s petitionary prayer is not free in the
strong libertarian sense, a potential petitioner can truly reason in
the following way: if my prayer for E happens to provide God with
the right kind of reason, then God will have no choice but to grant my
40
See section 2.6, and Adams 1972, Pruss 2013, and Rowe 2004 and Wierenga
2007.
petition; if not, then God will have no choice but not to grant my
petition. We might call this the no choice challenge.
The no choice challenge suggests a violation of the divine side of
what Vincent Brümmer has called the “two-way contingency” require-
ment for petitionary prayer, according to which God must be free to
respond to prayer in order for the practice to make sense.41 But
Brümmer’s arguments for this conclusion assume that God is free in
the strong libertarian sense, so they cannot be dialectically useful here—
appealing to them would simply beg the question about the nature of
divine freedom. Although I agree with Brümmer that it is odd to
imagine that God has no choice but to answer someone’s petitionary
prayer, there is nothing incoherent about the idea, and we have seen
that there are serious difficulties in the other direction.
A different worry is that the no choice challenge makes answered
petitionary prayer seem rather like magic: if the spell is cast correctly,
then the effect follows of necessity; if not, not.42 Peter Geach describes
the case of the fictional Maharaja Kehama, whose perfect sacrifices
forced the gods to give him what he wanted, and Geach objects that
traditional theists cannot think of answered prayer along these lines:
“It makes sense to approach God in the style of a petitioner only if one
conceives of God as a rational agent who acts by free choice,” he says,
and clearly intends to endorse strong libertarianism with regard to
divine freedom here.43
But traditional theists need not embrace strong libertarianism with
regard to divine freedom in order to resist the comparison between
answered prayer and magic. There are important differences between
41
Brümmer 2008, chapter 3 (see also Geach 1969, pp.89ff., and Adams 1987,
pp.22–3); in a related vein, some have argued that unless one believes that one’s
petitionary prayer can make a difference to God, then one’s apparent petition is
not really a petition at all (see Howard-Synder and Howard-Snyder 2010, p.46).
42
Phillips thinks that all petitionary prayers designed to influence God’s action
are like magical incantations (see Phillips 1981). See chapter 7 for a discussion of
the petitioner’s responsibility for the results of answered prayer, including the
claim (endorsed in Howard-Synder and Howard-Snyder 2010 p.53) that the
offering of a prayer in the right circumstances is both necessary and sufficient for
the obtaining of a given state of affairs.
43
Geach 1969, p.87. The story comes from Robert Southey’s epic poem, “The
Curse of Kehama” (1810).

a magical spell that works directly on the natural world, on the one
hand, and an answered petitionary prayer, which involves God’s free
agency and perfect judgment, on the other hand. Here traditional
theists who reject strong libertarianism with regard to divine freedom
can appeal to some well-known arguments from compatibilists con-
cerning (human) freedom and determinism, who have cleverly resisted
various incompatibilist attempts to compare determined action to
action that is compelled in various ways by external forces.44
Does it follow, then, that the no choice challenge should not trouble
those traditional theists who reject strong libertarianism with regard to
divine freedom? There is one lingering worry: from a practical point of
view, the no choice challenge might undercut some of the motivation
that people take themselves to have for offering petitionary prayers.
People often assume that it is up to God to answer petitionary prayers,
that the offering of the prayer makes a difference to God’s reasons all by
itself, whether or not anything else is at stake. Based on the no-choice
challenge, though, they could reason as follows, based upon consider-
ations of expected utility: “Since I have no idea whether God’s reasons
line up with what I might request in this case, I have no idea whether
my petitionary prayer could play any role in God’s action, so I will take
the trouble to pray only when I am desperate and the stakes are high.”
Of course, this appeal to ignorance can cut both ways; since I will
discuss practical challenges and defenses in detail in chapter 9, I will
postpone further discussion of this idea until then.
In conclusion, although the strong libertarian challenge is impres-
sive and warrants further attention, in this chapter we were not able to
identify a challenge to petitionary prayer based upon metaphysical
considerations related to divine freedom that included premises to
which all traditional theists are committed. In the next two chapters,
I will set aside metaphysical considerations and turn to epistemo-
logical challenges and defenses. After discussing ethical considerations
in chapter 6, I will return to metaphysical considerations again in
chapter 7, in order to consider carefully responsibility-based defenses
of petitionary prayer.
44
See Dennett 1984, e.g.; also see the discussions in Wierenga 2002 and
Talbott 2009.
4
Epistemological Challenges
4.1 Knowledge and Relevant Alternatives

If God answered petitionary prayers, would people ever know about
it?1 It is important here to distinguish several different questions from
the very beginning: First, could we know, in general, that God answers
petitionary prayers, without knowing specifically which ones? Second,
could we know that God had answered some particular petitionary
prayer at some point in history? Third, could we know that God had
answered some particular petitionary prayer offered by me or by
someone whom I know? Finally, could we be justified in believing
any of these things?
If it is possible for God to reveal things to human beings so that they
come to know what has been revealed, then the answers to our first
two questions seem both obvious and affirmative.2 It falls beyond the
scope of the present study to explore the reasons why people believe
this, but traditional Jews, Christians, and Muslims all seem to agree
that God has revealed that God answers at least some petitionary
prayers, and they also agree on some specific examples.3 They also
agree that God has commanded us to pray in the petitionary way,
perhaps for a variety of reasons.4
1
The discussion in this chapter corrects the oversimplified arguments of
Davison 2009, pp.293–4.
2
The book of Exodus reports, for instance, that God spoke to Moses from a
burning bush that was not consumed. For detailed defenses of the concept of divine
revelation, see Mavrodes 1988 and Swinburne 1992.
3
For more on this, see section section 5.3.
4
The possibility that God may answer one’s prayer is not the only reason given
in the traditions for praying in the petitionary way—for more on this, see chapters
5 and 9.
Epistemological Challenges 63
However, answering these first two questions affirmatively does not,
all by itself, enable us to answer the third question affirmatively. And it
is the third question, not the first two, which weighs heavily in the
minds of those of us who wonder whether petitionary prayer is
pointless for us—we wonder whether God answers petitionary prayers
from persons like us, in the sorts of situations in which we find
ourselves today.5 So I will focus on the third question here, not the
first two. With regard to whether people could be justified in believing
that God has answered some particular petitionary prayer offered by
me or by someone whom I know, I will postpone my discussion of this
issue to chapter 5, in which I consider the bearing of specific religious
teachings on these questions.
Could we know that God had answered some particular petitionary
prayer offered by me or someone whom I know? Returning again to
divine revelation, it seems theoretically possible that God could reveal
directly to someone that a specific petitionary prayer had been
answered. If I heard a voice coming from a burning bush that was
not consumed, for instance, and the voice conveyed information to me
that no natural source could possess, I might be convinced (properly)
that God was revealing something to me. And if God’s voice told me
(truly) that my earlier prayer for something which had actually come
to pass had been answered, then perhaps I could come to know that
God had answered my petitionary prayer. Although this kind of
revelation from God seems possible (I will refer to it as “direct
revelation”), it is very unusual for people to claim that God has
provided it, and the teachings of the central theistic religious traditions
do not lead us to expect it today. So I shall set aside the possibility of
direct revelation from God as a source of knowledge concerning
specific answered petitionary prayer (although I will talk about some
closely related ideas in chapter 5).
Instead, let us focus on a more typical case. Imagine that some
human person, S, prays for God to bring about some event E, and
E in fact occurs. Apart from direct revelation from God, what would
be required in order for S to know that S’s prayer had been answered
5
I will say more about practical challenges and defenses of petitionary prayer in
chapter 9.
by God? So far, we have said only that S prayed for E to occur, and
that E in fact occurred; given only this information, there are a
number of possible explanations of the occurrence of E, of course.
Here are just a few of them:
(a) E was caused by natural forces, but not by any intelligent person
(so S’s prayer was not answered by God).
(b) E was caused by some intelligent person, but not by God (so S’s
prayer was not answered by God).
(c) God brought about E, but not at all because S prayed for it (so S’s
prayer was not answered by God).
(d) God brought about E because S prayed for it (so S’s prayer was
answered by God).
In order for S to know that God answered S’s prayer, a few things
seem clearly necessary.6 First, in order for anyone to know anything, it
must be true. Second, a person must have a belief about something
before he or she can claim to know it. So let’s stipulate that (d) above is
the case, that it is true that God answered S’s prayer for E, and let’s
also stipulate that S believes this.
So far, so good—but true belief is not sufficient for knowledge all by
itself; there is a difference between knowledge and belief that is true
by luck. How might S’s true belief be a case of knowledge? Let us
start with S’s reasons for belief. Apart from direct revelation, why
does S believe that God has answered S’s prayer on this particular
occasion? Perhaps S has observed a simple correlation between the
offering of the prayer and the subsequent occurrence of E. But as
Hume taught us long ago, such a correlation all by itself does not
constitute good evidence of a real connection between two events.7
William Alston, himself a prominent traditional theist, argues that it
would be very difficult to know that divine intervention had occurred
in a particular case:
6
For more on this, see Davison 2003.
7
See Hume 1977, section VII; Confucius appears to have argued that cases of
apparently answered petitionary prayers are actually just coincidences, and that it
is better to see prayers as marking off special occasions rather than seeing them as
effectively changing the world (see Goldin 2011, p.88; thanks to You Bin for
drawing my attention to this point).
Even though divine intervention is possible, it is by no means clear that
it ever does happen....No matter how unusual or outlandish the
occurrence, we cannot rule out the possibility that it was brought
about by natural causes in a way that we do not currently understand....
We can be justified in dismissing the possibility of a naturalistic
explanation only if we have a complete description of the particular
case and a complete inventory of natural causes of that sort of occur-
rence. Armed with that, we might be able to show that there were no
available natural causes that could have produced that result. But
when are we in a position to do that? (Alston 1986, pp.213–14)8
Our question here is not the same as Alston’s, of course, but the
difficulties he raises suggest parallel difficulties for us. We noted
above that there are at least three other possible explanations of the
occurrence of E, namely, (a), (b), and (c). If S cannot distinguish what
actually happened here from what might have happened in the
alternative scenarios, it is hard to see how S’s belief could constitute
knowledge, even if it is true.9
Some traditional theists might object here that Alston’s argu-
ment (and my list (a)—(c) above) involves a dubious assumption
about the number of possible explanations available to S, an
assumption that sets the bar too high for knowing that a petitionary
prayer has been answered by God. They will argue that if trad-
itional theism is true, then in some sense, God is a cause of every
event that occurs, so explanations (a) and (b) can be safely ruled out
by S. They might argue in this way because traditionally, theists
have embraced the doctrines of divine creation, conservation, and
concurrence with the operation of secondary causes.10 So my list of
possible explanations appears to be inflated in number, including
as it does both (a) and (b).
There are several things to say in response to this appeal to univer-
sal divine causation. First, it is important to note that traditionally,
8
Compare this to a similar claim in Swinburne 1998, pp.116–17.
9
Cohn-Sherbok develops a similar challenge in a different way, connecting
the difficulty of knowing whether or not God is the cause of something with the fact
that God has no body, and hence cannot be observed making a difference in the
world: see Cohn-Sherbok 1989, pp.55–6.
10
See section 1.2.
theists have also insisted that God is not a direct cause of evil.11 And if
this is so, and evil occurs fairly regularly, then fairly regularly there are
things of which God is not a direct cause. Second, if there are non-
human created persons who have some control over events in the
world, then it is possible for such persons to bring about events for
which human persons had prayed to God, but for evil purposes.12
Apart from direct revelation, in a specific instance, it is hard to see
how S could know the difference between this kind of case and a case
of answered petitionary prayer. So the traditional theist’s way of
discounting alternative (b) by appealing to universal divine causation
is not without difficulties, difficulties that seem fairly deeply rooted
within traditional theism itself. To address these questions with any
confidence, we should need to digress rather deeply into the nature of
divine action, something I will not do here. In order to set all of these
questions aside, in the remainder of this book I will simply assume for
the sake of the argument that every event in the world is produced by
God in some sense, as some traditional theists insist, and I will also
assume that S knows this somehow. These assumptions represent
generous epistemological concessions to traditional theists, of
course—in fact, some readers will certainly find them altogether too
generous. But they do not preclude the formulation of important
epistemological challenges from within a theistic framework, or so
I shall argue.13
Let’s return to S, who is presented with two possible explanations of
the occurrence of E, namely, (c) and (d). In order to know that one of
11
For two well-known examples, see Augustine 1993 and Plantinga 1974b.
12
Perhaps such created persons could foresee that bringing about some event
would be very bad for the world, and hence bring it about for that reason;
Plantinga suggests that something like this is logically possible: see the discussion
of St Augustine’s account of demons and natural disasters in Plantinga 1974b,
pp.58–9.
13
These are not challenges to the coherence of answered petitionary prayer per
se, of course, because they concern only what we can know or believe with
justification; in that sense, they might perhaps better be described as “defense
defeaters” rather than challenges. But if these arguments are successful, they
undercut several popular defenses of petitionary prayer, as we will see. For the
sake of simplicity, I will continue to refer to them as “epistemological challenges.”
them obtains instead of the other one, it seems that S would need to
possess information about God’s reasons for bringing about E on this
particular occasion. S needs to have some indication, that is, that God
did not decide to bring about E for reasons that are completely
independent of S’s prayer in order to rule out explanation (c). But
apart from direct revelation, it is hard to see how S could possess such
information, so S could not know that S’s prayer had been answered
by God—or so it seems.
To illustrate why one might think this, consider the relationship
between knowledge and relevant alternatives.14 Suppose that Eric is
color blind, and hence cannot distinguish between two photographs of
his family, one of which is in black and white, and the other of which is
in color. Imagine that Eric has available to him only the evidence of
his own visual sensations, that the photographs are not different in any
respect except for color, and that nobody else is around to help him.
Even if Eric happens to believe correctly that the photograph on his
left is the color photograph, he does not know this. Instead, it is a lucky
guess. The most reasonable thing for Eric to do here would be to
withhold belief on the question of whether or not the photograph on
the left is the color one.
Next, suppose that Joan cannot distinguish a gunshot in the dis-
tance from a firecracker in the distance, and that it is the evening of
the Fourth of July (when firecrackers are often heard). Imagine that a
gunshot occurs in the distance, that Joan hears it, and that she
possesses no other information about the source of the sound. Even
if Joan happens to believe correctly that the sound she just heard was a
gunshot, she does not know this. Instead, it is a lucky guess. The most
reasonable thing for Joan to do here would be to withhold belief on
the question of whether or not the sound she just heard was a gunshot.
Finally, suppose that Bill sends a letter to a company recommend-
ing an improvement in one of its products but receives no reply to his
letter. A year later, though, he notices that the company in question
has made the improvement that he recommended. Imagine that Bill
14
Joshua Smith has pointed out to me that the classic source that started the
contemporary discussion of relevant alternatives is Dretske 1970, although the
person most commonly cited in connection with this approach is Alvin Goldman
(see Goldman 1976 and 1986).
does not know whether or not other people make suggestions of this
sort to the company in question, does not know whether the company
takes such suggestions seriously, and does not know how or why the
company decides to change their products from year to year. In this
case, Bill cannot tell whether the change in the product was due to his
suggestion or made by the company on independent grounds. So even
if Bill happens to believe correctly that the change was due to his
suggestion, he does not know this. Instead, it is a lucky guess. The most
reasonable thing for Bill to do here would be to withhold belief on the
question of whether or not the change in the product was due to his
suggestion.
These cases support the general principle that if a person cannot
distinguish which of two (or more) possible and incompatible explan-
ations of the occurrence of some event E is operative, then S does not
know that one of the explanations is operative, even if S believes this
and it is true. Return now to S, who notices that E occurs after
S offered a petitionary prayer to God for E. Since (we have assumed)
S has no direct revelation from God concerning God’s reasons for
bringing about E, S cannot rule out the possibility that God brought
about E for independent reasons and not in response to S’s prayer. So
S does not know that God brought about E in response to S’s prayer,
even if S believes this and it is true—instead, S’s true belief is just a
lucky guess. The most reasonable thing for S to do here would be to
withhold belief on the question of whether or not the occurrence of
E was an answer to S’s petitionary prayer. Let us call this the discrim-
ination challenge to knowledge of answered petitionary prayer.
4.2 Skepticism, Sensitivity, and Safety

Some readers will object that the principle that drives the discrimin-
ation challenge leads to skepticism about the external world. To see
why, compare the following two incompatible explanations of my
current visual sensations: either I am actually perceiving a computer
screen right now as I type this sentence, or I am a brain in a vat being
fed a pattern of electrical stimulation that makes it appear to me as
if I am actually perceiving a computer screen right now, although in
fact I am not really perceiving anything external to myself at all. Since
I have no indication which of these two explanations is operative
currently, it follows from the principle at the heart of the discrimin-
ation challenge that I do not know that I perceive a computer screen
right now. But many people find this conclusion absurd, and since it
follows from the principle articulated above, it appears that we should
reject the principle.
Although this is a complicated question that deserves extended
discussion, in the end, this objection to the discrimination challenge
to knowledge of answered petitionary prayer strikes me as compelling
enough to set the challenge aside for now.15 But this is not the end of
the matter, because there may be another principle in the neighbor-
hood that does not imply skepticism about the external world, a
principle that would serve us equally well in formulating a closely
related challenge. Such a principle might also explain why, in the
cases of Eric, Joan, and Bill described above, we are inclined to say
that the subjects in question have all made lucky guesses, but fail to
possess knowledge.
In a series of publications, Duncan Pritchard has defended an
interesting requirement for knowledge of contingent propositions
based on a highly plausible explanation of epistemic luck. Epistem-
ologists often assume that knowledge cannot depend on luck without
explaining in any detail why this should be so,16 but Pritchard offers a
principled account of this assumption. He begins with the observation
that “lucky events are events which obtain in the actual world but
which don’t obtain in a wide class of nearby possible worlds where the
initial conditions for that event remain (sufficiently) in play.”17 With
regard to knowledge, the basic idea is that in order for a true belief to
count as an instance of knowledge in the actual world, it must not be
the case that in nearby possible worlds, the person’s belief is formed on
15
I will, however, return to this challenge in chapter 5. Thanks to Michael Rea
and Thomas Flint for helpful discussion concerning this point in correspondence.
For a very helpful treatment of the issues involved, including questions about the
closure principle, internalism, and luck, see Pritchard 2005, especially chapters
3–4; for more on internalism and knowledge, see BonJour 1985, Steup 1999,
Feldman 2004, and Conee and Feldman 2004.
16
This seems to be one of the morals to be derived from Gettier cases and
lottery cases; see Pritchard 2008, pp.2–6.
17
Pritchard 2012b, p.174; for a highly detailed discussion of the nature of luck,
including various kinds of epistemic luck, see Pritchard 2005, chapters 5–6.
the same basis as it is in the actual world but turns out to be false. Can
we make this idea more precise in order to apply it to the case at hand,
the case of knowledge concerning answered petitionary prayer?
Here is one way in which we might try to characterize true beliefs
that are immune to luck in the right way: a true belief is sensitive if and
only if it could not have easily been false when formed on the same
basis. In the three examples described above (involving the photo-
graph, the gunshot, and the recommendation), it seems that the true
beliefs in question are not sensitive because they could easily have
been false when formed on the same basis. And this reinforces our
judgment that these true beliefs are not cases of knowledge. However,
it seems wrong to require sensitivity as a necessary condition for
knowledge in general, as a number of authors have argued.
For example, consider the following case: Gwen drops a bag down
the rubbish chute, which has always worked perfectly, is regularly
serviced, etc., and she truly believes a few moments later that the
rubbish is in the basement.18 However, her belief is not sensitive, since
it could have easily been false when formed on the same basis—she
would still have believed that the rubbish was in the basement if
the bag had become snagged along the way for some reason, for
example. After all, her basis for believing that the rubbish is in the
basement, namely, her inductive evidence based on the past, would
have remained the same in a possible world in which the rubbish
became snagged along the way for the first time today. But it seems
that Gwen still knows, in the actual world, that the rubbish is in the
basement. It seems to follow that sensitivity is not necessary for
knowledge. So we should not appeal to sensitivity in order to explain
the sense in which knowledge is not lucky.
However, there is another notion that is closely related to sensitivity
that seems to fare better in this regard: safety.19 Following Pritchard,
we can say that a true belief is safe if and only if, in most nearby
possible worlds in which the agent forms her belief on the same basis
as she does in the actual world, her belief continues to be true. Gwen’s
belief that the rubbish is in the basement is not sensitive, as we have
18
This example comes from Sosa 1999, p.13.
19
Sosa introduces safety as an alternative to sensitivity: see Sosa 1999 and the
discussion in Pritchard 2008, pp.12–15.
seen, but it is safe: since the rubbish chute has always worked perfectly,
is regularly serviced, etc., a possible world in which the rubbish gets
snagged along the way is not very close to the actual world. So in
nearby possible worlds in which Gwen believes that the rubbish is in
the basement on the same basis as she does in the actual world
(namely, based on her inductive evidence from past experience), her
belief continues to be true. This is why she knows that the rubbish is
in the basement, and this is why her true belief is not lucky in the
relevant sense.
But there are also cases that seem to stand in the way of requiring
safety for knowledge in general; here is one of them. Suppose that Joe
purchases a ticket in a very large lottery, so that his odds of winning
are extremely low, and suppose that he believes that his ticket is a loser
on the basis of the odds alone. If his ticket is in fact a loser, should we
say that Joe knows this? Of course, assuming that the lottery was
conducted fairly, there was a chance that Joe would win, so there is
at least one nearby possible world in which Joe’s belief that the ticket
would lose is false. And in that world, Joe’s belief is still based on the
same reasons it is based upon in the actual world (namely, the odds).
But in most of the nearby possible worlds in which Joe forms his belief
that his ticket is a loser on the same basis as he does in the actual
world, his belief continues to be true, and this is the definition of
safety. So Joe’s true belief appears to be safe, but it does not constitute
knowledge, which suggests that knowledge is not the same thing as
true, safe belief.
In response to this kind of problem, Pritchard has modified the
notion of safety so that Joe’s belief in the lottery case does not count as
a case of safe belief after all (which corroborates our inclination to say
that it is not a case of knowledge), but Gwen’s belief in the rubbish
chute case still counts as a case of safe belief (which corroborates our
inclination to say that it is a case of knowledge):
[W]hat is salient about the lottery case is that given the nature of how
lotteries are decided, the world in which one is presently holding the
winning lottery ticket is in fact very close to the actual world in which
one is holding the losing ticket. This is in contrast to the rubbish chute
example, since while one might disagree about whether, properly
understood, the world in which the bag snags is close enough to
count amongst the near-by worlds, it is certainly true by everyone’s
lights that it won’t be particularly close, since if that were the case then
the agent concerned certainly wouldn’t possess knowledge.
With this distinction between the two cases in mind, one can thus
deal with the problem in hand by sticking to the original formulation of
safety in terms of most near-by possible worlds but modifying one’s
understanding of this principle so that more weight is given to the
closest worlds. One could do this, for example, by insisting that there
be no very close near-by possible world in which the agent believes the
target proposition (on the same basis) and yet forms a false belief
(thereby dealing with the lottery case), while also allowing that of the
near-by possible worlds as a whole, it need only be the case that one’s
belief matches the truth in most of them (thereby ensuring knowledge
in the rubbish chute case).20
Pritchard’s modification to the notion of safety is sufficient to answer

the problem posed by lottery-type examples. His explanation of the
connection between the safety condition for knowledge and anti-luck
epistemology provides a plausible defense of the claim that in general,
safety is required for knowledge of contingent truths.21 Unlike other
relevant alternative approaches, requiring safety for knowledge does
not lead to skepticism about the external world, since worlds in which
I am a brain in a vat (for example) are presumably not very close to the
actual world.22
Pritchard’s requirement of safety for knowledge of contingent
truths also provides the basis for a new challenge to knowledge of
20
Pritchard 2008, pp.18–19. Pritchard also mentions the possibility of requir-
ing an additional condition for knowledge over and above safety (p.14), but
dismisses this move as ad hoc; it is worth noting here, though, that the epistemo-
logical challenge under discussion requires only that safety be necessary for
knowledge, not that it be sufficient as well.
21
More specifically, Pritchard has combined a safety account and a virtue
account into the following: S knows that p if and only if S’s safe true belief that
p is the product of her relevant cognitive abilities (such that her safe cognitive
success is to a significant degree creditable to her cognitive agency) (Pritchard
2012a, p.27); see also his defense of the safety condition against four alleged
counterexamples in Pritchard 2012b.
22
If, contrary to popular belief, such worlds are actually close to the actual
world, then the right conclusion to draw seems to be that we do not, in fact, know a
great deal about the external world after all—our true beliefs are lucky but not safe
(see Pritchard 2008, pp.12–14).
answered petitionary prayer. Let’s return to our imaginary person S,
who truly believes that God has answered S’s petitionary prayer for E.
Earlier we considered two competing explanations of E’s occurrence,
namely (c) God’s bringing about E for reasons that were completely
independent of S’s prayer and (d) God’s bringing about E because
S prayed for it (so S’s prayer was answered by God). Is there a very
close possible world in which God brings about E for reasons that are
completely independent of S’s petitionary prayer, and in which
S believes (falsely) that God has answered S’s prayer on the same
basis as S does in the actual world? Or is it the case that in most of
the nearby possible worlds, S’s true belief fails to match the truth? If
either of these things is the case, S’s true belief that God answered S’s
prayer is not safe, so that S does not know that God answered S’s
prayer. Let us call this the safety based challenge to knowledge of
answered prayer.
Drawing on the discussion of divine freedom in chapter 3, we can
see that there is at least one way in which S’s true belief could turn out
to be unsafe: if God is free, in some libertarian sense, to choose
whether to bring about E in response to S’s prayer (as happens in
the actual world) or to bring about E for other reasons that have
nothing at all to do with S’s petitionary prayer, then there is a very
close possible world in which God has all of the same reasons as in the
actual world, but in which God chooses to bring about E for reasons
that are independent of S’s petitionary prayer.23 In this possible
world, S still believes that God has answered S’s petitionary prayer
for E, on the same basis as S does in the actual world, but S’s belief is
false, which implies that S’s belief in the actual world is unsafe, and
hence not an item of knowledge.
Here is another way in which it could turn out that S’s true belief is
not safe in the actual world: suppose that there is a very close possible
world in which prior (or later) events or God’s reasons (or both) differ
from those in the actual world in such a way that God brings about
E for other reasons, and not at all because S prayed for it. If there are
possible worlds like this, then in at least one of them, S would still
23
This possible world would have exactly the same (suitably edited) history and
laws of nature as the actual world: see the discussion of this in chapter 3, along with
the discussion of Pruss’ conception of omnirationality in chapter 2.
believe that God has answered S’s petitionary prayer for E, on the
same basis as S does in the actual world, but S’s belief would be false,
in which case S’s belief in the actual world would be unsafe.
Finally, it could be the case that in most nearby possible worlds, S’s
belief fails to match the truth. This could happen if the actual world
turns out to be unusual with respect to God’s reasons for bringing
about E, compared to most nearby possible worlds, for whatever
reason. If that were the case, then once again, S’s belief in the actual
world would be true but unsafe.
But are there any nearby possible worlds of the types just described,
worlds that would undermine S’s knowledge that God has answered
S’s petitionary prayer? To be perfectly honest, I don’t think we really
have any idea—it depends on which worlds are nearby, the particular
circumstances of the case, the nature of God’s reasons, and so on. It
will be helpful at this point to explore briefly what traditional theists
have said about particular events in the world.
4.3 God’s Reasons

The difficulty involved in trying to decide whether or not there exist
relevant possible worlds that would undermine S’s knowledge of
answered petitionary prayer can be highlighted by considering what
traditional theists have said about the difficulty of discerning God’s
reasons for bringing about or permitting specific events in the world.
This is an old theme that is strongly emphasized in the Hebrew
scriptures, perhaps most clearly in the book of Job.24 According to
the story, Job is a righteous and prosperous man who loses all of his
children, animals, property, and health as a result of a bet between
God and Satan over the stability of Job’s faithfulness to God. But Job
and his so-called friends do not know the true cause of his suffering,
and God never tells them about the bet. After a great deal of soul-
24
The prophet Isaiah is often quoted in this regard also: “Let the wicked
forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the LORD, and
he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon. ‘For my
thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the
LORD. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your
ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’ ” (Isaiah 55:7–9).
searching, Job finally demands an answer from God as to why he
suffers unjustly. This is what he gets:
Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said: “Who is this
that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself
like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were
you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a
measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its
cornerstone—while the morning stars sang together and all the angels
shouted for joy?” ( Job 38:1–7)
It seems that Job is in no position to question God’s decisions about

particular cases because Job does not know enough about the world or
God’s role in it, and many traditional theists would say that we are in
no better position than Job in this regard.25
This same point is often made by traditional theists in connection
with prayers that go unanswered. For instance, as mentioned in
chapter 2, Flint suggests that one reason why God does not answer
some petitionary prayers is that answering them would not be good
for us, despite appearances to the contrary.26 If a mother of young
children is diagnosed with cancer, and scores of people pray for her
recovery but she dies anyway, traditional theists do not conclude that
God is unable to intervene or that God does not love the mother or
her family members. Instead, they conclude that her death must have
occurred for some other reason, even if they cannot understand why
God would permit it.27 Since only God knows how everything is
connected to everything else, what would happen if those connections
did not obtain, and what good things are at stake in a given situation,
only God is in a position to judge whether or not a given particular
event should occur. If this is so, though, it follows that the specific
events for which people offer petitionary prayers might have been
25
For a fascinating interpretation of the book of Job in light of questions posed
by the problem of evil, see Stump 2012 chapter 9.
26
Flint 1998, p.217.
27
I have seen this happen more than once in my own local community. For
more on the distinction between questions about God’s reasons for not answering
petitionary prayers and the questions posed by the problem of evil, see the
discussion in section 6.1.
important parts of God’s plan even if nobody had prayed for them, in
which case God might have brought them about for independent
reasons (and not in response to petitionary prayers).
Recent discussions of the problem of evil suggest a similar conclu-
sion. For example, in response to William Rowe’s much-discussed
example of an apparently pointless evil that seems to count as evi-
dence against the existence of God (the dying of a fawn trapped in a
forest fire who suffers for days), Stephen Wykstra argues that just
because we cannot tell what greater good might be served by some
apparently evil event, we are not entitled to infer that no greater good
is in fact served by that apparently evil event.28 In other words, for all
we know, an event which appears to be evil to us might be an essential
part of some greater good, all things considered, and vice versa.29
So traditional theists seem committed to some form of agnosticism
with respect to the instrumental value of particular events.30 This
means that those who are committed to traditional theism may
never be in a position to estimate with any confidence whether or
not there exist possible worlds that would undermine a given person’s
knowledge of answered petitionary prayer. It also highlights a flaw in
some defenses of petitionary prayer. For instance, Isaac Choi claims
that seeing some of our prayers “clearly and objectively answered”
can serve as a powerful reminder of God’s reality, nature, and love.31
But even when “the antecedent probability of what we requested
28
Rowe’s argument occurs in Rowe 1979 (and was modified several times
before appearing in a new version in Rowe 1996); Wykstra’s initial response occurs
in Wykstra 1984. A number of approaches that follow Wykstra’s general strategy
have emerged, and come to be called versions of “skeptical theism” (see, e.g.,
Bergmann 2009 and Dougherty 2014), but I am not arguing here that all theists
should be skeptical theists—I am arguing instead for the weaker idea that all theists
should embrace what I call here agnosticism with respect to the instrumental
value of particular events.
29
For more along these lines, see the discussion of Leibniz’ claim that we
cannot tell whether or not this is the best of all possible worlds in Murray and
Greenberg 2013.
30
The intrinsic value of such events is another matter entirely; see the discus-
sion of prayers of thanksgiving in chapter 9 and the discussion of intrinsic value,
God, and gratitude in Davison 2012, chapter 7.
31
Choi 2003, p.12.
32
happening by chance is extremely low,” the occurrence of the event
for which we prayed does not provide good evidence for the conclu-
sion that God has answered our prayers, since we are never in a
position to know the antecedent probability of a given event relative
to God’s reasons and knowledge in a given situation. This is because
we do not know the antecedent probability (given God’s reasons and
knowledge in a given situation) of God’s bringing about the same
event had nobody prayed for it, or the antecedent probability of the
same event’s occurring had we prayed for it (given God’s reasons and
knowledge of a situation), so we cannot fruitfully compare the two.
This means that we cannot draw the conclusions Choi describes.33
This concludes my presentation of epistemological challenges to
petitionary prayer. Before we try to draw any firm conclusions about
the success or failure of the safety based challenge, though, it will be
helpful to consider first some epistemological defenses of petitionary
prayer. This is the subject of chapter 5, to which we may now turn.
32
Choi 2003, p.12, fn.35.
33
It is worth noting in passing that some people draw rather unorthodox
conclusions about God on the basis of their idiosyncratic experiences involving
petitionary prayer.
5
Epistemological Defenses
5.1 Defenses Based on Empirical Studies

One way to defend the claim that we know that petitionary prayers
are sometimes answered is to appeal to clinical studies of its efficacy.1
It is worth nothing that such studies face a number of important initial
obstacles. For example, in trying to divide medical patients into a
control group for whom petitionary prayers are offered and an
experimental group for whom no petitionary prayers are offered, it
is impossible to guarantee that nobody is actually praying for those in
the experimental group as well. In order to set aside such difficulties,
let us consider an idealized, fictional experiment with a strongly
positive result instead of considering any of the studies that have
actually been performed.2
Suppose that we created a very large experimental group and a
very large control group of medical patients, and that we could
control for all of the relevant medical differences between them.
Imagine that a large number of devout believers prayed fervently
for those in the experimental group, but not for those in the control
group, and that nobody prayed at all for those in the control group,
not anywhere, ever. (Remember, this is a fictional experiment!) Sup-
pose that previous studies had shown conclusively that a specific
1
For some examples, see Byrd 1988, Harris, Gowda, Kolb, Strychacz, Vacek,
Jones, Forker, O’Keefe, and McCallister 1999, and Leibovici 2001.
2
It is also unclear in these real world studies whether the effects in question are
due to prayers being answered by God, on the one hand, or due instead to the
activity of praying itself, which might have had an effect even if God did not exist.
For a provocative discussion of the possibility that human psychic powers among
the living are responsible for the reliable information obtained in some dramatic
cases in which other people appear to have survived death, see Braude 2003.
Epistemological Defenses 79
medical problem had a certain probability of recovery given certain
treatments in highly specific conditions, but that our fictional study
showed a remarkably higher rate of recovery for those patients in the
experimental group as compared to the normal rates of recovery for
those patients in the control group. If we like, we can even say that the
experimental group experienced a number of apparently miraculous
recoveries, that is, recoveries that could not be explained naturally in
terms of our current medical knowledge. Would such a result provide
strong empirical evidence for the conclusion that in this study, peti-
tionary prayers had been answered by God?
Maybe so; maybe we would have good reason here to say that
petitionary prayer explained the difference between the two groups.
But I’m not sure. Just because those in the experimental group improved
dramatically compared to those in the control group, could we really say
that this was because God answered prayers on their behalf? There are
alternative explanations and other variables to consider, introduced
(ironically) by the idea that God is involved. For instance, even if we
knew somehow that God had miraculously healed those in the experi-
mental group (and it is not clear how we would know this), still we would
not know that their healing was a response to petitionary prayer, since
God could have had independent reasons for healing those persons at
those very times. As we noticed in chapter 4, traditional theists have
strong reasons for agnosticism about the instrumental value of particular
events, so they should be the first to agree with this point. For all we
know, the miraculous healing of those in the experimental group could
be connected to other states of affairs, perhaps lying in the distant future,
and those healings could be completely unconnected to the human
purposes at work in the study.
The same thing can be said about individual cases, which people
tend to find very impressive.3 If my friend is diagnosed with a rare
form of cancer and the medical community insists that her odds of
survival are very small, but she recovers spontaneously after petition-
ary prayers are offered, many people will take this to be convincing
evidence of answered prayer. But we also know that sometimes,
3
For related arguments for a similar conclusion, see one of the authors in
Howard-Snyder and Howard-Snyder 2010, pp.57–9.
people recover spontaneously, with no medical explanation. More
importantly, we are in no position to say what God’s reasons might
be for causing such a recovery, whereas saying that it is an answer to
petitionary prayer implies something very specific along those lines.
Returning to the subject of ideal empirical studies, then: perhaps
they would give us strong empirical evidence for answered petitionary
prayer, and perhaps they would not. Of course, with regard to an
ideal empirical study, we have assumed that our groups have been
reliably distinguished from one another, that our correlations have
been clearly identified, and that our empirical studies point to statis-
tically significant differences between the groups in question. But
actual empirical studies are never like this. (There exist no groups of
people for whom no petitionary prayers have ever been offered, for
one thing.) So actual empirical studies do not seem very promising in
this regard.
5.2 Defenses Based on Religious Teachings

In chapter 4, we imagined S, a hypothetical traditional theist, praying
for God to bring about something E. But to talk in such an abstract
way about petitionary prayer is surely an abstraction and a distortion.
Those who pray in the petitionary way typically do so in accordance
with religious traditions, following specific religious teachings. They
also interpret patterns of events in terms of these teachings, having
learned to see ordinary events through the eyes of faith.4 Perhaps
specific religious doctrines, designed in part to train the attention of
the believer, can provide an epistemological defense by explaining the
conditions in which God is likely to answer petitionary prayers. If so,
this might enable us to explain how true beliefs about answered prayer
could be justified and perhaps even constitute knowledge in virtue of
being safe after all.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims are encouraged to pray in the peti-
tionary way for one another and for those in need, and they believe
that God hears the prayers of the faithful. Of course, very few
adherents of these traditional theistic religions hold that their religious
4
See Brümmer 2008, chapter 9, Luhrmann 2012, and section 5.7 below.
teachings guarantee that God will answer any particular petitionary
prayer. Although I am not an expert in these matters, Christian
teachings concerning petitionary prayer seem to create higher expect-
ations for answered prayer than the corresponding Jewish and Muslim
ones, and also to present special challenges. In what remains of this
chapter, I will consider Christian teachings concerning petitionary
prayer and some of the scriptures on which they are based. I must
confess from the outset, though, that I am no theologian or scripture
scholar, so I enter this subject with a great deal of hesitation, and I am
subject to correction from many sides. It is not my goal to convey here,
even in summary fashion, the complete content of Christian teachings
concerning petitionary prayer; that task is better suited to a theolo-
gian. Instead, I will draw together various threads from Christian
teaching with an eye to highlighting tensions and puzzles, because
I want to explore the epistemological implications of those things, and
because it seems to me that these implications have never been clearly
explored.
First, it is worth noting that the injunction to pray is not always an
injunction to pray in the petitionary way—there are also prayers of
thanksgiving, adoration, confession, contemplation, and so on. So one
should not assume that every command to pray is a command to pray
in the petitionary way. Some wonder how to interpret the injunction
to pray continually,5 for instance, but this is less puzzling if it is not
interpreted as the injunction to pray continually in the petitionary
way.
In addition, sometimes the motivation cited to pray in the petition-
ary way has nothing to do with the possibility that God might answer
the prayer, as in the following passage from the letters of St Paul:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and
petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the
peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your
hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
(Philippians 4:6–7, New International Version).
5
“Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is
the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (I Thessalonians 5:16–18, New Inter-
national Version); for a lively account of the Jesus Prayer in the Russian Orthodox
tradition as a response to this injunction, see Bacovcin 1985.
In this case, the main reason given for praying in the petitionary way
seems to be that one might overcome anxiety and be guarded by the
peace of God. (I will return to this topic again in chapter 9, in
connection with the question of whether petitionary prayer is pointless
in a larger sense.)
It is also worth repeating that one should not expect all petitionary
prayers to be answered, although the teachings are not always clear on
this point. For instance, the author of the book of James says the
following:
You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get
what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you
do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask
with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleas-
ures ( James 4:2–3, New International Version).
We should infer from this teaching that successful petitionary prayer

requires a good motive, and that without this, petitionary prayers will
not be answered.6
The teachings of Jesus occupy a central role in Christian understand-
ing of petitionary prayer, but they also generate interesting puzzles in
their own right. One puzzle was identified clearly by C. S. Lewis, a
prominent twentieth-century Christian apologist, who described two
distinct patterns in the teachings attributed to Jesus.7 The A pattern,
according to Lewis, involves petitionary prayers in which “Thy will be
done” is an explicit or implicit part of the prayer, so that the believer is
asking God to do something only if it fits in with God’s will. Lewis notes
that this is a kind of conditional asking, and observes that it does not at
all imply that the petitioner believes that God will definitely answer the
petitionary prayer in question. As an example of this type of prayer,
Lewis mentions Jesus’s petition in the garden of Gethsemane on the
night before his arrest, in which he appears to ask that he be spared the
ordeal to come the next day, if it be God’s will.8
6
For a fascinating discussion of petitionary prayers for bad things, see
Smilansky 2012.
7
Lewis 1967; thanks to Tom Flint for bringing this essay to my attention.
8
Matthew 26:36–42; here is verse 39: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup
be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will” (New International Version).
By contrast, according to Lewis, the B pattern seems to require that
the petitioner possess a very high degree of confidence to the effect
that God will bring about whatever is requested. In the gospel of
Matthew, for instance, after his disciples asked why the fig tree that
Jesus cursed became withered immediately, he is reported to have said
the following,
Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do
what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain,
“Go, throw yourself into the sea,” and it will be done. If you believe,
you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.9
Lewis argues that it is impossible to pray according to the A pattern
and the B pattern at once, and he wonders which kind of pattern
should inform his own prayers.10 He confesses that he is unable to
pray according to the B pattern because of his lack of faith, and also
holds that such faith would have to be a gift of God, not something he
could generate by himself—but that probably such faith would be
given to him only in response to Lewis’s own request.11
One solution to the problem of the tension between the A pattern
and the B pattern (a solution Lewis rejects) is the idea that the
B pattern conceals an implicit restriction to God’s will (“If you believe,
you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer—as long as you ask
according to God’s will”). If sincere believers tried to pray according
to the B pattern and reported unanswered prayers, Lewis wonders,
how would we explain to them what had happened?
Dare we say that when God promises “You shall have what you ask,”
He secretly means “You shall have it if you ask for something I wish to
give you”? What should we think of an earthly father who promised to
Other petitionary prayers attributed to Jesus raise fascinating questions that

I cannot pursue here, but will pursue in future work (including “Father, forgive
them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34, New International
Version).
9
Matthew 21:21, New International Version.
10
Lewis 1967, pp.143–3, 151.
11
But which kind of request, a request according to the A pattern or the
B pattern?—See Lewis 1967, p.150.
give his son whatever he chose for his birthday and, when the boy asked
for a bicycle, gave him an arithmetic book, then first disclosing the
silent reservation with which the promise was made?12
Lewis’s answer to the rhetorical question is that we would think that
such an earthly father is tainted by deceit and mockery.13 He con-
cludes his discussion by confessing that he does not know how to
resolve the tension between the A and B forms of prayer recom-
mended in the teachings of Jesus, and asks his local clergy for help.
According to one straightforward interpretation of the B pattern,
there is a significant track record of false predictions that strongly
disconfirms the truth of the B pattern teachings attributed to Jesus.
This is because on many occasions, people with complete confidence
in a given outcome have prayed for it in the petitionary way without
success. In defense of the truth of the B pattern teachings, one might
reply that although the petitioners in question appeared to have the
right kind of faith, the end result suggests otherwise—given the
B pattern teachings, they must not have had the right kind of faith
after all. If this is so, though, it follows that the right kind of faith is not
something that we can identify reliably, in which case the B pattern
teachings do not really help to explain how we might know whether or
not a given petitionary prayer has been answered, and hence do not
help us to address the epistemological challenges outlined in the
previous chapter.
Consider now the A pattern, which includes “Thy will be done”
implicitly or explicitly, and hence is open to the possibility that God
will not answer the request from the outset. People might pray this
way to imitate the example of Jesus, or because they are agnostic
about the instrumental value of particular events, or because they feel
odd recommending something specific to God.14 But what does it
mean to pray “Thy will be done,” exactly?
It might be thought that this question leads to a general challenge to
petitionary prayer based upon the nature of God’s will. The word
12 13
Lewis 1967, p.149. Lewis 1967, pp.149–51.
14
For more on “Thy will be done,” see section 9.2, and Phillips 1981,
pp.121–2. Of course, not everything that occurs before, during, or after a peti-
tionary prayer must itself be a petitionary prayer.
“will” is ambiguous, after all; it has (at least) a stronger and a weaker
sense.15 If “will” in “Thy will be done” refers to that which God is
determined to bring about in the world regardless of what else hap-
pens (this is the stronger sense of “will”), then it seems clearly pointless
to pray that God’s will be done, since God will do it anyway (by
definition). By contrast, if “will” refers to that which would be good to
happen generally, or that which God would prefer to happen in the
world but might not happen for some reason (this is the weaker sense
of “will”), then why pray for this, either? As H. D. Lewis points out,
“there is no point in praying to God to protect people who fly in
airplanes if accidents are part of the divine plan and if it is God’s will
that they should occur.”16 God must have some reason for not
bringing about all possible good things, or else they would be part of
God’s will in the first, strong sense.17 However, this general challenge
to petitionary prayer based on the idea of God’s will collapses as soon
as we observe that the offering of petitionary prayers itself can change
the situation, and hence change the content of God’s will (in the
weaker sense of “will”).18
What we have seen here in the Christian tradition can be general-
ized in the following way: suppose that a given traditional theistic
religion teaches that God will answer a petitionary prayer as long as
some set of conditions C1, C2,…, Cn is satisfied. Someone who
accepts this teaching may claim to know or justifiably believe that
God answers petitionary prayers. But as indicated in chapter 1, in
order for a petitionary prayer to be a viable candidate for being
answered by God, it must not request something that violates any of
the logical, moral, or providential restrictions on God’s action—there
must be space among God’s reasons for the offering of the petitionary
15
Of course, if there is no such distinction in God’s will, and everything that God
wills is something that God is determined to bring about in the world regardless of
what else happens, then there seems to be no point in offering petitionary prayers in
the first place; see the brief discussion of a general challenge to petitionary prayer
based upon a Calvinistic view of God’s will in section 1.4.
16
Lewis 1959, p.157.
17
For more on the relationship between this question and the problem of evil,
see the discussion in chapter 6.
18
See the discussion of Flint in chapter 2; I will return to this theme again
chapters 6, 7, and 8.
prayer to play the appropriate role in order for it to be answered. So
these religious teachings do not imply that any of the specific petition-
ary prayers offered by me or by those I know will be answered,
because there will always be a doubt in our minds about whether or
not all of the conditions C1, C2,…, Cn are satisfied. In fact, every
single petitionary prayer offered by me and by everyone I know, over
an entire lifetime, could very well go unanswered without contradict-
ing any of those teachings, simply because there was no space for those
specific requests among God’s reasons. So these teachings concerning
petitionary prayer do not appear to provide a successful epistemo-
logical defense, even if they are all true.
5.3 Specific Examples from Scriptural Traditions

In connection with a related epistemological challenge to knowledge
concerning answered petitionary prayer, Michael Murray discusses in
some detail the case of Elijah and the prophets of Baal. In this case,
Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a contest: two piles of wood
are collected, and the prophets of Baal are permitted to call upon Baal
all day long, imploring him to consume the wood with fire. Nothing
happens. Elijah then has his pile of wood soaked in water, calls upon
God to consume it, and immediately the pile of wood is consumed in
flames, despite the presence of the water.19
In some ways, this case is similar to Flint’s case of St Peter’s
command discussed in section 2.3. In that case, we saw that it was
more reasonable to think that God’s action was based not upon the
content of St Peter’s petitionary prayer per se but rather upon
the benefits that would come from healing the man lame from birth,
given that St Peter had publicly commanded him to walk. In the same
way, one might argue in this case that God’s action seems to depend
on the value of publicly exposing the prophets of Baal as frauds. After
all, would God have consumed a pile of wet wood with fire in response
to Elijah’s private, silent prayer, if nobody else were around and
nobody knew that Elijah had prayed for this?
19
See 1 Kings 18:17–40.
Suppose, though, that instead of arguing in this way, we were to
grant that the case of Elijah and the prophets of Baal is a clear
example of an answered petitionary prayer from the tradition.
Murray says that “the indirect evidence makes it clear that the con-
sumption of the sacrifice was a response by God to Elijah’s petition,”20
and goes on to say that
Many theists claim, similarly, that indirect evidence makes it plausible
that particular events have occurred in response to their petitionary
prayers. And while these judgments certainly will be false in some cases,
there is no reason to think that they are always, or even often, unjus-
tified. (Murray 2004, p.265)
Is this right? First, it is important to point out that the cases mentioned
by Flint and Murray, which involve apparently miraculous public
events, are extremely rare, to say the least. In addition, given the
difficulties involved in knowing God’s reasons for bringing about
specific events in the world (see chapter 4), Murray’s empirical claim
about the quality of evidence available to many theists seems overly
optimistic to me. As noted above, the typical person does not have
good indirect evidence for answered prayer, let alone anything that
remotely resembles the kind of evidence available in the case of Elijah
and the prophets of Baal. Instead, in the typical cases in which
traditional theists believe that their petitionary prayers have been
answered, there is no convincing evidence that something miraculous
has occurred, no good reason to think that the event in question would
not have happened if no petitionary prayers had been offered, and
most importantly, no way to discern what role petitionary prayers
might have played in God’s decisions (and hence no way to tell
whether or not a given event is an answer to prayer).
Finally, from the perspective of a traditional theist, the pattern
exemplified in the cases discussed by Flint and Murray is not a pattern
that one should be encouraged to create on one’s own. Deliberately
trying to “raise the stakes” in such situations can be seen as a way of
trying to force God to act, and seems to involve something like the
20
Murray 2004, p.264.
testing of God that is forbidden by the traditional theistic religious
traditions.21
5.4 Divine Illumination

Murray also claims that “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.”22 If this were so, then perhaps God could enable the
believer to know when certain petitions were granted. But why should
we think that God actually does this? Does it happen whenever a
petitionary prayer is answered (or not answered)? Is there some way to
know that our beliefs about apparently answered petitionary prayers
are due to God’s enlightenment, as opposed to some other source?
T. H. Luhrmann, a contemporary anthropologist, spent several
years observing (and participating) in American evangelical Christian
communities in which petitionary prayer played a large role. She
provides a compelling psychological account of the ways in which
the people whom she observed learned to experience God as an
objective reality, including the role of what she calls “absorption
training.” But she hastens to add that
None of these observations explains the ultimate cause of the voice
someone hears on a Tuesday afternoon. [My] account of absorption
training is fully compatible with both secular and supernaturalist
understandings of God. To a believer, this account of absorption speaks
to the problem of why, if God is always speaking, not everyone can
hear, and it suggests what the church might do to help those who
struggle. To a skeptic, it explains why the believer heard a thought in
the mind as if it were external. But the emphasis on skill—on the way
21
Jesus appears to quote Deuteronomy 6:16 in describing this prohibition (e.g.,
see Luke 4:12).
22
Murray 2004, p.249; a similar point is made in Brümmer 2008, chapter 9.
Perhaps Plantinga’s notion of the “internal instigation of the Holy Spirit” (see
Plantinga 2000, p.251) could be invoked here also, but as Lehrer has argued
persuasively, Plantinga’s conditions for warrant would be satisfied (but insufficient
for knowledge) in an analogous case of a non-natural belief forming process
(Lehrer’s well-known “Mr. Truetemp” case: see Lehrer 1996, pp.31–3 and the
discussion in Beilby 2007, pp.151–3).
we train our attention—should change the way both Christians and
non-Christians think about what makes them different from one
another. (Luhrmann 2012, p.223)
Although Luhrmann’s account here is officially neutral with regard to
the question of God’s answering petitionary prayers, it provides a way
of explaining, in completely naturalistic terms, why many people
believe so firmly that their prayers have been answered when they
observe a correlation between what they have requested and its
coming to pass.
What is epistemologically interesting about Luhrmann’s account,
for our purposes, is that it explains why one might have an experience
that many would describe as “enlightening the mind of the petitioner”
even if God did not actually answer the petitionary prayers in ques-
tion. It is important also to consider the compelling psychological
evidence for what is often called the “self-serving bias,” an apparently
robust human tendency to attribute good things to one’s own efforts,
whether or not such attribution is deserved.23 Such a tendency surely
inclines some people to claim a degree of responsibility for those
things for which they have offered petitionary prayers, whether or
not such an attribution of responsibility is warranted.
Putting all of these things together, plus a few others: Could we
reliably distinguish the following things from one another in our own
experiences?
• The happiness one experiences as a result of taking credit (by
mistake) when things occur for which one offered petitionary
prayers (where those prayers were not in fact answered by God).
23
See Brown’s discussion of the claim that belief in the efficacy of petitionary
prayer can be seen as “a mode of egocentric thought” (Brown 1966, p.207);
Phillips compares petitionary prayer to a magic spell and describes the attempt
to influence God as “superstition” (Phillips 1981, pp.113–15, 118). Cohen states
that “No less than we, the ancients understood how ridiculous it is for anyone to
place himself at the center of the universe. Therefore, in sober moments, they
would recognize that they had to be subservient to God and not expect Him to
change His mind at the behest of any mortal” (Cohen 2000, p.140). From a
Christian point of view, it is even tempting to view the desire to claim responsibility
for the results of answered prayer as something like a sinful impulse; for more on
this question, see chapter 7.
• The experience that results from the training in attention described
by Luhrmann when things occur for which one offered petitionary
prayers (but where those prayers were not in fact answered by God).
• The feeling of the real presence of God that results from a life full of
petitionary prayers, none of which is actually answered by God
(even though the events for which one prayed occurred for other
reasons, and were not in fact answered by God).
• The feeling of being actually enlightened by God to convey not that
one’s prayer was answered by God, but that one’s prayer was heard by
God (in cases in which the object of petitionary prayer comes to be,
but not because those prayers were answered by God).
• The feeling of being actually enlightened by God to convey that
one’s petitionary prayers have, in fact, been answered by God (as
described by Murray).
Unless we have more information about how God’s enlightenment is

supposed to work, it is very hard to see how we could distinguish
beliefs about apparently answered petitionary prayers that are due to
God’s enlightenment from those that are due to some other cause.
Murray does not explain why we would expect that God would
enlighten the mind of the believer whenever petitionary prayers are
answered (or would fail to produce or preclude one of these other
experiences when the prayers in question were not answered but God
decided to bring about the events in question for other reasons). As
noted above, the traditional theistic religious traditions do not prom-
ise knowledge concerning particular answered petitionary prayers,
and their teachings are compatible with a given person’s offering
any number of petitionary prayers that go unanswered.
In chapter 4, I explored something called the discrimination chal-
lenge to knowledge of answered petitionary prayer, but ultimately set
it aside in favor of the safety based challenge. This was because that
challenge seemed to lead to skepticism with regard to the external
world, an implication that few would be willing to accept. Here, how-
ever, we are talking about whether people can discriminate various
internal states of mind, so a restricted version of the principle at stake
in the discrimination challenge seems to apply, namely, the following: if
a person S cannot distinguish two (or more) possible and incompatible
states of mind, then S does not know that S is in one of those states of
mind, even if S believes this and it is true. So with some hesitation,24
I conclude that the appeal to the possibility of divine illumination is
ultimately unsuccessful as an epistemological defense.
5.5 Contextualism to the Rescue?

So far, I have assumed that what is required for knowledge is the same
all the time, for everyone, so that Pritchard’s safety constraint (for
example) always remains invariant. But perhaps this is a mistake; in a
number of highly influential publications, Keith DeRose has argued
that different contexts call forth different standards for knowledge.25
With regard to alternative possibilities, for instance, DeRose says that
What the context fixes in determining the “content” of a knowledge
attribution is how good an epistemic position S must be in to count as
knowing that p. The mentioning of alternatives…when there is no
special reason for thinking such possibilities likely, can be seen as raising
the strength and changing the content of “know” because the ability to
rule out such alternatives would only be relevant if one were after a
strong form of knowledge (if one were requiring the putative knower to
be in a very good position in order to count as knowing).
(DeRose 1992, p.922)
If DeRose is right about this, then perhaps the safety based challenge
to knowledge of answered petitionary prayer applies only in certain
contexts, contexts in which we are after a strong form of knowledge.
24
Although I have indicated here where my sympathies lie, this is one of those
instances in which it seems to me that further philosophical work is warranted. The
argument here raises large questions about faith, the hermeneutics of suspicion,
and self-doubt, and requires more attention to the debate between internalism and
externalism with regard to knowledge than I can provide at this time; I have no
doubt that others will be willing to take up this topic in future work. For a start, see
the discussions in Lehrer 1996, Plantinga 2008, and Beilby 2007; see also Moser
2008 for an entirely different approach.
25
See DeRose 1992, 1999, 2000, and 2009, for example. I will not discuss here
whether DeRose’s formulation of contextualism is the most plausible version of
non-invariantism; that would take me too far afield. Instead, I will take his view as
one example of this family of positions, in order to see if it sheds any light on the
present question.
For instance, Christians often gather together on a regular basis in
order to hold prayer meetings. They pray together for specific things
in the future and express gratitude for good things in the past, and
sometimes they keep lists of both things. Following DeRose’s lead, in
such a context, the truth conditions for S’s knowing that a prayer had
been answered might not require that S be able to rule out the
possibility that God brought about E for independent reasons. But
the situation might change in a different context: for example, suppose
that in a philosophy class at the local secular university, a member of
the prayer group were to argue that the list of “answered prayers”
collected over the years by the group constituted strong evidence for
the existence of God. In this context, the truth conditions for knowing
that a prayer had been answered might be raised, especially if alter-
native possibilities had been mentioned in the class, including the
possibility of coincidence or the possibility that God might have
brought about E for independent reasons.26 As DeRose says,
In some contexts, “S knows that P” requires for its truth that S have a
true belief that P and also be in a very strong epistemic position with
respect to P, while in other contexts, the very same sentence may
require for its truth, in addition to S’s having a true belief that P,
only that S meet some lower epistemic standards. Thus, the context-
ualist will allow that one speaker can truthfully say “S knows that P,”
while another speaker, in a different context where higher standards are
in place, can truthfully say “S doesn’t know that P,” though both speakers
are talking about the same S and the same P at the same time.27
If contextualists are right about the shifting of standards for knowledge

attributions in general, would this license the attribution of knowledge
concerning answered prayer in various familiar contexts, such as the
prayer group context?
Since traditional theists themselves regularly mention the possibility
that God might do things for reasons unknown to us, as noted in
chapter 4, the contextualist’s explanation of confident attributions of
knowledge concerning answered prayer in the prayer group setting
26
In such a context, it would be perfectly reasonable for classmates to protest,
“Nobody really knows that God answered those prayers.”
27
DeRose 1999, pp.1–2.
seems to fail. But this is not quite right. In the prayer group setting, the
idea that God might have reasons of which we are unaware for doing
or not doing something in a given situation plays a distinctive role—it
arises only when petitionary prayers appear not to be answered; it
represents a kind of fallback position. There are also other factors at
work here.
As DeRose has noted, pragmatic, non-epistemic considerations also
play a role in changing the context of knowledge attributions.28 In the
prayer group setting, the following pragmatic considerations contrib-
ute to a lower standard for the attribution of knowledge: the belief that
it is important to be grateful for the good things that God does,
especially answered prayers; the desire to reinforce the religious beliefs
of everyone involved in the prayer group; a reluctance to question the
reports of other members, since it could lead to suspicion about one’s
own religious convictions; and the fear that God might frown upon
those who do not have the faith to recognize answers to petitionary
prayers when they occur.
Contrary pragmatic considerations could raise the threshold for
knowledge attributions concerning answered prayer for these same
people (although perhaps not in that setting, without violating norms
to which everyone seems tacitly to have agreed). For instance, people
might find the confident petitionary prayers of prominent religious
figures (such as televangelists) to be so obviously arrogant and self-
important that by association, they find any knowledge attributions
concerning answered prayers to be in tension with a sense of proper
humility. If this is right, then we might predict a palpable tension in
contexts where both kinds of pragmatic consideration are in play,
pulling in different directions. Persons participating in such an event
would feel torn between conflicting pressures, and might display
atypical reticence concerning attributions of knowledge concerning
answered petitionary prayer.29
28
See DeRose 1999; for more on the relationship between knowledge and
action, see Hawthorne 2004, Stanley 2005, and Hawthorne and Stanley 2008, for
example.
29
I have personally witnessed a number of cases that appear to illustrate this
phenomenon.
So even if DeRose is right about contextualism with regard to
knowledge, it is not clear how much this will help the defender of
knowledge of answered petitionary prayer. In a context such as the
one in this book, for instance, in which we are involved in a philo-
sophical discussion that is determined to consider all possibilities, the
threshold for counting something as a case of knowledge is surely high.
Of course, if DeRose is wrong about contextualism, and the standards
for knowledge are the same in all contexts, then the contextualist
defense clearly fails. DeRose’s account would still help to explain
different attributions of knowledge in different contexts—one virtue of
his approach is that it draws attention to the important role that
pragmatic factors can play in what we say and think.30 But either
way, it seems that the contextualist defense should not change any of
our conclusions here.
By way of summary: the safety based challenge to knowledge of
answered petitionary prayer developed in chapter 4 seems stronger
than any of the defenses discussed here. Apart from direct revelation
from God, it seems unlikely that we know that God has answered (or
would answer) particular petitionary prayers offered by us or by
someone whom we know. But it is important to recognize that the
safety based challenge is essentially an appeal to ignorance: it says that
there could be nearby possible worlds that undermine our knowledge of
answered petitionary prayers in the actual world, even if it is true that
God has answered the prayers in question. But it does not show us that
there must be such worlds in all cases; it just depends—for all we have
seen so far, there might be such worlds, in which case one’s knowledge
is undermined, but there might not be such worlds, in which case one
might actually possess knowledge of answered petitionary prayer.31
This means that to some degree, it could be a matter of luck
whether one’s true belief that a given petitionary prayer had been
30
I will discuss pragmatic defenses of petitionary prayer in chapter 8.
31
In this chapter and the previous one, I have ignored the question of what else,
besides safe, true belief is necessary for knowledge, and I have ignored all intern-
alist accounts of knowledge (such as Sosa’s account of “reflective knowledge,” as
opposed to “animal knowledge:” see Sosa 2009); if such internalist accounts are
plausible, then it seems very hard indeed to say that someone might know, apart
from direct revelation, that a specific petitionary prayer had been answered.
answered constitutes a case of knowledge as opposed to mere true
belief. Of course, it is impossible to eliminate all luck from know-
ledge,32 but the strength of the safety based challenge should certainly
give us pause—the claim that we have knowledge of specific answered
petitionary prayers is problematic at best, for reasons that are internal
to traditional theism itself.
However, it is important to keep distinct in our minds the difference
between the epistemological question whether we ever know that
petitionary prayers are answered, on the one hand, and the question
whether petitionary prayers are in fact answered, on the other hand.
A negative answer to the first question implies nothing about the
second question. As we will see in the next few chapters, though, a
negative answer to the first question does have important implications
for some of the prominent defenses of petitionary prayer in the
literature to date.
32
On this question, see Pritchard’s discussion of benign epistemic luck
(Pritchard 2005, pp.133–41).
6
Divine Goodness and Praying
for Others
6.1 Petitionary Prayer and the Problem of Evil

As noted in chapter 3, God is rational, and so must do what there is
conclusive reason to do. Given the contrastive reasons account (CRA)
of answered prayer defended in chapter 2, if God has conclusive
reasons for doing something E independently of petitionary prayers
offered for E, then God’s bringing about E cannot be counted as an
answer to those petitionary prayers. But what if there are cases in
which God has less than conclusive reasons for doing something? Are
those cases in which petitionary prayer could make all the difference?
Some traditional theists hold that God’s moral perfection requires
that God must always choose the best available course of action in any
situation. But others disagree, claiming instead that God can choose
less than the best available course of action, and yet remain perfectly
good and loving. This is a large and complicated dispute about the
available space among God’s reasons, to use the language from
chapter 1. It is a dispute that has generated a great deal of controversy,
and I will not try to resolve it here.1 Instead, in this chapter I will
confine myself to discussing challenges and defenses related to other,
more specific claims concerning divine goodness and love.
Suppose that a person P suffers from an illness, that another person
S offers petitionary prayers for P’s recovery, and that God answers S’s
1
Leibniz famously claimed that since God must create the best of all possible
worlds, and God created this world, this must be the best of all possible worlds; for
more on his view, see Murray and Greenberg 2013. For the tip of the proverbial
iceberg of the contemporary literature concerning this question, see Adams 1972
and Rowe 2004.
Divine Goodness and Praying for Others 97

prayers by healing P. Would God have healed P even if nobody had
prayed for this? Surely God knew about P’s situation, and cared about
P more than anyone else did, and knew that it would be good for P to
be healed. (After all, if it were not good for P to be healed, then
presumably God would not have answered S’s prayer for this.2) But if
God would have healed P even if nobody had prayed for this, then S’s
prayer made no difference, and hence was not answered after all.3
This kind of challenge has dominated many discussions of petitionary
prayer in the literature, and the most important defenses formulated
to date are designed to answer it. (In this chapter and the next two, we
will discuss in detail the most prominent and promising defenses of
petitionary prayer in the literature.)
Charles Taliaferro considers cases in which God does not provide
something for someone because others have not offered petitionary
prayers. He claims that such cases are no more (or less) problematic
than cases in which adults fail to provide for children in their care:
Clearly this is all part of the problem of evil.…But if one believes it is
possible for an all-good God to create a world where the well-being of
children depends on others, it is not clear that petitionary prayer should
create an additional problem.4
There are two separate but related questions here, and they must be
addressed rather differently. Returning to the example involving
P’s illness and oversimplifying just a little bit,5 we can distinguish at
least three different scenarios involving God’s possible responses to
P’s illness:
(1) For reasons R, which are completely independent of any actual or
possible petitionary prayers, God will heal P, and would have
done so whether or not any petitionary prayers were offered on
2
For a discussion of prayers for bad things, see Smilansky 2012.
3
I called this the divine goodness problem in Davison 2009 (pp.292–3); related
worries are described in Basinger 1983 (pp.25–6, 29–31, and 33–4) and Murray
and Meyers 1994 (pp.311–12).
4
Taliaferro 2007, p.621. For a discussion of defenses based on the idea that
petitionary prayer extends human responsibility for one’s own self and for others,
see chapter 7.
5
See the detailed discussion of divine reasons in sections 2.4 and 2.5.
P’s behalf. (In this case, petitionary prayer makes no difference at
all—God will heal P regardless of whether or not such prayers are
offered.)
(2) For reasons R, God will heal P if petitionary prayers are offered on
P’s behalf by certain persons in certain circumstances, but not
otherwise. (In this case, petitionary prayer makes all the difference.)
(3) For reasons R, which are completely independent of any actual or
possible petitionary prayers, God will not heal P, and would not
have done so whether or not any petitionary prayers were offered
on P’s behalf. (In this case, petitionary prayer makes no difference
at all—God will not heal P regardless of whether or not such
prayers are offered.)
Those who attempt to address the familiar problem of evil are trying
to identify what God’s reasons might be in case (3), reasons that God
presumably lacks in case (1). Traditional theists assume that God has
some reason or other for permitting evil, at least in general, even if we
do not know exactly what it is. (If God has no reason at all for
permitting evil, then God is not good.) By contrast, those who attempt
to offer a defense of petitionary prayer are trying to identify what
God’s reasons might be in case (2).6 So Taliaferro is mistaken in
claiming that questions about petitionary prayer collapse into ques-
tions concerning the problem of evil in general.7
Michael Veber poses a clever challenge to other-person-directed
petitionary prayer based upon God’s essential goodness. Exploring
his challenge will help us to frame our questions about petitionary
prayer and divine goodness more precisely.8 He begins by considering
6
Of course, even if existing defenses are not strong, it does not follow that God
has no reasons to require other-person-directed petitionary prayers—God might
have reasons of which we are not aware, perhaps even reasons of which we cannot
become aware. In that case, we could not provide a successful defense, but God
would have perfectly good reasons for requiring petitionary prayers before pro-
viding certain things. (Veber would call this a “capitulation speech”: see Veber
2007, p.186.)
7
For a different defense of the same conclusion, see Howard-Snyder and
Howard-Snyder 2010, pp.64–6.
8
It will become clear in what follows that I do not accept Veber’s challenge, but
it will be helpful here to describe various defenses as providing helpful responses
to it.

clinical studies that claim to show that petitionary prayer is effective in
helping patients to recover from various kinds of ailments. Veber
argues that given how scientific experiments are constructed, such
studies are designed to show that had petitionary prayers not been
offered for a certain class of patients, then those patients would not
have recovered in certain ways.9 So suppose that person S asks God to
heal someone P in the experimental group, where P suffers from some
illness.10 Imagine also, for the sake of the argument, that God answers
S’s prayer by healing P. Since God actually healed P, Veber says that
we can conclude that P’s suffering from the illness was a case of
unnecessary suffering—after all, if P’s suffering had been necessary
for some greater good, then God would not have healed P. But given
his analysis of what the studies are supposed to show, he concludes
that had S not prayed for P, then P would not have recovered in this
way, and would have suffered from the illness instead. This means that
there is a nearby possible world in which S does not pray for P’s
recovery, God does not heal P from the illness, and God allows P’s
unnecessary suffering to occur. Veber argues that the only difference
between the actual world and the possible world just described is that
in the actual world, there is a person S who is praying for P’s recovery,
but this is “not a morally relevant difference.”11 So God’s permission
of unnecessary suffering in a nearby possible world is incompatible
with God’s essential goodness, and we should reject the claim that
God answered S’s prayer for P after all.12
W. Paul Franks formulates a reply to Veber’s challenge patterned
after Alvin Plantinga’s well-known reply to the logical problem of evil
9
Veber 2007, pp.178–9. For more on some of the issues involved here, see the
discussion of the counterfactual dependence account of answered prayer in chapter 2
and Flint 1998, chapters 10 and 11.
10
The studies Veber describes are double blind, so P would not know that
anyone had prayed for his or her recovery; see Veber 2007, pp.178–9.
11
Veber 2007, p.182.
12
Assuming, of course, that nobody else prays for P (see the discussion of people
“piggybacking” on the prayers of others in Murray and Meyers 1994, pp.317–18,
and a related point in Taliaferro 2007, p.621), and assuming also a number of
controversial things about the semantics of counterfactual conditional statements
that I shall not discuss here; see the summary of the argument in Veber 2007,
p.183.

(the free will defense). Franks proposes the following proposition, which
he claims is consistent with God’s being all-knowing, all-powerful, and
perfectly good: “God has restricted his powers of interaction with
humankind in such a way that those powers are exercised only in
response to promptings from humankind.”13 Franks then argues that
it is possible that the self-imposed restriction on divine action that this
proposition describes is required for God’s existence, love, and good-
ness to be manifested to human beings in the world on some occasions.
More specifically, if God had not imposed this restriction, and had
healed P without S’s petitionary prayer (to return to our hypothetical
example), then perhaps those involved in this situation would not have
known important things about God, and would have suffered eternal
separation from God as a consequence.14
Franks is right to point out that his own proposed scenario need not
be actually true, just possibly true, in order to show that Veber is hasty
to conclude that the case involving answered petitionary prayer entails
that God is not essentially good.15 But Franks’s explanation raises more
questions than it answers,16 and leads one to wonder whether there
might be a more detailed and compelling explanation of the morally
significant differences at stake here. Without trying to answer Veber’s
challenge specifically, others have tried to defend petitionary prayer
against related challenges by explaining why God might make the
provision of some good thing dependent upon petitionary prayers. In
one way or another, they all dispute Veber’s claim that P’s suffering in a
nearby possible world is unnecessary suffering, all things considered,
since they claim that there is a good reason for God’s requiring
petitionary prayers before providing certain things.17 It will be helpful
13
This is in accordance with the general pattern of the “greater goods” approach
to the logical problem of evil: see Franks 2009, pp.322–3.
14
Franks 2009, pp.322–3.
15
Franks 2009, p.323. To complete his defense, Franks’s proposed proposition
must also imply that P suffers in the nearby possible world described above, but
I will not pursue that issue question here.
16
But see the discussions of related questions in chapters 9 and 10.
17
Veber himself considers considering the possibility that P’s suffering is a
punishment for the sins of others, who failed to pray for P, but rejects this because
“Any God who punishes people for the sins of others, especially when they are this

to consider their arguments one at a time, since they represent the most
important defenses of petitionary prayer in the literature to date.
As mentioned in chapter 1, in order to be successful, the premises of
a defense need not be known to be true, but they must be plausible. In
general, the more plausible the premises, the stronger the defense. In
addition, since traditional theists hold that petitionary prayers are
more important when serious things are at stake, a successful defense
should explain why God might require petitionary prayers before
providing serious things, not just trivial ones.18 I will begin with a
general defense based on the nature of requests and reasons, and then
turn to some defenses of other-person-directed petitionary prayer.
I will postpone until chapter 7 discussion of those defenses based on
the idea that petitionary prayer is one of God’s ways of extending
human responsibility for one’s own self and for others, and then I will
turn toward defenses of self-directed petitionary prayers in chapter 8.
6.2 Requests and Reasons

Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder and Alexander Pruss propose
deontological defenses of petitionary prayer by arguing that unless
special exclusions occur, when someone asks God for a good thing,
this gives God a new reason, all by itself, for responding favorably to
the request.19 In this way, petitionary prayers would make a difference
with respect to God’s reasons, and hence would generate a morally
significant difference between Veber’s pair of possible worlds. Is this a
plausible explanation?
In order to support this claim, the Howard-Snyders appeal to Geof-
frey Cupit’s account of the way in which requests typically generate
minor (if they are sins at all), is an unjust God” (Veber 2007, p.184). Of course, it
may not be a matter of punishment at all—instead, it may be a kind of conse-
quence built into the world for good reasons. (This is one of the big questions about
petitionary prayer, really.)
18
See Basinger 1983 (pp.35–6), Basinger 1995 (pp.483–4), and Howard-
Snyder and Howard-Snyder 2010 (p.65).
19
Howard-Snyder and Howard-Snyder 2010, pp.47–51.

moral reasons among human beings.20 According to Cupit, we must be
careful to distinguish the following three things: requests, statements
expressing wishes, and statements concerning what we need. Although
it is possible for a request to express a wish and to be a statement
concerning what we need all at once, this need not be the case:
sometimes we make requests in contexts in which people already
know what we wish and what we need. In those contexts, there would
be no point in making a request unless it was designed to create a new
reason for acting all by itself.21
Since this is so, it follows that “to make a request of someone is to
treat the requestee as someone for whom our wishes, in themselves,
can provide a reason for action.”22 Now when we promise to do
something, one of our reasons for keeping the promise is that we
will make a fool of the person to whom we made the promise if we
fail to keep it. In the same way, Cupit claims, we can make a fool of the
person who makes a request of us if we do not regard the request as
generating a reason for us to comply with it. And this reason is a moral
reason, since we have a duty not to treat people unfittingly or to treat
them as less than they are.23 So when people make requests of us,
typically those requests generate moral reasons for us to answer them.
Does Cupit’s account explain how petitionary prayers might provide
God with a new reason to do something?
It is not clear that Cupit’s account can be applied in any straightfor-
ward way to petitionary prayer. First of all, consider those common-
place petitionary prayers that take the form of simply enumerating the
other reasons (that is, reasons independent of the petitionary prayer
itself ) that God already has for bringing about the object of the
prayer—for example, all of the bad consequences that will ensue if
this particular person does not recover from a serious illness. This is an
interesting practice, not just because God is assumed to know all of
these reasons already, and to care about everyone involved more than
any petitioner could, but also because it reveals that the petitioner
20
Cupit 1994; I say “typically” here because of the restrictions he imposes on
his account (pp.453–4). The remainder of this section expands and improves upon
the brief discussion of Cupit in Davison 2011.
21
Cupit 1994, p.449.
22 23
Cupit 1994, p.450. Cupit 1994, pp.450, 440.

believes that the request, all by itself, is not sufficient to provide God
with a reason to act. Cupit’s account of the way in which requests
generate reasons will not apply to this kind of petitionary prayer at all,
since it “applies only where the requestor trusts the requestee to treat
the request as providing a reason for action.”24
With regard to more typical kinds of petitionary prayer, there are
significant differences between God and human beings that strain
Cupit’s account, since it was developed with reference to examples
involving only human beings. By way of illustration, imagine that a
young child meets a famous scientist who has developed a powerful
new weapon, and requests that the scientist provide a demonstration
of the weapon that would endanger the lives of many innocent people.
Although Cupit’s mechanism explains how the child’s request might
generate a new reason for the scientist to attempt the dangerous
demonstration, we expect the scientist not to let this request become
a strong reason for acting because of the risks involved. In other
words, we expect the scientist to weigh the significance of the reason
generated by the child’s request against the significance of the scien-
tist’s existing reasons for not attempting the demonstration. In the
same way, we expect that God would not regard human requests as
generating strong reasons for acting if answering those requests would
require sacrificing something else more significant. At best, then,
Cupit’s account could explain how petitionary prayers change God’s
reasons significantly only in a very small number of cases.
In addition, the application of Cupit’s account to the divine/human
situation faces an even more serious problem: God would not make a
fool out of those who offered petitionary prayers by not answering
those prayers. God knows much more about the situation than peti-
tioners do, and everyone expects God to take such information into
account.25 So petitioners do not have a right to feel slighted or
diminished if their petitionary prayers never make a difference in
24
Cupit 1994, p.453. This is not to say that such prayers are pointless, of
course—it is simply to say that Cupit’s approach cannot explain why they would
give God a new reason to grant the request in question.
25
This is surely why there is a strand of Christian teaching according to which
“Thy will be done” is an essential part of every proper petitionary prayer; for
further discussion, see chapters 5 and 9. Reflection on such considerations also

terms of what God decides to do. By contrast, in the cases involving
human beings that Cupit’s account was designed to handle, the people
involved do have a right to feel slighted or diminished if their requests
do not make some discernible difference to one another. Since the
central mechanism at work in Cupit’s account does not apply to the
divine/human situation, it does not explain how petitionary prayers
could be expected to make a difference with regard to God’s action,
and hence ultimately fails to provide an account of the morally
relevant difference required to answer Veber’s challenge.
Of course, just because Cupit’s account of how requests generate
moral reasons among human beings does not help us here, it does not
follow that every other explanation of this idea would fail also. For the
sake of the argument, suppose that the offering of a petitionary prayer
always gives God a new reason for bringing about the object
requested.26 To return to the example discussed above in connection
with Veber’s challenge, will this be a morally relevant difference
between the actual world, in which God heals P in response to S’s
petitionary prayer, and a nearby possible world in which God does
not heal P because S does not pray for this?
The answer, I think, is that it depends on the details—it depends on
what else is at stake in this situation. If there were literally nothing
important at stake in the situation, for example, then surely it would
constitute a morally relevant difference. If the situation were rele-
vantly similar to the situation described above involving the child and
the scientist, though, then the answer would be “no.” We need more
information. This shows, however, that the new reason for God to act
provided by a petitionary prayer is not sufficient, all by itself, to
answer Veber’s challenge. To do this, we need to know what else
might be at stake in answering petitionary prayers, and this is exactly
what the other defenses we will consider in the following sections are
designed to identify.
tends to make the objects of petitionary prayers more and more general; see the
discussion of this in chapter 9.
26
Unlike the Howard-Snyders, who rely on Cupit’s account, Pruss simply
asserts that “a request for a good always provides the requestee with a reason to
provide the good, at least barring some exclusionary reason” (Pruss 2013, p.16).

6.3 Basinger and Stump on Other-Person-Directed
Petitionary Prayer
It is very common for people to offer other-person-directed petition-
ary prayers when the serious well-being of others is at stake.
A successful defense should provide a plausible answer to the question
of why God might make one person’s well-being depend upon the
petitionary prayers of another.
David Basinger asks us to consider a case of other-person-directed
petitionary prayer in which Bill prays on behalf of his friends Tom and
Sue, whose marriage is in trouble. He argues that it is hard to explain
why God might require petitionary prayers from Bill, before helping
Tom and Sue, just to teach Bill a lesson:
For God to refrain, for example, from increasing the quality of life for
Tom and Sue primarily because he wants to increase the quality of life
for Bill is to concede that God sometimes treats an individual’s quality
of life not as an end in itself, but as a means to some other end. Divine
activity of this sort, however, seems inconsistent with [the claim that a
perfectly good God is always doing everything within his power to
maximize the quality of life for each of his created moral agents]. How
could a God who has an infinite amount of concern for each individual
and can intervene whenever he desires refrain from doing something
beneficial for one person, primarily because to withhold such beneficial
action will or could benefit another person? (Basinger 1983, p.34)27
This is a deontological challenge to other-person-directed petitionary
prayer based on the idea that it is wrong to treat someone’s quality of
life merely as a means, and not always as an end in itself.28
By way of an initial reply, it would seem open to God to decide, on
a case-by-case basis, whether or not to treat one person’s quality of life
as a means to some other end, including the quality of life of some
27
Basinger refines this challenge further in a later article (Basinger 2004),
incorporating the distinction between basic and discretionary provisions.
28
Although I will not pursue this question here, William Hasker has pointed
out (in helpful correspondence) that Basinger’s argument assumes that God must
always maximize utility, which is certainly controversial, as noted earlier in this
chapter. Hasker is right about this, of course, but as I will explain, there are also
other reasons to object to Basinger’s argument.

other person. As the creator and sustainer of every creature, God has
rights over human persons that they do not have over one another
(and perhaps even over their own selves).29 If there is more at stake in
the life of one person than in the life of another in a given situation, for
example, then it might be best for God to treat one person’s quality
of life as a means to improving the quality of life of another, at least for
a time.
So there seems to be no obstacle, in principle, to God’s treating one
person’s quality of life as a means to some other end. But what kinds of
things might be at stake? What reasons might God have for requiring
other-person-directed petitionary prayers in some cases? In her
ground-breaking article concerning petitionary prayer, Eleonore
Stump suggests a way to fill in the blanks here. She argues that God
desires friendship with created persons. But if such persons are free in
some libertarian sense, then God cannot unilaterally bring about
friendship with them—they must cooperate on their own. By requir-
ing freely offered petitionary prayer before providing things in some
cases, she argues, perhaps God can prevent the overwhelming oppres-
sion and spoiling of created persons that could occur in friendship
with God.30
Stump begins her case for this conclusion by noting that when there
are extreme differences between persons (with regard to knowledge
and power, for instance), it can be difficult to maintain a healthy
friendship. There are at least two significant dangers to be avoided:
overwhelming spoiling and overwhelming oppression. If these things
happen,
[T]he result will be replacement of whatever kind of friendship there
might have been with one or another sort of using. Either the superior
member of the pair will use the lesser as his lackey, or the lesser will use
the superior as his personal power source.
(Stump 1979, reprinted in Timpe 2009, p.407)31
29
For more on this theme, see Swinburne 1993, p.185, and Swinburne 1994,
p.203; see also the discussion of permission-required goods in section 8.4.
30
Stump 1979 (reprinted in Timpe 2009, pp.407–11).
31
Here I will discuss only Stump’s defense of other-person-directed prayer, but
I will discuss her defense of self-directed prayer in chapter 7.

With regard to other-person-directed prayers, Stump argues by ana-
logy that God’s requiring such prayers would help to guard against
oppressive overwhelming. She imagines a student asking a teacher to
help the student’s friend, who is also a student in the class and has not
started writing an important paper. In this case, she argues, the
teacher “is in a position to help with less risk of oppressive meddling
than before.”32
In one of the most detailed and thorough defenses of petitionary
prayer in the literature, Michael Murray and Kurt Meyers consider
and reject Stump’s defense. First, they note, there are important
differences between the two kinds of relationship that strain her
analogy to the point of breaking: whereas the struggling student can
be told, by the teacher, that help has been offered because of the
intercession of the student’s friend, no such conversation is possible (or
required) between God and the beneficiary of petitionary prayers in
the typical case. Also, in the paradigm cases of other-person-directed
prayers mentioned by Murray and Meyers (from the Christian trad-
ition), the person who is the object of prayer is also praying for the very
same things on his or her own. But in Stump’s case, the friend asks the
teacher for help in the first place only because the struggling student is
not willing to do this on his own.33 These difficulties seem decisive
against Stump’s defense of other-person-directed petitionary prayer,34
and they lead Murray and Meyers to propose a different explanation,
to which we may now turn.
6.4 Murray and Meyers on Other-Person-Directed

Petitionary Prayer
First, Murray and Meyers say that God’s requiring such prayers gen-
erates interdependence among believers that “fosters the sort of unity
God demands of the [Christian] church.”35 Other-person-directed
prayers
32
Stump 1979 (reprinted in Timpe 2009, p.408).
33
Murray and Meyers 1994, p.326.
34
For a discussion of Stump’s argument as applied instead to self-directed
prayers, where the issues are very different, see sections 8.3 and 8.4.
35

…encourage believers to share their needs and shortcomings with
others so that they might pray for them. But more than this, corporate
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. (Murray and Meyers 1994, p.327)
Like Stump’s, this defense faces a number of serious difficulties. First,
it assumes that people know (or at least justifiably believe) that God
will not provide certain things unless and until petitionary prayers are
offered for them—otherwise, they would not be motivated to share
their needs with one another in the way described, or to offer the
relevant prayers for others. As we saw in chapters 4 and 5, though, it is
problematic to assume this. Also, in chapter 5, we saw that Christian
teaching concerning petitionary prayer is not as clear as one might
expect if God really does withhold serious things from people just
because others fail to pray for them in the petitionary way.36
Second, this explanation assumes without argument that the inter-
dependence fostered by requiring other-person-directed petitionary
prayers is highly valuable. In formulating the task to be discharged by
a successful defense, Murray and Meyers say that one must identify
“some good which accrues as a result of the petition being made, a
good significant enough to be worth foregoing the (lesser) good of the
provision being made without the request.”37 But if the provision in
question involves a serious matter, it is not clear that interdependence
among believers is a good of sufficient significance.
For example, suppose that a mother of five young children con-
tracts cancer. If petitionary prayers of impressive quantity and quality
were offered on behalf of the mother and her children by a large
number of people with good intentions, but she died anyway, then
traditional theists would probably conclude that this is a case like (1) in
section 6.1, in which God had some reason for permitting her to die
that overrides any reason provided by the petitionary prayers offered
on her behalf. But suppose that nobody offered petitionary prayers on
her behalf; should traditional theists think that the cause of creating
36
As Cohn-Sherbok says, concerning Jewish teaching regarding God’s will, “If
God wants people to follow His guidance, why does He allow such confusion to
exist?” (Cohn-Sherbok 1989, p.91).
37

interdependence among believers was sufficiently significant for God
not to heal her, because such prayers were not offered? I think that the
answer here is “no,” but perhaps there is room for reasonable people
to disagree.38 In the typical case, in fact, it seems clear that only God
would know the answer to the question about the relative values of
things at stake in a given situation. So this defense would lead us to say
that other-person-directed petitionary prayers are required by God
only when the good of interdependence outweighs the good at stake
specified by the object of the other-person-directed petitionary
prayer,39 which narrows the application of this defense significantly.
Third, the goal here is to locate “some good which accrues as a
result of the petition being made,” but as Isaac Choi points out, even if
God never answered any petitionary prayers at all, the factors at work
in Murray and Meyers’ explanation would still motivate people to
pray for others—as long as they believed (falsely) that such prayers
were necessary and answered, whether or not they were in fact.40
Finally, one might wonder whether God’s requiring other-person-
directed petitionary prayers actually generates interdependence
among believers. This would seem to be an empirical question, and
it brings us to the second half of Murray and Meyers’ defense of other-
person-directed petitionary prayer: they argue that God’s requiring
other-person-directed petitionary prayers makes people aware of each
other’s needs, and thus leads not just to people praying for one
another, but also to people helping one another directly.41 But is
38
Taliaferro, for example, appeals to the possibility of survival of death in order
to argue that God might permit significant things to hang upon petitionary
prayers, thereby blunting the force of this implication: see Taliaferro 2007,
p.620. For more on this question, see section 8.4.
39
Murray and Meyers (1994) suggest both that God has a “general policy”
regarding when to require petitionary prayers (p.315, fn.6) and that God might
require different things from different people, based upon middle knowledge
(pp.324–5); I will return to this question in section 8.4.
40
See Choi 2003 (a similar point is made in Hoffman 1985, p.28 and Smith
and Yip 2010, p.7). The problem in this case would be similar to other cases in
which the petitionary prayer itself does not do the work in question (see section
2.3). Such false beliefs need not be due to deceit on God’s part, by the way—they
could arise in a number of ways.
41
Murray and Meyers 1994, p.327. Murray 2004 (p.251) adds an analogy
here, in which parents require that siblings ask for things for one another, but as

this a “good which accrues as a result of the petition being made, a
good significant enough to be worth foregoing the (lesser) good of the
provision being made without the request”? Once again, it seems to
depend on what is at stake. It is good that people help each other,
where possible, and it is good that people share their needs with those
who wish to help. But are these goods significant enough to be worth
forgoing the provision of clearly significant, serious goods when others
fail to offer petitionary prayers? Choi’s point mentioned above also
applies here: even if God never answered any petitionary prayers at
all, people would be just as motivated to discover and share one
another’s needs if they believed (falsely) that God required petitionary
prayers.
Still, it is clear that Murray and Meyers’s defense of other-person-
directed petitionary prayer does explain why God might withhold the
provision of certain things unless and until petitionary prayers are
offered, at least in some cases, and this is a significant result.
6.5 Taliaferro, Smith, and Yip on Other-Person-Directed

Petitionary Prayer
Taliaferro has a different approach to our question. He asks us to
consider “the Petitionary World,” which is “precisely like ours in all its
main features” and includes some good things (and does not include
some bad things) as a result of answered petitionary prayers. He
claims that this world would be better than “the Non-Petitionary
World,” in which there is the same amount of good and evil as in
the Petitionary World, but none of the good occurs (and none of the
evil prevented is prevented) because of petitionary prayers. For
example, in the Petitionary World, God helps to evacuate 300,000
troops from Dunkirk in 1940 in response to petitionary prayers, but in
the Non-Petitionary World, this happens without God’s answering
any such prayers. Taliaferro claims that The Petitionary World “has
an additional value that the second world lacks; this value may be
with many other analogies, this one is strained by epistemological differences, some
of which Murray himself acknowledges (see 2004, p.254).

called a mediatory good. By a mediatory good, I mean the valuable
mediation of a good agent.”42
Nicholas Smith and Andrew Yip read Taliaferro’s description of
the Non-Petitionary World (“the same amount of good and evil”) in
such a way that it includes God’s helping to evacuate the troops, but
not in response to petitionary prayer; hence they disagree with Talia-
ferro’s claim that this second world contains no mediatory good. Even
if they have misread Taliaferro’s description of this second world, they
are surely right to point out that it is possible that God introduce
mediatory goods into a world without doing so in response to peti-
tionary prayers. Hence they conclude (properly) that Taliaferro’s
appeal to mediatory goods fails to explain why God might withhold
something unless and until such prayers are offered.43 It also seems
appropriate to point out that, as Murray and Meyers put the matter,
Taliaferro must hold that the valuable mediation of a good agent is
“significant enough to be worth foregoing the (lesser) good of the
provision being made without the request.”44 But it seems doubtful
that this will be true in cases involving petitionary prayers for very
serious matters, such as the recovery of the young mother of five
children mentioned above. So although Taliaferro’s defense would
seem to apply to some cases of other-person-directed petitionary
prayer, it will have limited application, much like the defense devel-
oped by Murray and Meyers.
Trying to capture the central insight behind Taliaferro’s approach,
Smith and Yip offer a partial defense of petitionary prayer based on
the claim that partnership with God is the significant good thing that is
present in a world in which God answers petitionary prayers, where a
pledge of partnership “entails the petitioner’s genuine desire in obey-
ing, loving, and sharing the ways of God in his or her earthly life.”45
This partnership is evident in petitionary prayer when petitioners not
only ask God for some good thing, but present themselves to God
to contribute actively to its achievement if the opportunity should
present itself. Without an implicit vow of partnership, they claim,
petitionary prayers are really asking God to serve us, rather than to
42
Taliaferro 2007, p.621–2, italics in the original.
43
Smith and Yip 2010, pp.9–10.
44 45
Murray and Meyers 1994, p.313. Smith and Yip 2010, p.10.

assist us. And in a world in which God provided every good thing
without petitionary prayers, there would be nothing for us to do, no
positive moral agency for us to exercise.46
Smith and Yip call their argument a “partial” defense, in part
because they do not address the question that has plagued the other
defenses discussed above, namely, the question of the relative signifi-
cance of the goodness of partnership with God as compared to God’s
providing certain things without requiring petitionary prayers.47
As mentioned above in connection with these other defenses, it is
not clear whether partnership with God is significant enough to
provide God with a reason for requiring other-person-based petition-
ary prayers where serious matters are at stake. I will return to the
question of the importance of human moral agency in chapter 7,
where I will discuss some closely related defenses of petitionary prayer.
But there is one additional problem with Smith and Yip’s defense
that should be pointed out first. One difficulty involved in evaluating
their proposal stems from the fact that in formulating the question of
what makes petitionary prayer worthwhile enough for God to require
it in some cases, they frame the question in terms of two possible
worlds, described as follows:
…it would seem that a world in which God simply supplied all appro-
priate goods to the world—without requiring His creatures to pray for
them (henceforth we will call such a world NPW), would be preferable
to one in which God answers prayers, but allows the world not to enjoy
all of the goods appropriate to it unless and until someone prays
for them (henceforth, we will call this world PW).
(Smith and Yip 2010, p.1)48
Later in the paper, they argue that in NPW, creatures would be

“unable to engage in genuine moral agency,” because God would
always provide the appropriate thing at the appropriate time, leaving
no room for us to act to improve the world.49 But surely this way of
46
Smith and Yip 2010, pp.10–12; their description of partnership with God is
similar, in some ways, to the notion of being symbolically for the good (see Davison
2012, chapter 6).
47
Smith and Yip 2010, p.13.
48
Here they take themselves to be following Taliaferro’s example.
49
Smith and Yip 2010, p.12.

describing the possibilities poses a false dilemma. Imagine a third
world in which God answers no petitionary prayers, but does not
provide all appropriate goods unasked, either. In this world, there
would be the possibility of genuine moral agency and partnership with
God in Smith and Yip’s sense, but without any answered petitionary
prayers.
So far, the defenses we have considered concerning other-person-
directed petitionary prayer have had some success in answering
Veber’s challenge. They have identified plausible candidates for
something “significant enough to be worth foregoing the (lesser)
good of the provision being made without the request,”50 at least in
some cases. They have not been able to show that this is the case when
something very serious is at stake, because they have not been able to
establish the relative goodness of the valuable things alleged to be
generated by requiring petitionary prayers. But we have not yet
considered an important family of defenses of other-person-directed
petitionary prayer, namely, those based on the extension of human
responsibility. This category of defenses is the subject of the next
chapter, to which we may now turn; then we will turn to different
kinds of defenses of self-directed petitionary prayer, in chapter 8.
50
7
Responsibility-Based Defenses
7.1 Responsibility in General

Many authors have provided defenses of petitionary prayer (both
other-person-directed and self-directed) along the following lines: it
is good for people to be responsible for what happens in the world,
both for themselves and for one another. Petitionary prayer enables
people to be more responsible than otherwise by providing additional
opportunities to make a difference in the world, with God’s help. This
added level of responsibility requires that God provide certain things
only if people ask for them, so this is what God does.
In some ways, this seems to me to be a key issue in the entire debate
over petitionary prayer. The idea that human beings have influence
over God, and can thereby affect the course of things, is very import-
ant to many people, especially if they feel powerless to make a
difference in any other way. But there is also something theologically
questionable, it seems to me, in wanting to take credit for the results of
answered prayer. Perhaps this is just a reflection of the general
theological tension between an emphasis on divine providence and
sovereignty, on the one hand, and human responsibility, on the other
hand. But perhaps there is also something else going on, something
resembling pride that is in tension with the attitudes of gratitude and
humility recommended by all traditional theistic religions. I am not
completely confident about this, but in some cases, people seem to
take credit for the result of answered prayer in ways that strike me as
wholly inappropriate. I will not pursue this theological question any
further, although I think it deserves attention from those who are
qualified to address it.
In order to assess properly the prospects for a defense of petitionary
prayer based upon human responsibility, we need to consider carefully
Responsibility-Based Defenses 115

several questions. First, when are people responsible for things, in
general? Second, to what degree would a petitioner be responsible for
the outcome of a petitionary prayer that was answered by God? Finally,
would this added responsibility provide God with a compelling reason
for withholding something unless and until petitionary prayers were
offered for it? Let’s explore the general idea of responsibility briefly, and
then we can explore the other questions as we consider particular
defenses based upon the idea of responsibility from the literature.
Often we attribute responsibility to people for states of affairs,
including their actions, the results of their actions, and their charac-
ters. But we also attribute responsibility to non-human animals or
objects—for example, we say that a rabbit was responsible for the hole
in the ground, or that a snow storm was responsible for the collapse of
the roof. In these cases, we are making assertions about causal rela-
tions between the thing held responsible and the state of affairs in
question. By contrast, the typical attribution of responsibility to a
person usually involves something about that person’s beliefs, desires,
abilities, and actions.1
Attributions of responsibility to persons come in several different
varieties. There are positive attributions of responsibility, such as
instances of praise, which involve a positive assessment of that for
which the person in question is responsible. There are also negative
attributions of responsibility, such as instances of blame, which involve
a negative assessment of that for which the person in question is
responsible.2
It is important to distinguish the factors that are relevant to assess-
ing a person’s moral character from those factors that are relevant to
1
See Dennett 1973, Wolf 1990, and Quinn 1983b. It should be clear that in
this chapter, we are concerned with what is often called retrospective responsibil-
ity, as opposed to prospective responsibility. Also, I will address here only questions
about individual responsibility, not collective responsibility; it would be interesting
to explore issues of collective responsibility with regard to petitionary prayer, but
I cannot do that here.
2
For more on the evaluative element at work in moral judgments, see
Stevenson 1937 and 1950, and Hare 1952. In between positive and negative
attributions of responsibility, there are also neutral attributions of responsibility,
which do not involve either positive or negative assessments of that for which the
person in question is responsible, but I will ignore those here.

assessing a person’s moral responsibility for a given state of affairs.
Roughly speaking, a person’s moral character is a relatively stable set
of dispositions or tendencies to think, feel, and act in morally signifi-
cant ways. Sometimes certain features of a person (for example, her
beliefs, desires, or involuntary reactions in certain situations) tell us a
great deal about her moral character, even though those same fea-
tures do not tell us anything about her moral responsibility for a given
state of affairs.3 However, sometimes the fact that a person is morally
responsible for a given state of affairs does tell us something interesting
about her moral character. Hence although facts about moral respon-
sibility are pertinent to discovering facts about moral character, the
converse does not usually hold.4
Realists about moral responsibility hold that the assertions expressed
by well-formed attributions of moral responsibility are either true or
false, that there is some independent fact of the matter concerning
whether or not a given person is really morally responsible for
something. In order to understand what is at stake here, consider
two different questions that we might ask about attributing moral
responsibility:
(1) Would it be appropriate now to attribute moral responsibility to
this person for this thing, given the circumstances?
(2) Is it objectively true that this person is actually morally responsible
for this thing?
In order to answer question (1), we might engage in many different
kinds of activities, such as trying to discover the probable consequences
3
As Nietzsche says, “[T]he origin of an action was interpreted in the most
definite sense possible, as origin out of an INTENTION; people were agreed in
the belief that the value of an action lay in the value of its intention.…[N]owadays
when, at least among us immoralists, the suspicion arises that the decisive value of
an action lies precisely in that which is NOT INTENTIONAL, and that all its
intentionalness, all that is seen, sensible, or ‘sensed’ in it, belongs to its surface or
skin—which, like every skin, betrays something, but CONCEALS still more?”
(Nietzsche 1886, section 32).
4
For an example of an author who seems to reverse this relationship, see
Schlossberger 1992; for more on moral character and moral responsibility for
states of affairs, see Gosselin 1982 and Fischer 1985/6. I will discuss luck and
responsibility below in section 7.4.

of attributing moral responsibility to S given the circumstances, trying
to compare those consequences to the probable consequences of not
attributing moral responsibility, etc. Based upon such an investigation,
we might decide that, given what we appear to know, it would be
appropriate now to attribute moral responsibility to S. Realists about
moral responsibility need not quibble with this approach to answering
question (1).
But realists about moral responsibility will insist that, in order to
answer question (2), we need to investigate the person’s actions and
the relationship between those actions and the thing for which S may
be held morally responsible. In practice, of course, such investigations
are often very difficult, as we see in the law.5 In other words, realists
can accept a “forward looking” approach to answering question (1),
but they will insist that the answer to question (1) does not by itself
provide us with the answer to question (2), which requires a “back-
ward looking” approach. In John Martin Fischer’s realist words,
agents are morally responsible to the extent that they are “rationally
appropriate candidates” for the “reactive attitudes” (like resentment
and gratitude), but being morally responsible doesn’t entail that one
ought to be praised or blamed in any particular way.6
Among realists about moral responsibility, there are further distinc-
tions to be drawn, parallel to those described in chapter 3 in connec-
tion with different views of freedom. Strong incompatibilists about moral
responsibility insist that only free actions or omissions can incur moral
responsibility for an agent, where an action or omission is free only if
the person could have done otherwise in a sense which is incompatible
with determinism. By contrast, weak incompatibilists about moral
responsibility agree that only free actions or omissions can incur
moral responsibility, but they reject the claim that acting or omitting
to act freely requires the ability to do otherwise, at the same time
insisting that free actions and omissions cannot be parts of determined
sequences of states of affairs.
5
This leads some to argue that realism about moral responsibility naturally
lends itself to skepticism about moral responsibility: see Dennett 1984, pp.136–65,
for instance.
6
See Fischer 1986, pp.12–13, and compare Brandt 1957 and Strawson 1962
(where the “reactive attitudes” are first described as such).

Strong compatibilists about moral responsibility agree that only free
actions or omissions can incur moral responsibility, although they
reject both (a) the strong libertarian claim that the ability to do
otherwise is necessary for acting or omitting to act freely and (b) the
weak libertarian claim that free actions and omissions cannot be parts
of determined sequences of events. And whereas weak compatibilists
about moral responsibility agree with the strong compatibilist’s view
of the relationship between freedom and determinism, they claim
further that it is possible to be morally responsible for the obtaining
of a state of affairs even if one has performed no free action or
omission which led to its obtaining.
Further distinctions could be drawn within each of these camps, but
this way of classifying accounts of moral responsibility is more than
sufficient for our purposes.7 Those who defend petitionary prayer
because it extends human responsibility are clearly realists about
responsibility, since they argue that it provides God with a reason to
act in certain ways (and God would know, objectively, whether or not
a given person was really responsible for something). Now we are in a
position to explore these defenses in detail.
7.2 Swinburne and the Howard-Snyders

Richard Swinburne claims that “If human responsibility is good, then
this extension to it—of exerting influence on (though not of course
compelling) God to change things [through petitionary prayer]—
would surely also be good.”8 In criticizing Swinburne, I argued in
another place that “it seems unlikely that one is responsible (in any
substantial sense) for the results of answered prayer.”9 My argument
7
Here I will not take a stand concerning which of these positions concerning
freedom, determinism, and responsibility is correct. For interesting discussions of
these issues, see Anscombe 1976, Austin 1970, Chisholm 1964, 1966, 1976a,
1976b, Clarke 2003, Dennett 1984, Fischer 1982 and 1986, Fischer and Ravizza
1998, Frankfurt 1969, Lehrer 1966, Locke 1976, O’Connor 1995 and 2000,
Timpe 2013, and van Inwagen 1983.
8
Swinburne 1998, p.115; Nicholas Smith and Andrew Yip (2010, pp.10–12)
also argue that petitionary prayer permits a kind of partnership with God that
would not be possible otherwise; see the discussion of their views in section 6.5.
9
Davison 2009, pp.296–8.

for this conclusion began with epistemological considerations similar
to those described in chapters 4 and 5: it is unlikely that people know
that their other-person-directed prayers have been answered, even
when the objects of such prayers come to pass. In general, one’s
degree of responsibility for something depends upon the extent to
which one could foresee it, the extent to which one intended it as a
result of one’s actions, and the extent to which one’s actions contrib-
uted to its obtaining.10 Since we cannot foresee the results of one’s
petitionary prayers, our responsibility for such results is dramatically
diminished—or so I argued.
But through a series of clever and thoughtful arguments, Daniel
and Frances Howard-Snyder have defended Swinburne’s view against
my critique.11 They argue that the extension of human responsibility
provides God with good reasons for decreeing what they describe as
“an institution of petitionary prayer,” according to which God will do
certain things if and only if people pray for them.12 The Howard-
Snyders offer a three part reply to my argument against Swinburne,
and it will be helpful to consider all three of them in order.
The first of the three replies is the “So What?” reply:
But how does any of this imply that the institution of petitionary prayer
does not extend human responsibility? We don’t see how. After all,
even if you are only somewhat responsible for your friend’s being
healed, your free petition was necessary and sufficient for it given that
the institution was in place. That’s responsibility enough.
(Howard-Snyder and Howard-Snyder 2010, p.53.)
The claim that one’s petition was “necessary and sufficient” for the
healing of one’s friend “given that the institution [of petitionary prayer]
was in place” is intriguing. The description of the institution that the
Howard-Snyders give is not very detailed, so it is hard to know if this
claim is true, but let’s suppose that it is.13 Is this “responsibility enough”?
10
See Davison 1999a and 1994, chapter 5.
11
I have learned a great deal from their discussion, and revised my arguments
accordingly, as will be evident in the remainder of this chapter.
12
Howard-Snyder and Howard-Snyder 2010, pp.51ff. The rest of this section
is based on Davison 2011.
13
Does the institution include God’s specific intentions to answer specific
prayers? If so, is this based on middle knowledge? What else does God require

We often talk about “the last straw,” implying that the last straw is
the one that broke the camel’s back. Given that the other straws were
already in place on the camel’s back, this one last straw’s presence was
necessary and sufficient for breaking the camel’s back. In Fred
Dretske’s useful terminology, this last straw was a “triggering cause”
of the breaking of the camel’s back, as opposed to a “structuring
cause.”14 But even if we agree that the last straw was necessary and
sufficient for breaking the camel’s back, this does not mean that the
last straw contributed causally to the breaking of the camel’s back
more than any other straw did—they all made the same contribution
(assuming that they have the same weight, of course). The contribu-
tion of the last straw seems especially important to us only because it
was the last one.
Suppose now that we complicate the picture a little bit. Imagine
that there is a very long line of people, each of whom will choose
whether or not to place a single straw on the camel’s back, one at a
time, without knowing whether or not any of the others who passed
the camel before them placed their straws on the camel’s back or kept
their straws and kept walking. At some point, we may suppose,
someone places what turns out to be the last straw, and the camel
buckles to the ground; let us suppose that straw number 15,000 is the
final one. Imagine also that the person placing the final straw cannot
foresee that it will make any difference to the camel’s back. Finally,
imagine that the camel’s owner, who is standing next to the camel, has
a choice about whether or not the camel will bear the full weight of the
straws placed upon it. Now we have approximated more closely (but
not exactly) the complicated situation described by the Howard-
Snyders as “the institution of petitionary prayer.”
In this case, the placing of the last straw is both necessary and
sufficient for the breaking of the camel’s back, given the circum-
stances, but will the person who placed the last straw on the camel’s
back be significantly responsible for breaking the camel’s back? I don’t
as part of this institution? Must prayers be sincere, or specific, or repeated, etc.? Is

the policy binding on God, or does it leave God with discretion to make exceptions
(see section 3.3)? The Howard-Snyders do not answer these questions.
14
Dretske 1988.

think so. This person will have no more responsibility for breaking the
camel’s back than any of the other 14,999 people who laid straws on
the camel’s back earlier. This is not because responsibility is like a pie
that must be divided among those who participate in joint venture;
two people can be fully responsible for the same thing.15 It is because
each of the participants is equally responsible to the same degree, and
this degree is very small because each one makes such a small causal
contribution to the final outcome, and none foresees the consequences
of his or her contribution.
The second of the three replies in defense of Swinburne involves the
Howard-Snyders taking issue with my epistemological claim, but
I have already discussed those questions in chapters 4 and 5, so
I will not rehearse my arguments here.16 In the third of their three
replies in defense of Swinburne, they suppose for the sake of the
argument that I am right in thinking that the foresight condition
cannot be met, but then argue that significant responsibility is still
possible. They offer two arguments for this conclusion. The first
involves the startling claim that the causal contribution that you or
I might make in a case of answered petitionary prayer “won’t be
significantly less than the degree to which you contribute causally in
bringing about various mundane states of affairs;” they say that
This is not surprising; after all, your freely asking is necessary and
sufficient for [a sick person’s] being healed, given that the institution of
petitionary prayer is in place. To be sure, you didn’t set the institution in
place, but then we didn’t set in place the standing conditions that allow
us to contribute causally to the way the world is. Indeed, it seems we had
no greater influence on those conditions than the institution in question,
in which case it seems that the degree to which your asking contributes
causally to your friend’s being healed is no less than the degree to which a
particular act of yours contributes causally to, say, the tennis ball’s
landing a winner or the sockeye and zucchini being grilled to
perfection. (Howard-Snyder and Howard-Snyder 2010, pp.59–60)
15
As Michael Zimmerman shows in Zimmerman 1985.
16
Actually, only one of the Howard-Snyders takes issue with my epistemo-
logical arguments—the other one is much less optimistic about the possibility of
knowing that petitionary prayers have been answered (see Howard-Snyder and
Howard-Snyder 2010, pp.54–9).

I will not defend here any specific analysis of causal contribution,17
but it seems obvious that the degrees of causal contribution described
in these cases are very different. Knowing whether or not something is
necessary or sufficient relative to certain standing conditions does not
permit us to determine, all by itself, degrees of causal contribution—
the case of the last straw’s breaking the camel’s back, described above,
demonstrates this point. Some traditional theists are quick to distance
themselves from the view that petitionary prayer is effective in the
same way that a (genuine) magical spell would be, presumably
because they hold that God is free in the strong libertarian sense,
and not obligated to answer particular prayers.18 But the claim that a
petitionary prayer is necessary and sufficient for a result (given that the
institution is in place) sounds very much like what we would say about
the efficacy of a (genuine) magical spell.
The Howard-Snyders’ second argument for the conclusion that
responsibility can be significant (even without foresight) involves an
appeal to an example in which a man plugs a leak at a nuclear facility,
where the method used to seal the leak is notoriously unreliable.19
Here I confess that I agree with them that it is possible to be respon-
sible for something to which one makes a substantial causal contribu-
tion, even if one cannot foresee the result with much confidence. So a
high degree of foresight is clearly not necessary for some degree of
responsibility. But from this it does not follow that the petitioner is
responsible in any substantial sense for whatever God brings about in
response to petitionary prayer. To show that, we would need a
sufficient condition for responsibility, and an argument for the con-
clusion that this condition would be satisfied in such a case; I could be
wrong about this, of course, but the prospects for success on this front
do not seem at all promising to me.
Suppose, though, that Swinburne and the Howard-Snyders are
right in thinking that the institution of petitionary prayer would
extend human responsibility. Does this show that the institution was
17
But see Chisholm 1976b, Freddoso 1988, Quinn 1983a and 1988, and Rowe
1991.
18
See the discussion of this point in section 3.4; the quotation from Swinburne
at the beginning of this chapter illustrates this view clearly.
19
Howard-Snyder and Howard-Snyder 2010, p.61.

“valuable enough” for God to decree? I don’t think so. For one thing,
just because something is good, it does not follow that more of it is
better. Also, since this is a consequentialist defense, we need to pay
attention not just to the positive results of extending responsibility,
but also to the negative ones. Responsibility is a two-edged sword:
if people can deserve praise for answered prayers, then they can
also deserve blame for not praying. The belief that such blame is
appropriate, even if it isn’t in a particular case, creates significant
heartache for many people, especially since we cannot tell whether
God would have acted differently had they prayed (or prayed differ-
ently).20 Many people also experience a great deal of anxiety about
what to ask God to do, and many others undergo a loss of confidence
in God due to unanswered prayers.21 Since some of the consequences
of decreeing the institution of petitionary prayer would be bad for
us, can the Howard-Snyders reasonably claim that, on balance, the
extension of human responsibility would obviously justify God in
decreeing it?
To understand what is at stake here, let us compare the possibility of
increasing human responsibility through petitionary prayer to other
ways in which God might do the same thing, such as by increasing
our power or our knowledge. For example, perhaps God could have
given us psychic powers that enabled us to move objects at a distance
without physical contact, or extra-sensory perceptual abilities that
would have permitted us to know things about the natural world
without using the five senses.22 Would it have been better for God to
give us those abilities? Well, it depends, I suppose, on a huge number of
factors; I would not presume to know either way. Giving us those
abilities would certainly extend our responsibility for ourselves and
20
The following may be an instance of such blame: “You do not have because
you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with
wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” ( James 4:2–3,
New International Version; of course, James seems to have in mind here only
things that can be spent on pleasures, whatever these might be). One might also
wonder whether God could blame persons for not praying if the teachings
concerning such prayer are not clear; I will return to this question in chapter 9.
21
For more on this, see chapter 9.
22
For a defense of the claim that some people actually possess such abilities, see
Braude 2002 and 2003.

others, but all by itself, this does not show that it would be a good thing
for God to do.
So even if the Howard-Snyders had successfully defended Swin-
burne against my criticism, this by itself would not show that the
extension of human responsibility makes the institution valuable
enough for God to decree, all things considered (depending on the
details of the decree, of course). The problem here is roughly the same
one that we encountered in connection with other defenses of other-
person-directed petitionary prayer in chapter 6—the extension of
human responsibility might be a good “significant enough to be
worth foregoing the (lesser) good of the provision being made without
the request,”23 to repeat Murray and Meyers’ formulation of the issue,
but not if there is a great deal at stake in a situation. The appeal to
responsibility would explain how petitionary prayers find a place
among God’s reasons in some cases, but we would not expect God
to permit one person to suffer significantly just so that other people
might be slightly more responsible—responsibility is just not that
important.24 This means that the responsibility defense applies to a
limited range of cases, at best; I will return to the question of the
plausibility of responsibility defenses in general in section 7.4 below.
7.3 Choi on Love

Isaac Choi argues that God might not maximize the good in every
human life in order to leave room for the improvement of the world in
two ways.25 First, petitionary prayers express praiseworthy attitudes,
which God would naturally choose to reward. Second, petitionary
prayer “…gives us a practical opportunity to love others, especially in
those situations when there is not much else we can do to readily help
23
24
It might also be rare, in general, if the kinds of choices required to ground it
are rare—see van Inwagen 1989; see also Levy 2011, Waller 2011, and Caruso
2013 for recent skepticism regarding freedom and moral responsibility based on
empirical studies.
25
Choi 2003, pp.9–10; a similar view is defended by R. T. Allen in Allen
1972, p.2.

26
them.” By making the provision of certain things depend upon the
offering of petitionary prayers, then, God leaves room for us to make a
difference, and hence to be responsible for things.
With regard to the first claim, Choi has a point: prayers typically do
express praiseworthy attitudes.27 But if God rewards those attitudes
per se, then God is rewarding those attitudes, not the petitionary
prayers that spring from them (if any). So God could reward those
very same attitudes even if they never resulted in the offering of any
petitionary prayers.
Perhaps this is unfair, though—perhaps Choi means to say that
there are specific praiseworthy attitudes that are expressed only in
petitionary prayer, and nowhere else. Even if this were so, God would
not need to answer the associated petitionary prayers in order to
reward the attitudes that they expressed. So God need not make the
provision of good things depend upon the offering of petitionary
prayers in order to reward the attitudes in question. But this means
that the rewarding of such attitudes does not contribute to a defense of
other-person-directed petitionary prayer, even if God would naturally
choose to reward those praiseworthy attitudes expressed in petitionary
prayer.
Consider now the second claim, that petitionary prayer can be a
way of loving others. Some have noted that petitionary prayer can be
a substitute for helping those within our reach, rather than a supple-
ment to it, but I will ignore such cases here.28 John Brentlinger has
noted that just about any emotion can be an expression of love, as long
as it fits into an appropriate pattern of emotions and actions.29 In the
same way, just about any action can be an expression of love, as long
as it is motivated in the right way. Not all acts of love are effective,
though; some acts of love result in harming rather than helping the
beloved. For example, if I try to remove a splinter from your finger,
but accidently push it deeper into your skin, my act may still count as
26
Choi 2003, p.12.
27
Not always, though—for a discussion of some common petitionary prayers
that would seem to incur blame instead, see Smilansky 2012.
28
C. S. Lewis: “It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him”
(Lewis 1964, p.66).
29
Brentlinger 1970.

an act of love, as long as it is motivated in the right way. Similarly,
petitionary prayers can be acts of love for others even if they are never
answered by God.30 In order for petitionary prayers to constitute acts
of love, then, God need not make the provision of good things depend
upon them. Choi’s account explains why God might be pleased if
people offered other-person-directed petitionary prayers, but it does
not tell us why God would require such prayers before providing
things for others.31
Even if Choi’s second claim could overcome this objection, his
account still faces the deeper problem that is also faced by Swinburne’s
and all of the other defenses of other-person-directed petitionary prayer
considered so far: in cases in which there is a great deal at stake in a
situation, it does not clearly identify a good “significant enough to be
worth foregoing the (lesser) good of the provision being made without
the request,”32 to repeat Murray and Meyers’s formulation.
7.4 Responsibility and Luck

Questions about responsibility naturally lead to questions about luck,
since whether or not one is responsible for the consequences of one’s
action often depends on things beyond one’s control.33 We saw in
chapter 5 that Basinger objects to God’s requiring other-person-
directed petitionary prayers before providing things for other people
because that would seem to treat one person as a means to the end of
30
For more on this, see chapter 10.
31
A different worry concerning Choi’s account, this time concerning interven-
ing agents, is expressed in Davison 2009 (pp.297–8), criticized in Howard-Snyder
and Howard-Snyder 2010 (pp.62–4), and defended again in Davison 2011
(pp.233–4). But since that worry depends on the assumption that God is free in
some libertarian sense, I will not discuss it here. For more on divine freedom, see
chapter 3; for more on intervening agents and responsibility, see Zimmerman
1985.
32
33
Perhaps this is because responsibility typically involves causation, and causal
chains are subject to good and bad luck. For more on this question, see Feinberg
1962, Frankfurt 1969, Nagel 1976, Fischer 1982, Fischer and Ravizza 1998, and
Davison 1999a.

benefiting another person. A slightly different challenge, this time
based on something like luck, comes from H. D. Lewis:
Ought not God to benefit men according to their needs or merits and
not in terms of the rather haphazard and arbitrary condition of being
the subject of prayer? Should momentous things, like recovery from
sickness, depend on someone’s asking God?34
Like Basinger’s challenge, Lewis’s is deontological, emphasizing the
injustice of God’s providing assistance on the basis of something “hap-
hazard and arbitrary” in cases where something of great significance is at
stake. From the point of view of the recipients of such divine assistance,
we might say that there is a significant element of luck involved, which
Lewis seems to regard as counting against God’s goodness.
Of course, in many respects, there is plenty of luck in ordinary life
already—setting aside questions about petitionary prayer, whether or
not one person helps another often depends on luck.35 But with regard
to cases involving petitionary prayer, there is a difference: the help in
question operates through God’s agency in a way that ordinary help
does not. Suppose that Swinburne, Choi, and the Howard-Snyders
are right in saying that as a result of answered petitionary prayers,
human beings are responsible for good things in the world, where this
would not be possible if God did not answer these prayers. And
suppose further that Lewis’ challenge based upon luck can be answered
in some satisfactory way. Would this provide God with a reason for
requiring petitionary prayers before providing certain things?
Here is an argument for a negative answer to this question, based on
other considerations involving luck.36 Suppose that there are two per-
sons, A and B, who are exactly alike with respect to history, character,
beliefs, intentions, sincerity, etc. Imagine that A prays that God would
heal a sick friend, X, and that B also prays, in exactly the same way, that
God would heal a (different) sick friend, Y. Suppose that for reasons
34
Lewis 1959, p.255, cited in Cohn-Sherbok 1989, p.101.
35
See the discussion of a related point from Taliaferro in section 6.1.
36
This argument reinforces Choi’s point that God would value the attitudes
expressed in petitionary prayer (as opposed to the petitionary prayers themselves),
and is inspired by an argument concerning the distinction between killing and
letting die formulated in Rachels 1975.

that have nothing to do with A or B, God answers A’s prayer but not
B’s—perhaps God knows that the healing of X would promote good
things (or prevent bad ones) that the healing of Y would not, for
example. In this case, following Swinburne, Choi, and the Howard-
Snyders, we might say that A is responsible for X’s healing to some
degree, and this is a good thing. How good is it, though? Would it be
good enough for God to require A’s petitionary prayer before healing
X, for instance?
Notice that although A is responsible for X’s healing to some
degree, B is not responsible for Y’s healing to any degree, since
Y was not healed. But the only difference between A and B is a
difference that is due to luck. If A and B were to become fully
informed, and could compare their lives up to this point in time,
what would they say to one another? It would make no sense for
A to boast that unlike B, A was responsible for the healing of a friend
through petitionary prayer, since B did the very same things that A did
to make this happen and only luck explains the difference between
them.
God would know all of this, of course, and would not count against
B the fact that B was not responsible for Y’s healing. From God’s point
of view, then, there would be no difference between A and B, no
reason to value A’s activity any more than B’s. So it seems that
extending human responsibility for things through petitionary prayer
would not make a difference to God; God would care only about the
underlying attitudes and intentions, not the actual responsibility.37 So
all by itself, the possibility of A’s responsibility for the healing of
X would not provide God with a good reason for making X’s healing
dependent upon A’s offering petitionary prayers for this; if there is a
good reason for God to require petitionary prayers in this case, it must
involve more than just A’s responsibility. So all defenses of petitionary
prayer based upon responsibility alone seem bound to fail.
I will return to the question of luck again at the end of the next
chapter, in connection with an unrestricted challenge to petitionary
prayer and the possibility of a case-by-case approach instead of a “one
37
Given the arguments of chapters 4 and 5, fellow human beings would not
know that A was responsible for X’s healing, so this responsibility would not make
a difference there, either.

size fits all” approach. This will lead to a new defense of other-person-
directed petitionary prayer. I have not considered, in this chapter,
defenses of self-directed petitionary prayer based upon appeals to
responsibility. But I will discuss such an approach in the next chapter,
which is devoted exclusively to defenses of self-directed petitionary
prayer.
8
Self-Directed Petitionary Prayer
and New Defenses
8.1 Giving in Response to Requests

There are many differences between self-directed and other-person-
directed prayers, but perhaps the most important difference, for our
purposes, is this: it is morally permissible for me to make certain
decisions for myself that I cannot make on behalf of other people.
For example, I can give an artist permission to tattoo my arm, but
I cannot give an artist permission to tattoo your arm. As a result, there
may be distinctive reasons for God to require self-directed petitionary
prayers before providing certain things, reasons that simply do not
apply in cases involving other-person-directed petitionary prayers. So
defenses of self-directed petitionary prayer might look very different
from defenses of other-person-directed petitionary prayer.
In chapter 6, I noted that in defending petitionary prayer in
general, the Howard-Snyders appeal to a deontological defense
involving Cupit’s account of the way in which requests generate
reasons. But they also appeal to a consequentialist defense involving
a claim articulated clearly by Murray and Meyers, namely, that
sometimes it is better to give something in response to a request
than to give it unsolicited. In order to support this claim, they describe
cases in which it appears better for a parent to give something to a
child in response to a request than otherwise, either because the child
will be more grateful, or exercise more control over his or her life, or
take more initiative with regard to his or her own development.1
These examples echo and extend points made by Murray and Meyers
1
Howard-Snyder and Howard-Snyder 2010, p.47.
Self-Directed Petitionary Prayer and New Defenses 131

in connection with a hypothetical case involving a father who realizes
that his son has come to take things for granted, and decides not to
give things in the future unless asked. This leads to the son’s recog-
nizing the father as the source of provision, and results in the son’s
heartfelt expressions of thanks (instead of rote ones).2
There is no doubt that it is better, on occasion, for parents to
provide certain things for their children only in response to requests.
But do these analogies show anything about petitionary prayer in the
divine–human relationship? In order to answer this question, since
this is a consequentialist defense, we need to know whether the good
things described in the parent–child analogies (or similar things)
would also accrue in the divine–human relationship. Two of the
good things mentioned by the Howard-Snyders, namely the exercise
of more control and the taking of initiative, are so closely related to the
responsibility defense discussed in chapter 6 that I will not discuss
them separately here. The remaining good things, namely the recog-
nition of the parent as the source of good things and the gratitude that
naturally follows, are highly problematic because of the epistemo-
logical issues explored in chapters 4 and 5: whereas human children
typically know when they have received something from their parents
in response to a request, created persons do not typically know that
they have received things from God as a result of petitionary prayers
(as opposed to God’s providing things simply because they were
needed, or providing things for reasons that have nothing to do with
the person or the immediate situation in question).3
8.2 Idolatry and Depersonalization

A related consequentialist defense, also offered by Murray and
Meyers, involves the claim that God’s requiring petitionary prayers
would keep a person from a form of idolatry that “leads her to look
2
Murray and Meyers 1994, p.316; see also the discussion of a similar example
in Murray 2004, p.247.
3
Basinger makes this point in response to Murray and Meyers in Basinger
1995, pp.476–7; I will discuss in detail some of Murray and Meyers’ related claims
about petitionary prayer and gratitude in chapter 9.

only to nature or her neighbor for her daily bread rather than God.”4
In response to the objection that prayers of thanksgiving would keep
people from idolatry all by themselves, they argue that “if humans
were to limit themselves only to prayers of thanksgiving, many would
eventually lapse into idolatry simply because there is insufficient
motivation to maintain continual prayers of thanksgiving.”5 Petition-
ary prayers provide motivation for prayers of thanksgiving, they claim,
as long as God regularly requires petitions before bestowing some
good things: “Because provision hangs on petition, petitions force
humans to realize that God’s provision of their bread is dependent
upon them taking an active role in asking for it. If they lapse in this
petition, their stomachs will pay the price.”6
In order for this explanation to work, though, people must be aware
that God’s provision for them actually hangs on petition, but as we
saw in chapters 4 and 5, this is problematic, even from the point of
view of the traditional theistic religious traditions. In addition, as
noted in chapter 6, Choi points out that what Murray and Meyers
say about petitionary prayers would be true even if God never
answered any of them, as long as people falsely believed that they
were necessary and answered.7
Vincent Brümmer argues that if God did not require petitionary
prayers before providing some things for human beings, then the
relationship between them would become depersonalized:
Similarly, there are different ways in which one person can fulfill the
needs or desires of someone else. One could notice what the other
needs, and do it without waiting to be asked. But then the relation
between them is somehow depersonalized. It becomes similar to the
relation between me and the potted plant on my window-sill which
I water whenever I notice it wilting. When I decide to fulfill the needs of
the other without waiting for the other to ask then the wishes of the
other is not a condition for my fulfilling what I take to be his or her
need. If, however, I want to fulfill the needs or desires of the other
4
5
Murray and Meyers 1994, p.315. For more on Murray and Meyers on
prayers of thanksgiving, see chapter 9.
6 7
Murray and Meyers 1994, pp.315–16. Choi 2003.

within the context of a personal relation the request of the other is a
necessary condition for me to do so.
God fulfills most of our needs and desires without our having to ask
him. If, however, he were to fulfill all our needs and desires in this way,
we would be like potted plants on his window-sill and not persons with
whom he seeks to establish and maintain a relationship of personal
fellowship. (Brümmer 1984, p.53)8
This is a consequentialist defense of petitionary prayer. It is true that

the relationship between me and my potted plant is depersonalized,
because the potted plant is not a person and cannot communicate
with me in any straightforward sense. It is also true that in typical
relationships between human beings, we should not try to fulfill the
needs of others without considering what they ask of us.9 But does it
follow that if petitionary prayers were never required, then God
would be treating us like potted plants and not persons?
I don’t think so. After all, we enjoy personal relationships with
many people who never ask us to do anything.10 It is also important
to remember that petitionary prayer is just one type of prayer. There
are traditional theistic religious communities that emphasize submis-
sion to God’s will, and hence do not encourage petitionary prayers for
many things; extrapolating a little bit, we can imagine a hypothetical
religious community that forbade petitionary prayer altogether. It
would be highly offensive to say that God’s relationship to the mem-
bers of such a community could not be more personal than my
relationship to a potted plant. In addition, as noted in connection
with other analogies above, there are salient epistemological differ-
ences between Brümmer’s paradigm cases involving human persons
8
Cited in Murray and Meyers 1994, p.323.
9
Of course, we cannot wait for everyone to ask for everything—this would
involve a different (but also serious) failure of love between persons. For an
argument for the conclusion that offering petitionary prayers might actually
indicate a lack of faith, at least in some cases, see chapter 9.
10
Here I would include not only relationships with other adult human beings,
but also relationships with very young children and non-human animals. (If one
were to say that personal relationships cannot be had with non-persons, then
I should argue that some animals qualify as non-human persons.) For a defense
of the claim that all existing things have some degree of intrinsic value, including
all living things, see Davison 2012.

and the divine–human relationship, and these differences undermine
the analogy even further.
8.3 Stump’s Defense

As mentioned in chapter 6, Stump argues that petitionary prayer
provides a kind of buffer that protects human beings from being
spoiled or overwhelmed in friendship with God. She describes the
first danger by comparison with members of a royal family: “Because
of the power at their disposal in virtue of their connections, they often
become tyrannical, willful, indolent, self-indulgent, and the like.”11 By
requiring that created persons ask, on occasion, before God provides
things, this can be prevented—if a created person
…gets what he prayed for, he will be in a position to attribute his good
fortune to God’s doing and to be grateful to God for what God has
given him. If we add the undeniable uncertainty of his getting what he
prays for, then we will have safeguards against what I will call (for lack
of a better phrase) overwhelming spoiling.
(Stump 1979, reprinted in Timpe 2009, p.407–8)
Stump’s argument here has two parts. The first part has to do with
what happens if God answers petitionary prayers. In this case, she
says, the petitioners will be able to attribute the result to God and to
be grateful as a result. But of course, this assumes that created persons
would know that God has answered their prayers, which is problem-
atic, as we saw in chapters 4 and 5.12 The second part of Stump’s
argument has to do with the “undeniable uncertainty” of getting what
is requested in petitionary prayer. And here Stump seems to be clearly
right: if God were to answer every petitionary prayer immediately, a
person could quickly become spoiled. But this shows only that God
has a compelling reason not to answer every single petitionary prayer,
not that God has a good reason to require any of them.
11
Stump 1979, reprinted in Timpe 2009, p.407.
12
But if the petitioner attributes all good things to God, as a traditional theist
would, then he or she will be thankful whether or not such things came in response
to petitionary prayer; for more on this, see chapter 9 and Davison 2012, chapter 7.

The second danger to be avoided in such friendships, according to
Stump, is very different: the inferior party
can be so overcome by the advantages or superiority of his “friend” that
he becomes simply a shadowy reflection of the other’s personality, a
slavish follower who slowly loses all sense of his own tastes and desires
and will. (Stump 1979, reprinted in Timpe 2009, p.407)
To illustrate this, she describes the case of a student who is struggling
to write a paper, whose teacher “calls the student at home and
simply presents him with the help he needs in scheduling and
discipline,” without having been asked to do so. If the student were
to agree to this help, he “would have taken the first step in the
direction of unhealthy passivity towards his teacher,” and “if he
and his teacher developed that sort of relationship, he could end
by becoming a lackey-like reflection of his teacher.”13 By analogy,
then, requiring petitionary prayer before providing good things,
at least in some cases, would guard against God’s overwhelming
created persons.
Of course, if created persons in friendship with God do not know
what has been provided as a result of petitionary prayer, then they
won’t know whether or not God is respecting their boundaries, so to
speak.14 There could be both false positives (cases in which people
think that God is respecting perceived boundaries when God is not)
and false negatives (cases in which people think that God is not
respecting perceived boundaries when God is). If the point is to
require petitionary prayers in order to protect the divine–human
friendship, then it seems that God’s human partners need to know
those things with respect to which God has decided to require peti-
tionary prayers. But as we saw in chapters 4 and 5, it is doubtful that
they do, in fact, typically know those things.15
13
Stump 1979, reprinted in Timpe 2009, p.408.
14
If indeed this is a significant question: see the reply to Stump in Hoffman
1985, and the criticism of Stump’s description of human friendship in Smith and
Yip 2010, pp.5–7.
15
I will return to the question of the value of friendship with God in section 8.4
below.

8.4 A New Twist on Stump’s Defense
So far, Stump’s arguments seem not to constitute a compelling
defense of self-directed prayer. But there is a different way to under-
stand her account, in terms of providing a deontological rather than a
consequentialist defense. From a deontological perspective, the ques-
tion is not whether God’s requiring petitionary prayers would actually
prevent the consequence of the overwhelming of a human friend, as a
matter of fact, but rather whether God morally should require peti-
tionary prayers in some cases, regardless of the consequences of doing
so. This alternative interpretation of Stump is suggested by Basinger’s
critical discussion of her argument, in which he describes Stump as
committed to the view that God values the exercise of libertarian
freedom in order to respect human autonomy.16 According to this
interpretation, typically God respects human autonomy by not inter-
vening too much in the lives of free creatures, even in some cases in
which it is clear that such intervention would be best for them. For
example, following Stump’s lead, there would seem to be an import-
ant difference in value between free creatures offering petitionary
prayers to God for forgiveness on their own, on the one hand, and
unfree creatures being caused to offer such prayers by God, on the
other.17 And through petitionary prayer, created persons could give
God permission to intervene in their lives, thereby authorizing God to
do things that otherwise might be inappropriate (or contrary to
important divine purposes) for God to do.18 Let’s call this the auton-
omy defense of petitionary prayer.
The autonomy defense is limited in scope. Of course, it applies only
to self-directed petitionary prayers, not to other-person directed or
16
Basinger 1983, pp.29–30. This reading is also suggested in Murray and
Meyers 1994 (“If humans were led to docile acceptance of God’s unrequested
provision, it would infringe on their autonomy,” p.323), although the consequen-
tialist reading of Stump seems to be the primary one.
17
“As a runaway horse is better than a stone which does not run away because
it lacks self-movement and sense perception, so the creature is more excellent
which sins by free will than that which does not sin only because it has no free will”
(St Augustine, quoted by Plantinga in Plantinga 1974b, p.27).
18
For a clever account of sanctification along these lines, based on Frankfurt’s
notion of freedom (in terms of first and second order desires), see Stump 1988.

non-person-directed ones. And the deontological reason provided for
God to require petitionary prayers is clearly a defeasible one: there
could be cases in which God judges, correctly, that it is better to
override someone’s freedom for the sake of some greater good.19
Finally, the autonomy defense would explain God’s requiring petition-
ary prayers only with regard to those matters over which human beings
have a legitimate (but limited and defeasible) claim to autonomy.
Despite these limitations, it must be admitted that the autonomy
defense is plausible.20 Not only is it plausible as originally formulated,
but it can be extended in an important way: it was originally framed in
terms of the value of human autonomy as conceived in terms of the
exercise of libertarian freedom, but this does not seem to be an
essential ingredient in the defense. For even if compatibilists with
regard to freedom and determinism are mistaken, they are still right
to insist, against their indeterminist critics, that there are different
ways of being determined, only some of which are compatible with
enjoying some valuable kinds of freedom.21
To illustrate this idea, consider Basinger’s reconstruction of the
central point of Stump’s defense, according to which God cannot
directly cause friendship with a human person—it must be freely
chosen by that human person. Even if Stump is right in thinking
such friendship would be most valuable if it resulted from the exercise
of creaturely libertarian freedom, it does not follow that God would
value equally everything that falls short of libertarian freedom. For
example, God might value the exercise of compatibilist freedom that
is caused in a certain way much more than the direct manipulation of
a person’s choices by an evil scientist or a brainwashing dictator. In
fact, God might value the exercise of compatibilist freedom enough to
19
For example, some Christians would interpret the story of the conversion of
Saul of Tarsus along these lines (as described in Acts 9:3–19, 22:6–21, and
26:12–18, and Galatians 1:11–16); see also the discussion of the story of Job in
chapter 4. For an interesting study of the Christian scriptures with regard to the
interplay between divine sovereignty and human freedom, see Carson 1981.
20
Contrary to the hasty dismissal of Stump in Davison 2009 (p.296), which
failed (among other things) to distinguish consequentialist versus deontological
versions of the defense.
21
See, for example, Dennett 1984, Frankfurt 1969, Lehrer 1976, 1968, and
1980, and Locke 1976.

require, in some cases, that petitionary prayers be offered freely (in
some compatibilist sense) before providing certain things. Libertarians,
who often approach freedom in a black-and-white, all-or-nothing
fashion, are probably inclined to overlook this possibility.
I think we can achieve even more clarity about the scope of the
autonomy defense if we draw some distinctions among the good things
that could be the proper objects of petitionary prayers. First, there are
those things that God alone can provide, and must provide directly. In
this category, we should include God’s forgiveness, God’s palpable
presence, God’s special assistance, God’s peace, God’s miraculous
intervention, God’s friendship, God’s partnership, God’s mercy, and
so on. Let’s call these “direct divine goods.” By contrast, there are
good things that we might come to possess in some other way, such as
health, friendship, family, knowledge, success in our endeavors,
material possessions, and so on.22 For lack of a better term, let’s call
all of these things “non-direct divine goods.” According to traditional
theism, God could provide non-direct divine goods (and in fact
provides all good things, whether directly or indirectly), but need
not be the only source of them, whereas God alone could provide
direct divine goods.
Here is another distinction among good things that could be the
proper objects of petitionary prayers, which recalls our observations at
the beginning of this chapter regarding the differences between self-
directed petitionary prayers and other-person directed ones: there are
good things that one person should not provide to another unless the
other person provides some kind of permission, on the one hand, and
good things that one person may provide to another without any kind of
permission. Let’s call the former category of things “permission-required”
goods, and the latter category of things “non-permission-required”
things. Typically, for instance, a pet dog is a permission-required good,
since dog ownership brings with it serious responsibilities, whereas
22
I am not denying here the traditional theistic view that all good things come
from God; instead, I am appealing implicitly to the following test: “If God did not
exist, then it would still be possible for us to possess good thing X.” If this statement
is (non-trivially) true for some good X, then it is a non-direct divine good. For a
discussion of subjunctive conditional statements with impossible antecedents and
the intrinsic value of things in a world without God, see Davison 2012, chapter 7.

typically the gift of a small amount of money is not a permission-required
good. Of course, what is permissible for one person to give to another
might depend on the relationship between the one who gives and the one
who receives; I can give things to my children without their permission
that you cannot, and God can give things to me that no other human
person can give to me.23
Notice that among the direct divine goods, some are permission-
required goods and some are non-permission-required goods, and
sometimes this depends on the context. For example, in the typical
case, I should think that God’s palpable presence is a non-permission-
required good for many people, but I can imagine that God would
have good reasons for requiring some kind of permission from human
persons before they would experience this in a continued and uninter-
rupted way over a very long period of time. God’s special assistance
also seems to be like this—there are persons and occasions on which
God’s assistance would seem to be welcome without permission—for
example, when trying with all of one’s might to force open a door to
help someone else escape from a building on fire. On the other hand,
there are other cases in which God would have good reasons for
requiring some kind of permission before providing assistance—for
instance, when God has the ability to change a person’s naturally
acquired disposition to give into a certain temptation, but changing
such a person’s disposition without permission would violate that
person’s autonomy.
With regard to direct divine goods in permission-required cases, it
seems quite sensible that one should not expect to receive such things
unless one offers petitionary prayers for them, and it seems quite
reasonable for God to make their provision typically dependent
upon some kind of petitionary prayer.24 In this respect, the autonomy
defense is on solid ground. In addition, if some kind of friendship with
God is the greatest possible good for human beings, as many trad-
itional theists claim, then one might expect God to use every possible
23
For more on this general question, see the discussion of Basinger in section
6.3.
24
Assuming, of course, that the petitioner believes that all of these things are
true; this is an explicit part of the modified case-by-case approach developed in
section 8.5 below.

circumstance, including even serious misfortune in other areas of life,
to draw human beings into such friendship.25
However, as one might expect, the autonomy defense cannot help
us to resolve the difficulty for other-person directed petitionary
prayers described in chapters 6 and 7, namely, how to explain why
God might be justified in making the provision of something really
significant for one person depend upon the petitionary prayers of
another person. Given the distinctions drawn above, we can now
add that an other-person directed petitionary prayer from a person
S for God to provide a permission-required good for another person
P typically cannot be answered by God, even if the object of that
petitionary prayer is a direct divine good—unless, of course, P has
offered a self-directed petitionary prayer for the same good (or other-
wise granted permission to receive it). Let’s call this the permission-
required challenge to other-person-directed petitionary prayer, which
is clearly restricted in its scope.
One worry concerning the autonomy defense of petitionary prayer
stems from parallel debates about human autonomy. In the past thirty
years or so, psychologists and cognitive scientists have discovered
widespread and predictable flaws in human reasoning, flaws that
cast doubt on the relative value of human autonomy. As Sarah
Conly points out in a recent discussion of paternalism and social
policy, these flaws are especially significant with regard to our ability
to make rational choices about the means we use to pursue our own
goals:
We are, for example, unduly influenced by the particular description
used in the presentation of our options (more likely to choose a medical
procedure with a 20 percent chance of success than one described as
having an 80 percent chance of failure); unduly prone to think that we
25
Including, perhaps, the suffering of other people, contrary to Basinger’s
argument (see section 6.3); for example, see St Augustine’s discussion of the
suffering of innocent children in Augustine 1993, pp.116–17. In personal corres-
pondence, Eleonore Stump has emphasized this idea, together with the idea that
regular petitionary prayer is an essential ingredient in friendship with God; see also
Franks’ reply to Veber’s challenge in Franks 2009 (mentioned earlier in section
6.1), and Moser’s arguments for the conclusion that God reveals different things to
different persons in Moser 2008.

ourselves are less likely than others to suffer misfortune, even of something
entirely random, like lightning; prone to miscalculate the value of a thing
depending upon whether we do or don’t yet own it; prone to assuming
things that have one superficial characteristic in common also have
similarities throughout (commonly known as stereotyping).
(Conly 2013, pp.21–2)26
Especially when a lot is at stake, we need help to avoid causing

ourselves long-term harm—we cannot rely exclusively on our own
limited rationality. It is true that we value autonomy and freedom, but
we also “often regret bitterly the choices that have diminished the
quality of our lives, and wish we could do it over and choose better”; in
such cases, she continues, “we may well wish we had been stopped,
given the costs of our actions.”27 Conly argues that this line of
reflection justifies coercive legal paternalism by the state in many
cases, especially with regard to certain issues in health care. She also
claims that such an approach need not violate respect for persons,
because we already tolerate interventions designed to protect people
from serious harm (such as seat belt laws and regulations requiring
prescriptions for medicine):
We believe intervention in these cases is justified because we believe the
person left to choose freely may choose poorly, in the sense that his
choice will not get him what he wants in the long run, and is chosen
solely because of errors in instrumental reasoning. We do not consider
this disrespectful, since it is a rule applied to everyone equally and
which does not undervalue people’s actual decision-making abilities.
(Conly 2013, p.47)28
We can imagine a parallel argument for divine coercive paternalism

that is much stronger than Conly’s, because God is benevolent and
omniscient (unlike the state), and because God has rights over us that
other people do not. The systematic cognitive biases mentioned above
26
See also Levy 2011, Waller 2011, and Caruso 2013 for a sample of recent
skepticism regarding freedom and moral responsibility based on empirical
studies.
27
Conly 2013, p.16; similar enthusiasm concerning paternalism can be detected
in many of the essays collected in Coons and Weber 2013.
28
See also Conly 2013 pp.33–6, pp.91–5, and pp.189–92.

not only affect decisions about ordinary matters of health and wealth,
but also decisions about character formation and spiritual orientation.
Since God knows that our cognitive resources are limited in the
ways described above, God has very strong reasons to provide many
things to people without requiring petitionary prayers, especially in
cases in which significant goods are at stake that are not permission-
requiring.29
Still, even if the autonomy defense applies only to certain kinds of
cases, and applies in dramatically different ways from person to
person because of differences due to luck (which happens to be the
topic of the next section), it remains a compelling defense of self-
directed petitionary prayer.
8.5 Luck Again and Case-By-Case Approaches

In chapter 7, we discussed a challenge to other-person-directed peti-
tionary prayer based upon luck. A different but related argument,
again based upon luck, presents an interesting unrestricted challenge
to the necessity of petitionary prayer that has not been previously
described in the literature. Suppose that A and B are exactly alike with
respect to history, character, beliefs, intentions, sincerity, etc., right up
to time T. Imagine that A prays at time T for something E to occur,
and God answers A’s prayer by bringing about E. Suppose that by
luck, B is prevented from offering the very same prayer at time T for
E* to occur—perhaps B sneezes, for instance, or hears a very loud
noise, or suffers a heart attack. Imagine that God knows that B was
about to offer a petitionary prayer for E*,30 and also knows that had
B offered such a prayer, God would have answered it. Would God
decide not to bring about E* simply because B failed, because of luck,
to offer a petitionary prayer for it? If so, this seems unfair, since the
difference between A and B is due to luck alone. But if God were to
bring about E* because of B’s intention to pray alone, then it seems
29
The traditional theist should also say that God regularly nudges us in good
directions (see Thaler and Sunstein 2008).
30
For those who reject Molinism, perhaps B evinces a reliable sign to act upon
the intention to offer such a prayer: see Frankfurt 1969 and Davison 1999a.

that the actual offering of the petitionary prayer was not so important
after all—the intention to pray was really doing all of the work.31
One way to address this kind of puzzle, along with the challenge
based on luck posed by Lewis in chapter 6, is to appeal to God’s
knowledge of what would have happened if luck had not played a role
in things. So far, we have considered defenses of petitionary prayer as
if they were intended to provide a “one size fits all” explanation of a
given type of prayer, in the same way in which people often discuss
theodicies designed to explain why God permits evil. But a number of
authors, most notably Murray, Meyers, and Flint, have suggested that
perhaps God does not have a general policy about when to require
petitionary prayers, and instead makes such decisions on a case-by-
case basis, based on knowledge of what is at stake in the situation.32
To explain this idea, they appeal to middle knowledge, which
would enable God to know what petitioners would freely choose to
do in every possible circumstance, including which petitionary prayers
they would offer and how they would respond to answered (and
unanswered) prayers.33 By using this knowledge, Murray and Meyers
say that God can ensure that “there will never be individuals who are
unjustly denied provision because of lack of petition,” because “God
can make provision depend on petitions in those cases where doing so,
by either granting or denying them, would bring about the desired
result in the petitioner.”34
At this juncture in their paper, Murray and Meyers are discussing
self-directed petitionary prayer, but it is easy to see how to extend
31
For discussion of a similar case involving responsibility and attempts in general,
see Davison 1999a. A related question is raised by Daniel Cohn-Sherbok, who
argues that God seems to be more interested in the motive than in the content of
petitionary prayers: see Cohn-Sherbok 1989, pp.100ff.
32
For a defense of the related idea that the knowledge of God’s existence is
distributed differently to different persons, see Moser 2008.
33
For more on middle knowledge, see the discussions of Molinism in section
1.2; for more on Flint’s view, see Flint 1998 and sections 2.3 and 2.4. See also the
defense of this approach in Murray 2004, p.254.
34
Murray and Meyers 1994, pp.324–5. Incidentally, this seems to be in tension
with their statement (p.315, fn.6) that God has a “general policy” concerning when
to require petitionary prayers; I will take up this question shortly. For more on
luck, justice, and salvation, see Davison 1999c.

their point to the case of other-person-directed prayers. Since God
possesses middle knowledge, God can ensure that significant things
depend on petitionary prayer only when the relevant persons will offer
the relevant petitionary prayers (and the significant things provided) or
the relevant persons will freely choose not to offer the relevant peti-
tionary prayers (and the withholding of the related significant things is
an appropriate consequence of those free creaturely decisions).35 Let’s
call this the middle knowledge-based case-by-case approach.
The middle knowledge-based case-by-case approach would enable
us to answer a number of challenges to petitionary prayer involving
luck, including the one described above: God would bring about E*
because God would know that only bad luck prevented B from offer-
ing the relevant petitionary prayer. It would also answer the primary
difficulty raised against all of the defenses of other-person-directed
petitionary prayer discussed in chapters 6 and 7, namely, that they
failed to identify some good “significant enough to be worth foregoing
the (lesser) good of the provision being made without the request,”36
since God could require such prayers only when the good at stake is in
fact significant enough.
Of course, the middle knowledge-based case-by-case approach
requires that we accept the Molinist picture, according to which
God possesses middle knowledge, and many traditional theists find
this price too high to pay.37 This gives us a reason to look for a
different case-by-case approach that could avoid the difficulties that
attach to the Molinist view and address most of the difficulties that
motivated it. Here is an idea: first, drawing together the threads of our
discussion so far, perhaps God requires petitionary prayers before
providing certain goods in just two kinds of cases: (i) cases of self-
directed petitionary prayer concerning permission-required goods
(see section 8.4, above), and (ii) cases in which there are other goods
35
36
37
For more on this, see section 1.2; although I will not pursue the development
of any Molinist defenses of petitionary prayer in the remainder of this book, I hope
that the friends of Molinism will recognize the opportunity to develop new ones,
especially in certain categories—see the summary of the state of the current debate
in chapter 10 for some clues in this direction.

at stake that are significant enough to be worth forgoing the provision
of something in the absence of a petitionary prayer requesting it. For
ease of reference, let’s call cases that fit into these two categories
“qualifying cases.”
Also, in order to address the epistemological worries identified in
chapters 4 and 5, perhaps we should think of God as requiring
petitionary prayers for the provision of certain goods in qualifying
cases only if the potential petitioners believe that they are in a situation
that calls for petitionary prayers. This idea would suit the spirit of the
middle-knowledge based case-by-case approach, according to which
God’s requiring petitionary prayers depends on resource-relative
criteria, not resource-independent ones.38 It would also fit nicely
with the traditional theistic view that God judges the heart,39 and
explain why, as Murray and Meyers claim, God would not expect
petitionary prayers from atheists before providing certain things for
them.40 According to this approach, the problem posed by luck
described at the beginning of this section can be addressed simply:
God would not require a petitionary prayer from B before providing
E* because God would know about B’s frustrated intentions to offer one.
One wrinkle here involves the ethics of belief: what if a person does
not believe that petitionary prayers are called for in a given situation,
but should? (This would be something like a case of culpable non-
belief.) Or what if a person believed that petitionary prayers were
called for in a given situation, but should not think this? (This would
be something like a case of culpable belief.) Another kind of problem
concerns what is realistic to expect: what if a person believes that
petitionary prayers are called for in a given situation, but cannot offer
them for some reason?
To address these issues, we can modify the account as follows:
perhaps God requires petitionary prayers before providing certain
things only in qualifying cases in which it would be reasonable for God
38
For a helpful introduction to resource-relative versus resource-independent
criteria of evaluation, see Goldman 1986, pp.104ff.
39
For interesting Christian defenses of this idea, see St Augustine 1993 and
Abelard 1971; according to Phillips, “Prayers, unlike certain spells, are not ruined
by a slip of the tongue” (Phillips 1981, p.119).
40

to expect such prayers from those persons in those specific cases,
where this judgment would depend on myriad details that only God
would be qualified to judge. For example, if a person sincerely and
non-culpably believes that petitionary prayers are not expected, or the
case is not a qualifying case, or the person cannot offer the prayers
anyway, then God does require them. But if a person believes sin-
cerely and non-culpably that petitionary prayers are appropriate in a
qualifying case, and it is reasonable to expect this person to offer them
in this situation, then God does require them.
Although this modified case-by-case approach limits the number of
situations in which petitionary prayers might be answered by God, it
has the virtue of answering all of the objections we have encountered
in this chapter and the previous two.41 It also applies to both self-
directed and other-person-directed petitionary prayers, within some
limits. However, it does leave open an important practical question,
which was discussed briefly in chapter 5: for what should we pray?
This leads us to practical challenges and defenses, and to the relation-
ship between petitionary prayer and faith, which are the subjects of
the next chapter.
41
It does not help to address the metaphysical or epistemological challenges
developed in chapters 3, 4, or 5, of course.
9
Practical Questions and the Nature
of Faith
9.1 Practical Defenses

In chapters 4 and 5, I argued that there are good reasons for trad-
itional theists to think that typically, we do not know God’s reasons for
permitting or bringing about particular events. Some have argued
that this ignorance actually generates a reason to offer petitionary
prayers; for example, Eleonore Stump says that
As long as a believer is not in a position to know which states of affairs
are divinely determined to occur regardless of prayers, there is some
point in petitionary prayer—any given case may be one in which God
would not have brought about the desired state of affairs without
prayer for it. (Stump 1979, p.404)
This seems to be a practical defense of the practice of petitionary

prayer, based on the possibility that it could make a difference.1 To
appreciate this approach, we might think in terms of the expected
utility to which people appeal in connection with Pascal’s Wager: the
cost of offering the petitionary prayer is relatively low, but the payoff
could be high if this is a situation in which God has decided that
something significant will be provided only if petitionary prayers are
offered. By contrast, little is gained by not offering petitionary prayers,
1
I call this a practical defense because it provides a reason for offering
petitionary prayers without offering any explanation as to why God would require
them before providing something.

and something very significant could be lost.2 Let’s call this the wager
defense of petitionary prayer, for obvious reasons.
Appealing to a view of divine providence that includes Eternalism,
Tim Mawson defends the rationality of petitionary prayers for things
that we already know have obtained (or already know not to have
obtained). He argues that if an event is really significant, then it can be
rational to ask God to bring it about, even if we know that it already
has (or definitely will) come to pass. He also argues that it can be
rational to ask God not to bring about things that we already know
have not (and will not) come to pass.3 Part of Mawson’s argument for
this conclusion involves the claim that offering such petitionary
prayers costs us very little, so it includes an implicit appeal to some
version of the wager defense of petitionary prayer. Is this defense
compelling?
Practical defenses need to face practical constraints. Even if we set
aside Mawson’s claim that we should be offering petitionary prayers
for known outcomes, the number of significant events for which we
might pray is simply staggering, especially if we are expected to pray
not just for ourselves but for other people. Although some traditional
theists have recommended that one “pray without ceasing,” typically
this has been understood to involve something much less demanding
than the continuous offering of specific petitionary prayers.4 We might
compare the situation here to the case of purchasing lottery tickets. If
the rationale for purchasing the first ticket is sound, and the rationale
for purchasing one more ticket is always sound, then we will exhaust
all of our resources on lottery tickets. Mawson’s approach suggests
that we should pray in the petitionary way all the time until we
sacrifice something of comparable expected utility, but this is far too
demanding, or so it seems to me.
2
Pascal 1910, §233.
3
Mawson 2007, pp.78, 84–5; see also Mawson 2010 for a parallel argument for
the conclusion that some people should pray that God “stop them [from] being
atheists,” and Timpe 2005 for a general discussion of praying for past events.
4
This particular admonition comes from St Paul (I Thessalonians 5:17); for a
detailed presentation concerning one strategy designed to obey this teaching, see
the account of the origins of the Jesus Prayer in Russia in Bacovcin 1985.
Practical Questions and the Nature of Faith 149

To his credit, Mawson does consider the related objection that the
opportunity costs are always too high to pray for known outcomes,
since we will always think that we should be praying instead for things
whose outcomes we do not know about. He replies that the cost of
offering prayers for known outcomes is not really very high, since one
can offer petitionary prayers while one is doing other things, and
probably such prayers would simply replace useless thoughts (such
as a rehashing of last night’s soap opera on television in one’s mind).5
But this reply fails to get at the root of the problem, which is that there
are too many good causes for which to pray, all of which are equally
justified by the wager defense.
There is one kind of case in which the wager defense seems to me to
work quite well: if one has no control over something,6 and it is really
significant, then out of desperation, one can be forced to try every
available means to exert some influence over the situation. (This was
certainly the case when I lost my son Drew in the Michigan wilderness,
as described in the Introduction.) It is often said that there are no
atheists in foxholes, suggesting that any person can be driven to
petitionary prayer in the right conditions; Phillips discusses a case
like this (reported by Dietrich Bonhoeffer) in which a “normally
frivolous person” muttered “O God, O God” in a concentration
camp as it was being bombed during World War II. Since the
utterance did not fit in with the fellow’s regular life, Phillips (following
Bonhoeffer) does not regard it as a real petitionary prayer.7 But this
seems too restrictive: such petitionary prayers might be less than
optimal in some respects, but surely they count as petitionary prayers
nonetheless (or at least some of them do, at any rate). One hopes not to
be in high stakes situations without any control, of course, but this
happens to all of us at some point or other, and it happens to some
people more than others. In those cases, it seems that the wager
defense provides a reason for offering petitionary prayers, even
5
Mawson 2007, p.85; he seems to think it is worth one’s time to offer petition-
ary prayers requesting that God bring about Wellington’s victory over Napoleon
at the battle of Waterloo, for instance.
6
As I have noted elsewhere, we do not ask God to pass the salt: Davison 2009,
p.303, fn. 41.
7
Phillips 1981, pp.115–16; see the discussion of a related question in section1. 2.

though it provides no reason for thinking that such prayers would be
answered by God.8
9.2 For What Should We Pray?

The wager defense of petitionary prayer raises an interesting question
that has been lurking in the background for some time now, but which
we have not faced squarely yet: for what should we pray? It is often
assumed that the better a thing would be, the more likely it is that God
would answer prayers for its occurrence. But the better something
would be were it to occur, the stronger God’s reasons are for bringing
it about anyway, independently of petitionary prayer. So perhaps we
should suspect that the better it would be for E to occur (independ-
ently of the fact that petitionary prayers have been offered for it), the
less likely it is that petitionary prayers played a result in E’s occur-
rence, even if God in fact brings it about. Elsewhere, I have called this
“the puzzle of increasing value.”9 It suggests a practical problem for
petitionary prayer, because the better it would be for something E to
occur, it seems, the more reason there is to think that offering peti-
tionary prayers for E would be pointless.
In chapter 4, a number of arguments were presented for the
conclusion that traditional theists are committed to agnosticism
about the instrumental value of particular events. But agnosticism
about the instrumental value of particular events, when it is embraced
self-consciously, also leads many traditional theists to hesitate
when it comes to offering petitionary prayers for specific things. As
H. D. Lewis says,
From our limited human perspective how can we know which prayer is
to be preferred? It is not merely a lack of knowledge of future events
which makes it difficult to determine whether a request to God is
acceptable. If we assume that God’s will is inscrutable, there is no
8
One problem here, highlighted by Phillips’s discussion, is this: what kind of
good could be at stake in a situation like this to justify God in making the provision
of some serious good depend on the offering of petitionary prayer, especially if the
person offering the desperate prayer will not be changed, even by an answered
prayer?
9
Davison 2009, p.301, fn.13.

way of knowing whether the requests we make are in fact consonant
with His providence. (Lewis 1959, p.103)
Confident petitionary prayers containing highly specific requests give
the appearance of offering God advice about what to do, reminding
God about a situation, or trying to explain to God why something is
important. All of these things would make sense if another human being
were the object of such petitions, but God’s complete knowledge of
every situation and perfect love for everyone involved can make them
seem rather puzzling when considered as sincere petitionary prayers.10
Reflections along these lines tend to make one’s petitionary prayers
more general and less specific, with the result that it becomes less clear
whether or not they make a difference (because it becomes even less
clear whether or not they have been answered); elsewhere, I have called
this the “puzzle of particularity.”11 We might think of this as another
practical challenge to petitionary prayer.
Of course, many people offer petitionary prayers with an implicit or
explicit “Thy will be done” added. As we saw in chapter 5, this practice
echoes some of the practice and teaching of Jesus concerning petition-
ary prayer, and helps some people to resolve uncertainty concerning
what to request from God. But as also noted in chapter 5, there is a
stronger and a weaker sense of “will.” According to the stronger sense,
what God wills is that which God is determined to bring about regard-
less of what else happens. In this stronger sense, it seems pointless to ask
that God’s will be done, since (by definition) this will happen whether or
not one prays for it.
According to the weaker sense of “will,” by contrast, God’s will is
that which would be good to happen generally, or that which God
would prefer to happen in the world (but might not happen for some
reason). Even in this weaker sense of “will,” there is something puz-
zling involved in praying that God’s will be done because it is such a
general prayer. In some ways, “Thy will be done,” in this weaker sense
of “will,” can be understood to be more of an expression of one’s
10
Of course, sometimes what takes the form of a public petitionary prayer is
actually directed at other people, not to God, and not all petitionary prayers are
theologically well-informed.
11
Davison 2009, p.301, fn.13.

values than a request that God do something.12 According to Simone
Weil, as it occurs in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done” is a
renunciation of all claims on the future, including one’s own future
existence, and the complete acceptance of the fact that external
circumstances could do away with one’s self entirely.13 “Thy will be
done” can also be a way of expressing that one is symbolically for the
good, even if one is powerless to advance it.14 Phillips says that
The point of praising God is in the prayer itself, since without the
prayer, that devotion is not expressed. Just as we reveal what we are in
what we say to each other, so we reveal what we are in what we say to
God. There is this difference: in the latter case, it is to ourselves that we
reveal it. Prayer expresses a state of being, a state of soul.
(Phillips 1981, pp.109–10)
Phillips also points out that with regard to prayers that people repeat
over and over again (as many repeat the Lord’s Prayer), sometimes the
goal is to inspire devotion where it is lacking, not to express existing
devotion.15 So when people say “Thy will be done,” they may not be
offering petitionary prayers at all, despite appearances to the contrary.
To return to the modified case-by-case approach developed at the
end of chapter 8, perhaps the way to answer the central practical
question in this section (“For what should we pray?”) is to return to a
resource-relative approach, rather than pursue resource-independent
approaches. A resource-independent approach would recommend
that we pray for that which would be good in a given situation,
objectively speaking, whereas a resource-relative approach would
recommend that we pray for what seems to us to be good in a given
situation. Suppose that God requires petitionary prayers before
12
Mine is hardly a scientific sample, but in consulting others and observing
prayers in various situations, I have noticed that “Thy will be done” occurs much
more in public, group prayer than in private, individual prayer; this strikes me as
additional evidence for the conclusion that the phrase functions more to express
one’s own values than to ask God to do something.
13
Weil 1959, pp.174–5; see also the discussion of Weil in Phillips 1981,
pp.69–70. For the Lord’s Prayer, see Matthew 6:9–13 and Luke 11:2–4.
14
See Davison 2012, chapter 6 for a discussion of the notion of being symbol-
ically for the good.
15
Phillips 1981, p.134.

providing things only in qualifying cases in which it would be reason-
able to expect such prayers from those persons in those cases. Then
perhaps this solves the practical problems as well, since God would
require petitionary prayers based on what is reasonable to expect
from those very people in those situations—not just in terms of the
offering of some petitionary prayer or other, but also in terms of
the specific objects of those prayers.
So if a given person sincerely and non-culpably believes that peti-
tionary prayers are not appropriate, or the case is not a qualifying
case, or the person cannot offer the prayers for some reason, then God
would not require them from this person. But if another person
believes sincerely and non-culpably that petitionary prayers are
appropriate and that this is a qualifying case, and it is reasonable to
expect this person to pray for something in this situation, then God
might require such prayers before providing it.
In addition, if a person were to believe (sincerely and non-culpably)
that there are not sufficiently good reasons to offer petitionary prayers
for anything, then God would not require this person to offer peti-
tionary prayers before providing anything. But if another person faced
a desperate situation and had no other options and believed sincerely
and non-culpably that the chance of God’s answering a petitionary
prayer was not zero, then God might require petitionary prayer from
such a person before providing something. In this way, we can see that
the wager defense collapses into the modified case-by-case approach,
since the wager defense essentially invokes the agent’s subjective
assessment of the expected utility of petitionary prayer.
If God answered such a prayer in such a situation, could this
increase someone’s faith in God? Could this be a good thing that is
“significant enough to be worth forgoing the (lesser) good of the
provision being made without the request,”16 even in cases of other-
person-directed petitionary prayer? In order to investigate this possi-
bility, it will be helpful to explore in some detail the connection
between faith and evidence.
16
Murray and Meyers 1994, p.313; see the discussion of this idea in
chapter 6.

9.3 Faith and Evidence
Some people say that their faith in God is based, in part, on answered
petitionary prayer. Is this possible? Is it wise? First, let’s distinguish
two kinds of faith: faith that something is the case, and faith in a
person, such as a God.17 Here I will not focus so much on faith that
God exists (or faith that God is good, etc.), because faith in God strikes
me as much more important (although the two are certainly related in
interesting ways).18
Faith in God involves trust in God. To trust in God, it seems to
me, one need not believe that God exists (although it would be
much more natural to have faith in God if one believed that God
existed). This is because we can trust a person even though we do
not believe that he or she exists, as I noted in section 1.2. To repeat
the argument given there, suppose that I find myself exchanging
messages over the internet in a customer support chat session that
seems to involve another living person. Because I know that there
exist many computer programs that are capable of carrying on such
conversations in settings like this, I have reason to doubt whether
I am interacting with a living person. Imagine that I receive a
message asking for my telephone number, and I decide to provide
it. For all I know, I could be sharing my phone number with a
computer program that compiles data for the purpose of targeted
commercial advertising, and not with a living person. In this case,
let’s stipulate, I do not believe that I am sharing my phone number
with a living person, but I don’t believe that I am not, either—I
don’t believe either way. But suppose that in fact, I have been
talking with a living person, who receives my number and eventu-
ally contacts me for some good purpose. It seems right to say, in this
case, that I trusted this other person by sharing my phone number,
17
See Howard-Snyder 2013.
18
The author of the book of James in the Christian scriptures argues that faith
that God exists by itself is useless; one of his arguments goes like this: “You believe
that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder” (James
2:19). The author seems to be saying that mere intellectual assent without a
commitment of trust that is manifested in action is neither virtuous nor valuable
to God.

even though I did not believe, at the time, in the existence of this
person. So it seems that one need not believe that God exists in
order to trust in God.
Geoffrey Cupit claims that if we rely upon a person to the precise
degree that our evidence favors doing so, then we do not really trust that
person, because trusting involves taking a risk.19 Of course, trust is
typically based on some evidence: the stronger the evidence, the stronger
the basis for taking the risk. But if the evidence for relying upon someone
becomes too strong, trust is no longer possible, because it no longer
involves a risk. At the other end of the spectrum, trust can also be blind,
which happens when we trust in someone without any evidence at all. In
Figure 9.1, these relationships are represented graphically:
With 100% evidence

(proof), trust is no
Blind longer possible
Trust
Degrees of Possible Trust
0% 100%
Degrees of Evidence
50% 50%
100% 0%
= Trust = Evidence
Figure 9.1 Faith, trust, and evidence
Faith in God requires trust in God. So believing that God has

answered petitionary prayers might provide the basis for faith in
19
Cupit 1994, pp.442–3. As Dan Howard-Snyder has pointed out to me (in
correspondence), this is a subjective risk, not necessarily an objective one; for more
on this, see Kvanvig 2015.

God by providing a reason to trust in God.20 But no amount of
answered petitionary prayer (or any other evidence) could be respon-
sible for trust all by itself, since trust is not present unless one goes
beyond the evidence by taking a risk. This means that not even
knowledge of answered petitionary prayer, together with belief in
God, would be sufficient for faith in God (although it might make
faith in God more likely, because it could provide a basis for trust—
assuming that knowledge of answered prayer is possible, contrary to
the arguments in chapters 4 and 5). Are there other connections
between the offering of petitionary prayer and faith in God?
Choi claims that “[petitionary] prayerlessness betrays a practical
lack of faith and trust in God.”21 But if we follow the spirit of the
modified case-by-case approach defended in chapter 8 and above, this
is not necessarily true—some people do not believe that God answers
prayer, or do not think that they are in a qualifying situation, or don’t
know what to pray for, or can’t see why God would require petition-
ary prayer for them before providing certain things.
There also seems to be an interesting difference here between self-
directed petitionary prayers and other-person-directed petitionary
prayers. A person who never offered self-directed petitionary prayers
might lack faith and trust in God, as Choi suggests, especially if this
person believes that God is likely to provide certain things only if
petitionary prayers of permission are offered. But this same person
might find it unclear how to pray for other people because of the issues
we have discussed involving other-person-directed petitionary prayer,
and this need not indicate a practical lack of faith or trust in God. So
petitionary prayer does not seem to be necessary, in general, for faith
in God.
In fact, a lack of specific, other-person-directed petitionary prayer
could actually express faith in God. Although we should always be
suspicious of divine–human analogies, consider the fact that I have
20
Moser argues that the evidence of God’s existence and love is not public or
uniformly accessible to everyone, but rather revealed differently to different
persons, based on their willingness to engage in “divine corrective reciprocity”:
see Moser 2008, p.89ff.
21
Choi 2003, p.11.

faith in my wife, and trust her to do what is good for our children,
where she can, unless she has good reason to do otherwise. If I were
to ask her to do something specific that I could not do myself, such
as to make our children dinner while I was out of town, that request
could suggest that I do not trust her completely. (She would cer-
tainly find it puzzling.) In the same way, if I were to ask God to do
something specific for my children that I could not do myself, that
could suggest a lack of trust in God to look after my children. It
could suggest that I was worried that God would not realize the
importance of this issue or would not help my children unless
I asked—even though (according to traditional theism) God loves
them even more than I do, and knows more than I do what they
need.
Faith in God involves the hope (and perhaps even the belief) that
no matter what happens to us in life, on the whole, things will turn
out well in the end. Often people do not know what would be best in
a given situation, so they don’t know what to hope for or what to
pray for; if they have faith in God, though, they will not be com-
pletely consumed by worry. Faith in God leads them to trust God
to do what is good, where God can, unless God has a good reason
to do otherwise, even if they did not ask God to do anything
specifically.
This approach is suggested by the following teaching from Jesus’s
so-called Sermon on the Mount (which also contains his recommen-
dation of the use of a version of the Lord’s Prayer, incidentally):
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or
drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than
food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they
do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father
feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one
of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
(Matthew 6:25–27, New International Version;
see also verses 28–34 and Matthew 10:26–31).
Notice that the argument Jesus gives for not worrying has nothing to
do with whether or not we are good people, whether or not we offer
petitionary prayers, or anything of that sort. It appeals only to the fact
that God provides for less valuable creatures, and hence will provide

for us. Someone who trusted God to provide because of a sincerely
held belief in this teaching might not feel led to offer specific petition-
ary prayers for non-direct divine goods at all.22
A different Christian teaching, this time from the letters of St Paul,
might have a similar effect on some people:
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know
what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us
through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the
mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in
accordance with the will of God
(Romans 8:26–27, New International Version).
One of the points made in this passage seems to be that even though we
do not know what we ought to pray for, the Spirit intercedes for us to
pray for the right things. As before, someone who trusted the Spirit to
pray for us properly because of a sincerely held belief in this teaching
might not feel led to offer any specific petitionary prayers at all.23
By contrast, petitionary prayers always ask God to do something. It
is even tempting to suggest that the more specific one’s petitionary
prayers become, the less faith in God one evinces (although I think
things are more complicated than that). Certainly there is an odd
tension contained in the B pattern of Jesus’ teaching concerning
petitionary prayer discussed in chapter 5 (namely, that if you have
faith, then whatever you ask will be done). Why would you tell a
mountain to move, for example, if you had faith in God? What
would be the point? Wouldn’t you leave the placement of the moun-
tains up to God?24
22
It should go without saying here that I am not trying to summarize the
content of the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, let alone argue for its proper
interpretation; I am simply describing how someone might respond to it, in
accordance with the resource-relative emphasis inherent in the modified case-by-
case approach. My argument here raises all kinds of question about scripture and
authority and tradition that I must simply ignore here because I do not have the
space to address them responsibly.
23
As before, I am not recommending the response described here—I am
simply describing how some might react to the teaching.
24
This line of reflection suggests to me that the faith that Jesus has in mind in
the B pattern teachings is not the faith I have been discussing in this chapter at all;

Some will object to this line of thought by claiming that not all
petitionary prayer is specific—some of it seems to be quite general,
including the Lord’s Prayer.25 But it may be a mistake to view the
Lord’s Prayer as a petitionary prayer in the first place.26 Although it
has the form of a series of requests, they are so general that
praying the prayer in the petitionary way could, for some people,
suggest a lack of faith in God. This is because some people might
think that according to other Christian teachings (as noted above),
the things requested in the Lord’s Prayer are things that one
should trust God to provide whether or not one has asked God to
provide them.
It is important here to remember that petitionary prayer is only
one form of prayer. So just because someone fails to pray in the
petitionary way (or prays that way only on occasion), it does not
follow that this person has an impoverished life of prayer. Although
I am not recommending this, it seems that prayers of thanks-
giving, adoration, and confession could fill a person’s life of prayer.
9.4 Prayers of Thanksgiving

At this point, it will be helpful to take a closer look at the nature of
gratitude and prayers of thanksgiving. As noted in chapter 8, Murray
and Meyers argue that God’s requiring petitionary prayers before the
provision of certain goods is important for preventing a form of
idolatry that “leads her to look only to nature or her neighbor for
her daily bread rather than God.”27 In response to the objection that
prayers of thanksgiving are sufficient by themselves to prevent such a
passages in which Jesus tells people that their faith has healed them (Mark 5:34,
10:32, Luke 7:50, 17:19, etc.) confirm this suspicion.
25
See Matthew 6:9–13, Luke 11:2–4.
26
Here again, I have broached a huge subject, and cannot address the theo-
logical and interpretive issues involved in a responsible way; for a sample of
commentary, see Ayo 1992. As before, I am simply describing one way in which
people might interpret this material.
27

lapse, they argue that “if humans were to limit themselves only to
prayers of thanksgiving, many would eventually lapse into idolatry
simply because there is insufficient motivation to maintain continual
prayers of thanksgiving.”28 This is a consequentialist defense of peti-
tionary prayer: unless God requires petitionary prayers for the provi-
sion of certain things, we might fall into idolatry. The picture that one
gets from this description is that if only people could persist in prayers
of thanksgiving, then they would be saved from idolatry, but it is too
difficult for people to do this.
In order to consider carefully this proposal, let us ask this question
first: what distinguishes prayers of thanksgiving from other kinds of
prayers, besides the obvious difference in content? If an apparent
prayer of thanksgiving is not the expression of genuine gratitude,
then it is not really a prayer of thanksgiving at all, but rather some-
thing else—perhaps a failed attempt to offer a prayer of thanksgiving,
or a prayer designed to look like a prayer of thanksgiving, or a prayer
designed to inspire gratitude.29 Rather than saying that prayers of
thanksgiving help to prevent one from falling into idolatry, then, it
seems that genuine prayers of thanksgiving are sure signs that one has
not fallen into idolatry.30 What seems essential to preventing idolatry
is not so much the offering of prayers, whether petitionary prayers
or prayers of thanksgiving, but rather the understanding that
idolatry rests upon false assumptions about God’s relationship to the
created world, together with the attitudes that flow from such
understanding.31
Murray and Meyers also say that unlike the practice of petitionary
prayer, through which the believer is “rewarded in numerous other
ways,”
The goal of thanksgiving seems to be strictly the enhancement of one's
spiritual life. Through thanksgiving the believer acknowledges the
28
29
This view is supported by a number of texts in the canonical Christian
sources (for example, Luke 18:9–14).
30
Perhaps I am reading Murray and Meyers uncharitably here, but they
reinforce this impression elsewhere (for example, “Prayers of thanksgiving are
important because they inspire gratitude in believers for God’s provision”: p.316).
31
For more on this, see Davison 2012, chapter 7.

Creator's rightful position in her life. Thus, the believer can maintain
her spiritual equilibrium regarding her place in the operation of the
world. (Murray and Meyers 1994, p.315)
It strikes me as odd to talk about the goal of thanksgiving, as if it were
an activity pursued for the sake of some external good or as if it
required some kind of consequentialist justification. Heartfelt prayers
of thanksgiving may lead to the things Murray and Meyers describe
here, but surely these things are not the goal of the practice or the
justification for it. Instead, such prayers are a fitting response to the
recognition of God’s provision, whether or not they lead to any
further good. It also does not matter whether the provision for
which one is grateful was preceded by petitionary prayers—the pro-
vision is sufficient, all by itself, to warrant gratitude. In fact, in the
same way that one can lament tragedies that have no connection to
one’s own life, one can be grateful for good things that are completely
unrelated to one’s own self.32
Murray and Meyers also argue that
Through efficacious petitionary prayer, God can harness the appetites
of the believer's physical body and force those appetites to serve the
needs of her spirit. With this, God causes the satisfaction of the physical
appetites to be dependent upon a practice that in turn feeds the
spiritual life and keeps God in the forefront of the believer’s mind. As
a result, both the flesh and the spirit drive the believer toward this
exercise which helps her avoid idolatry. Thus, efficacious petitionary
prayer causes humans to persevere in their prayers in a way that
prayers of thanksgiving cannot. (Murray and Meyers 1994, p.315)
This kind of explanation requires that people be aware that God’s

provision hangs on petition, which is a problematic assumption (as
discussed in chapters 4 and 5). But what about the underlying idea
that prayers of thanksgiving (or attitudes of gratitude) will wither on
the vine without the support of petitionary prayers, answered or not?
This also strikes me as puzzling.33
32
See the discussion of theism and intrinsic value in Davison 2012, chapter 7,
especially section 2.
33
Smith and Yip accuse Murray and Meyers of assuming a “bleak appraisal of
the human condition” in this regard (Smith and Yip 2010, p.7).

To their credit, Murray and Meyers note, in a footnote, the objec-
tion that for the “spiritually mature believer,” petitionary prayers
might not be needed to keep idolatry at bay. They respond to this
objection by noting that “While this is so, not all believers are this well
positioned and, as a result, God’s general policy must provide for both
the spiritually mature and the spiritually less mature.”34 But this claim
is in tension with the claim, defended at the end of their paper and
mentioned in chapter 8, according to which God chooses which
possible world to actualize based upon middle knowledge of what
free creatures would freely choose to request from God, resulting in an
individualized providence that requires different petitionary prayers
for the provision of different goods for different people.35
In the last two sections of this chapter, I have argued that there is no
obvious necessary connection between faith and petitionary prayer.
More specifically, I have argued that a lack of specific petitionary
prayers need not indicate a lack of faith in God or a lack of
gratitude—in fact, in some cases, such a lack might actually indicate
faith in God, contrary to what one might have assumed. This is not to
recommend that persons of faith should not pray in the petitionary
way, of course—as I mentioned in the Introduction, I am the last
person who should be offering practical advice with regard to prayer.
But at this point, it does seem important to draw this investigation to a
conclusion, and to summarize the directions in which it points. This is
the subject of the concluding chapter, to which we may now turn.
34
Murray and Meyers 1994, p.315, fn.6.
35
Murray and Meyers 1994, pp.324–5.
10
Conclusion
People ask God for all kinds of things. As noted in chapter 1, though,
there are various limits on God’s action in general, and these also
apply to God’s ability to answer petitionary prayers. God is all-
powerful, but cannot do that which is logically impossible; God
cares about our requests, but cannot do that which is contrary to
essential moral perfection; God is provident and rational, and so will
not do things that would undercut God’s providential plan for the
world. In order for a petitionary prayer to be answered by God, there
must be space among God’s reasons for the offering of that petitionary
prayer to play the appropriate role in God’s decision.
In chapter 2, I tried to provide a clear and plausible account of the
role that the offering of petitionary prayers must play in God’s reasons
in order for a prayer to be answered. This was the contrastive reasons
account. According to it, one’s petitionary prayer is answered by God
if and only if God’s desire to provide the object of the prayer just
because the petitioner requested it plays an essential role in a true
contrastive explanation of God’s providing that object rather than
not. This account has the intuitively plausible consequence that in
order to be answered, petitionary prayers must make a difference; in
fact, in the typical case of answered petitionary prayer, had the
petitioner not offered the prayer, God would not have provided the
good thing in question.
So the task of offering a defense of petitionary prayer involves
explaining why God would make the provision of some good thing
dependent on the offering of petitionary prayers. The more plausible
the claims involved in a given a defense, of course, the more promising
it is. In chapters 6 through 8, we considered the most promising
defenses of petitionary prayer in the literature. Many of the
defenses found it difficult to explain how God might be justified in

making the provision of something really significant depend upon the
offering of petitionary prayer, since the good things identified by the
defenses are not always as clearly significant as the objects requested in
petitionary prayer.
Careful consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of defenses
and challenges led to several promising strategies for defense. In
chapter 8, we considered a slightly modified version of Eleonore
Stump’s account that I called the autonomy defense. This account
explained why God might require petitionary prayers with regard to
those matters over which human beings have a legitimate (but limited
and defeasible) claim to autonomy, namely, permission-required, direct
divine goods. In addition, reflection on the nature of permission-
required goods in general led us to formulate the permission-required
challenge to other-person-directed petitionary prayer: an other-person-
directed petitionary prayer from a person S for God to provide a
permission-required good for another person P typically cannot be
answered by God, even if the object of that petitionary prayer is a
direct divine good (unless, of course, P has offered a self-directed
petitionary prayer for the same good or otherwise granted permission
to receive it). This challenge seems to show that certain kinds of
petitionary prayers simply cannot be answered by God.
Further reflection involving questions of luck led to the formulation
of the modified case-by-case approach to defense, described in section
8.5 and then developed further in sections 9.2 and 9.3. This approach
is resource-relative, emphasizing the perspective of the petitioner, and
it does not require us to embrace the Molinist picture according to
which God possesses middle knowledge concerning what petitioners
would freely request in various situations. The modified case-by-case
approach applies only to what I called “qualifying cases,” namely,
those cases covered by the autonomy defense and cases in which there
are other goods at stake that are significant enough to be worth
forgoing the provision of something in the absence of a petitionary
prayer requesting it.
According to this defense, if the case is not a qualifying case, or the
person sincerely and non-culpably believes that petitionary prayers are
not appropriate, then God would not require them. But if it is reason-
able to expect petitionary prayers from a person in a qualifying case,
then God might require such prayers before providing something to
Conclusion 165
that person. In addition, if a person were to believe (sincerely and non-
culpably) that there are not sufficiently good reasons to offer petitionary
prayers for anything, then God would not require this person to offer
petitionary prayers before providing anything. But if another person
faced a desperate situation and had no other options and believed
sincerely and non-culpably that the chance of God’s answering a
petitionary prayer was not zero (this is the wager defense described in,
section 9.1), then God might require petitionary prayer from such a
person before providing something.
Table 10.1 summarizes the arguments of this book, and hence of
the current state of the debate (in my opinion):
Table 10.1 Summary: The Current State of the Debate

Prayer type: Object requested:
Self- 1. Permission- 2. Non- 3. 4. Non-
directed required, permission- Permission- permission-
petitionary direct divine required, required, required,
prayer good direct non-direct non-direct
divine good divine good divine good
Defense Yes: Yes: (Empty) Yes: Modified
available: Autonomy Modified case-by-case
defense case-by- approach
case
approach
Other- 5. Permission- 6. Non- 7. 8. Non-

person required, permission- Permission- permission-
directed direct divine required, required, required,
petitionary good direct non-direct non-direct
prayer divine good divine good divine good
Defense No: Yes: No: Yes: Modified
available: Permission- Modified Permission- case-by-case
required case-by- required approach
challenge case challenge
approach
I should explain why case 3 in the table is listed as empty. This would
be a case of self-directed petitionary prayer for a permission-required,
non-direct divine good. By way of reminder, direct divine goods are

those things that God alone can provide, and must provide directly,
whereas non-direct divine goods are those things that we might come
to possess in some other way, such as health, friendship, family,
knowledge, success in our endeavors, material possessions, and so
on.1 In our discussion of permission-required goods, we noted that
sometimes, whether or not a given good is permission-required
depends on the relationship between the one who gives and the one
who receives. For example, I can give things to my children without
their permission that you cannot, and God can give things to me that
no other human person can.2 Case 3 in the table is listed as empty
because I cannot think of a non-direct divine good the provision of
which by God would require a created person’s permission.3
The table is slightly misleading because so far in our investigation,
the modified case-by-case approach has been seen to apply only to
cases in which there are other goods at stake that are significant
enough to be worth forgoing the provision of something in the
absence of a petitionary prayer requesting it. The defenses from the
literature that we considered had trouble identifying a good at stake
that would justify God in forgoing the provision of something really
significant; I will return to this limitation momentarily. By contrast, as
mentioned above, the autonomy defense clearly applies even to cases
in which the object requested in petitionary prayer is highly signifi-
cant, because in those cases, the good things requested require per-
mission from the petitioner before God can provide them.
By way of illustration, consider case 1 in Table 10.1, involving a self-
directed petitionary prayer for a permission-required, direct divine
good. Suppose that traditional theists are right in thinking that friend-
ship with God is the greatest and most significant good available
to human beings, but that God will not force friendship upon anyone,
as Stump explains.4 Imagine that someone asks God to intervene
1 2
See the discussion of this in section 8.4. See section 8.4.
3
Traditional theists would probably also say that God needs no permission to
remove non-divine direct goods from the lives of the faithful, either, as illustrated
by the story of Job.
4
See the discussion of Stump’s views in section 6.3, and sections 8.3 and 8.4;
special thanks are due to Stump for private correspondence concerning these
issues.
Conclusion 167
miraculously to remove a habitual tendency to engage in a self-
destructive behavior that constitutes an obstacle to friendship with
God, but which has become firmly established through a lifetime of
free choices to engage in the behavior over time.5 In this case, we can
see how there is something very significant at stake, but we can also see
why God might require a petitionary prayer (a request for help) before
providing this good thing, since it involves a significant change to the
person in question that would undermine human autonomy if no
permission were involved.
Could a similar approach help to overcome the limitation in the
modified case-by-case approach noted above? Consider case 2 from
Table 10.1: can we imagine a situation in which God would require
a self-directed petitionary prayer for a significant, non-permission-
required, direct divine good? I think so: suppose as before that
friendship with God is the greatest and most significant good available
to human beings, but that such friendship requires occasionally, for
some people, God’s palpable presence. Then God’s palpable presence
could be instrumentally necessary for friendship with God in this case,
making it significant, but in general, God’s palpable presence need not
be a permission-required good for this person.
What about case 4? Can we imagine why God might require
self-directed petitionary prayers before providing a significant, non-
permission-required, non-direct divine good? Suppose that I am
deathly ill, and pray to God to heal me. We can easily imagine why
it would be good for God to heal me whether or not I pray for this, but
why would God do it only if I ask? Perhaps God knows somehow6 that
if I pray to be healed and my prayer is answered, then because of how
I will interpret my situation,7 my existing friendship with God will
flourish, whereas it will flounder otherwise. So it seems possible after
5
For a more detailed description of a scenario like this, see Stump’s account of
sanctification based on Frankfurt’s distinction between first and second order
desires in Stump 1988.
6
This need not involve middle knowledge, because the decisions and interpret-
ations described here need not be free in a libertarian sense—see the discussion of
this in section 8.3.
7
Namely, in a way that runs contrary to the arguments outlined in chapters 4
and 5.

all for the modified case-by-case approach to explain why God might
require this kind of petitionary prayer, at least in this case. But it is
hard to see how this kind of explanation could be applied to many of
the petitionary prayers of this sort that people offer, so the modified
case-by-case approach still has limited application in this category.
Consider now case 6: can we imagine a case in which God would
require an other-person-directed petitionary prayer for a significant,
non-permission-required, direct divine good? Let us try the strategy
we used above in connection with case 2. Suppose again that friend-
ship with God requires, for some person P, God’s palpable presence,
but that in general, God’s palpable presence is not a permission-
required good for P. Now imagine that some other person, S, offers
an other-person-directed petitionary prayer for P to experience God’s
palpable presence. Perhaps we can see why it would be good for P to
experience God’s palpable presence, but why should God’s provision
of this good depend on the offering of S’s? What good things could be
at stake here that would justify God in withholding this good thing
from P, should S not pray for it? Perhaps the answer lies not in P’s
friendship with God, but in S’s friendship with God instead—suppose
God knows that if P reports to S that P experienced God’s palpable
presence after S prayed for this, then S’s friendship with God will
flourish, whereas otherwise it will flounder.8
The same strategy could be applied to case 8, in which God would
require an other-person-directed petitionary prayer before providing
a significant, non-permission-required, direct divine good. For
example, S’s friendship with God could flourish if, but only if, S’s
petitionary prayer for P’s recovery from a serious illness is answered
by God. In this way, the modified case-by-case approach seems to
provide a possible explanation for petitionary prayers in categories 6
and 8. But as before, it is hard to see how this kind of explanation
could be applied to many of the other prayers of this sort that people
offer, so the defense has limited application in these categories.
By way of summary, then: the current state of the debate indicates that
some kinds of petitionary prayers are more philosophically defensible
8
See the discussion of Basinger’s argument for the conclusion that a perfectly
good God would never treat “an individual’s quality of life not as an end in itself,
but as a means to some other end” (Basinger 1983, p.34) in section 6.3.
Conclusion 169
than others. And as we saw in chapter 9, the relationship between
faith in God, conceived as trust, and the offering of petitionary
prayer is not straightforward—it depends on the details. So the
offering of petitionary prayers may be necessary for some people of
faith, unnecessary for others, and even precluded by the faith of still
others. Although it would be unusual, it would seem possible for
a person to have a life rich in prayers of various sorts, a life charac-
terized by faith in God and thanksgiving, and yet lacking in
petitionary prayers altogether.
However, it is important here to recall the artificial nature of our
main question, which was designed to isolate certain issues philosoph-
ically. As we have seen, religious injunctions to pray in the petitionary
way are not motivated only by the possibility that God may answer.
Praying in the petitionary way has many other benefits. For instance,
praying in the petitionary way solidifies one’s values and expresses
them to oneself and to others, especially in cases in which one has no
other way to contribute to the good.9 It also helps to create and
solidify one’s devotion to God. According to various religious teach-
ings, petitionary prayer can also lead to the peace of God. Praying in
the petitionary way for other people is an act of love, as Choi argues.10
And this is just the beginning—I will not attempt an exhaustive list of
positive benefits here.11 So the offering of petitionary prayers should
not be regarded as pointless in this larger sense, even if there is no
chance that they will be answered by God. One’s decision about
whether or not to pray in the petitionary way must take account of
these other things as well, not just the likelihood that God will answer.
Of course my philosophical investigation in this book is limited in
many ways—limited by my background beliefs and assumptions,
limited by the current state of the debate, and surely limited in
many other ways of which I am unaware. As a result, my conclusions
are very tentative, and I certainly do not intend them to inform
9
See Davison 2012, chapter 6.
10
See the discussion of Choi in section 7.3.
11
Although Phillips denies that petitionary prayer is designed to influence God
to act at all, his discussion of its other functions is certainly worth consulting here—
see Phillips 1981.

anyone’s personal decisions concerning whether or not to pray in the
petitionary way. I look forward to further debate concerning these
issues, and to learning more about challenges and defenses from
others who can see more clearly those things that I find puzzling.
Thank you for participating in this investigation with me.
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Index
Abelard, Peter 145 structuring cause 120

Adams, Robert Merrihew 22, 59, 60, 96 triggering cause 120
Alston, William 31, 64, 65 challenge to petitionary prayer 16–21, 23
Anscombe, G. E. M. 43, 118 divinity-based 18, 58
Anselm, St 49 domain-specific 16, 17
Aristotelian 47 goodness challenge 96–113
Aristotle 56 no choice challenge 59–61
atheism 145, 148, 149 safety based challenge 73, 77, 90, 91,
Augustine, St 47, 49, 66, 136, 140, 145 94–5
Aune, Bruce 43 unrestricted 16–20, 43, 58, 128, 142
Austin, John L. 118 Chisholm, Roderick 25, 44, 53, 118, 122
autonomy, human 136, 137, 139, 140, Choi, Isaac 23, 76, 77, 109–10, 124–8,
141, 164, 167 132, 156, 169
Ayo, Nicholas, C.S.C. 159 Christ see Jesus of Nazareth
Christianity 29, 47, 62, 80, 81, 82, 85,
Baal, prophets of 86, 87 88–9, 92, 103, 107–8, 137, 145, 154,
Bacovcin, Helen 81, 148 158–60
bad things 18, 66, 82, 97, 102, 110, Clarke, Randolph 38, 50–3, 118
123, 128 Cohn-Sherbok, Dan 20, 65, 108,
Basinger, David 13, 17, 19, 22, 26–7, 97, 127, 143
101, 105, 126–7, 131, 136–40, 168 coincidence 14, 15, 26, 27, 64, 92
Basinger, Randall 13 command 24, 29–33, 62, 81, 86
Beilby, James 88, 91 compatibilism, with regard to freedom
Bergmann, Michael 47, 49, 76 and determinism 46, 61, 118,
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 149 137–8
Brandt, Richard 117 Confucius 64
Bratman, Michael 25 Conly, Sarah 140–1
Braude, Stephen 78, 123 consequentialism 22, 123, 130, 131, 133,
Brentlinger, John 125 136, 137, 160, 161
Brown, L. B. 89 contextualism, epistemic 91–4
Brümmer, Vincent 17, 20, 22, 27, 60, 80, contingency 11, 12, 13, 20, 22, 29, 44,
88, 132, 133 60, 69, 72, 108
Buridan’s ass 55 contrastive explanation 38–42, 50–9,
Burrell, David 47 96, 163
control 12, 13, 19, 29, 56, 57, 66, 126,
Calvin, John 19, 85 130, 131, 149
Carson, Donald A. 137 Cornman, James W. 43
causation 12, 29, 34, 38, 43, 44, 47, Couenhoven, Jesse 49
49–53, 58, 59, 64–5, 120–2, 126 counterfactual power 14, 30
agent-causation 53, 55 Craig, William 14
causal contribution 19, 35, 111, creature 13, 24, 37, 106, 112, 136, 137,
119–22, 169 144, 157, 162
event causation 53 Cupit, Geoffrey 22, 101–4, 130, 155
186 Index
Davidson, Donald 25 future 12–14, 19, 20, 29, 36, 37, 43, 44,
Davison, Scott A. 11, 12, 13, 25, 28, 79, 92, 131, 150, 152
37, 46, 50, 62, 64, 76, 97, 102, 112,
118, 119, 126, 133, 134, 137, 138, Garcia, Laura 48
142, 143, 149, 150, 151, 152, 160, Geach, Peter 22, 27, 34, 60
161, 169 Gettier, Edmund 69
defense of petitionary prayer 18, 21–3 Ginet, Carl 56
autonomy defense 136–42, 164, 166 God
modified case-by-case defense 139, all-knowing 11, 100
146, 152–3, 156, 158, 164–8 all-powerful 11, 16, 100, 163
responsibility-based defenses 114–29 causal cooperation with creatures 12
wager defense 148–50, 153, 165 conservation 12, 65
demons 51, 66, 154 creation 11–15, 17–18, 21–3, 29, 36,
Dennett, Daniel 61, 115, 117, 118, 137 44–9, 65, 66, 78, 96, 97, 105, 106,
deontology 22, 101, 105, 127, 130, 108, 131, 134–6, 160
136, 137 foreknowledge 13, 20, 44, 46
depersonalization 22, 132, 133 forgiveness 20, 83, 136, 138
Derose, Keith 91, 92, 93, 94 free knowledge 13, 29
determinism 17, 19, 43–6, 51, 52, 59, 61, friendship with creatures 22, 106,
117, 118, 137 134–40, 167–8
Donagan, Alan 53 goodness 48, 49, 96–100, 127
Dougherty, Trent 76 illumination 88, 91
Dretske, Fred 25, 67, 120 immutability 20
impassibility 18, 20
Earman, John 17 middle knowledge 13–15, 27, 29, 109,
egocentrism 89 119, 143–4, 162, 164, 167
Elijah 86, 87 moral perfection 15, 96, 163
enlightenment 88, 89, 90 natural knowledge 13, 29
Eternalism 13, 15, 19, 27, 57, 148 omnipotence 49
evil 18, 21, 47, 49, 66, 75, 76, 85, 96, 97, omnirationality 27, 33–4, 37, 73
98, 99, 100, 110, 111, 143 omniscience 57, 141
externalism, epistemic 91 perfection 15, 48, 49, 57, 61, 96, 100,
105, 151, 163, 168
Feinberg, Joel 126 power 12, 19, 105, 106
Feldman, Richard 69 providence 12–19, 29, 85, 114, 148,
Fischer, John Martin 20, 43, 44, 46, 52, 151, 162, 163
116, 117, 118, 126 rationality 54, 55, 56, 58
Flint, Thomas P. 11, 14, 15, 21, 27–32, sovereignty 114, 137
39, 40, 45–6, 48, 53, 69, 75, 82, sustenance of the created world 12,
85–7, 99, 143 37, 106
foresight, and human responsibility 57, Goldin, Paul R. 64
66, 119, 120–2 Goldman, Alvin 25, 44, 67, 145
Frankfurt, Harry G. 27, 46, 48, 57, 118, Gosselin, Phillip D. 57, 116
126, 136, 137, 142, 167 Gowda, M. 78
Freddoso, Alfred J. 12, 44, 122 gratitude 11, 22, 23, 39, 76, 92, 93, 114,
freedom 12–15, 18, 20, 22, 23, 29, 30, 117, 130, 131–4, 159–62
39, 45–61, 73, 74, 100, 106, 117–22, Greenberg, Sean 76, 96
124, 126, 136–8, 141, 143, 144, 162,
164, 167 Hallanger, Nathan 17
Freedom to Do Otherwise (FDO) 46, 48 Harris, W. S. 78
Index 187
Hasker, William 13, 105 Leibniz, G. W. V. 76, 96
Hawthorne, John 93 Leibovici, L. 78
healing 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 40, 79, 86, Levy, Neil 124, 141
97, 98, 99, 100, 104, 109, 119, 121, Lewis, C. S. 49, 82, 83, 84, 125
127, 128, 159, 167 Lewis, David 51
Helm, Paul 13 Lewis, H. D. 85, 127, 143, 150, 151
Hitchcock, Christopher 51 libertarianism, with regard to human
Hoefer, Carl 17 freedom 12, 42, 46–61, 73, 106,
hope 157 118, 122, 126, 136, 137, 138, 167
Howard-Snyder, Daniel 9, 22, 23, 47, Lipton, Peter 51
60, 79, 98, 101, 104, 118–31, 154–5 lottery cases, epistemological 69,
Howard-Snyder, Frances 9, 23, 101, 71–2, 148
104, 118–31 love 48, 75, 76, 96, 100, 111, 124–6, 133,
Hume, David 64 151, 156, 157, 169
humility 93, 114 Lucas, J. R. 12
Humphreys, Paul 51 luck 58, 64, 67–72, 94, 95, 116, 126–8,
142–5, 164
idolatry 22, 131–2, 159, 160–2 Luhrmann, T. H. 80, 88–90
incompatibilism, with regard to freedom Luke, the book of 83, 88, 152, 159, 160
and determinism 13, 46–7, 61, 117
indeterminism 17, 44, 49, 51, 53, 137 Mackie, David 25
intention 108, 116, 119, 127, 128, 142–5 magic 60, 61, 89, 122
intercession 21, 107 Malebranche, Nicholas 44
interdependence 22, 107, 108, 109 Mann, William E. 54
internalism, epistemic 69, 91, 94 Masek, Lawrence 28
intervention Matthew, the book of 82, 83, 152,
divine 17, 22, 45, 64, 65, 75, 105, 136, 157, 159
138, 166 Mavrodes, George 62
human 45, 46, 48, 64, 65, 126, Mawson, Tim J. 49, 148–9
138, 141 McCallister, B. D. 78
Islam 47, 62, 80, 81 McCullagh, C. B. 25
miracle 14, 15, 17, 45, 79, 87, 138, 167
James, the book of 11, 82, 123, 154 Molina, Luis de 13–14
Jesus of Nazareth 29, 30, 32, 81, 82, 83, Molinism 13, 15, 29, 57, 142–4, 164
84, 88, 148, 151, 157, 158, 159 morally relevant difference 99–101, 104
Job, the book of 74, 75, 137, 166 Morris, Thomas V. 12, 17
Jones, P. G. 78 Morriston, Wes 47–9
Judaism 47, 62, 80, 81, 108 Moser, Paul 91, 140, 143, 156
Murray, Michael J. 22–3, 26–7, 76,
Kane, Robert 50, 53 86–9, 107–13, 124–36, 143–5, 153,
knowledge 12–15, 19–21, 27, 29, 39, 159–62
64–95, 100–3, 123, 128, 142, 143, Muslim see Islam
148, 149, 156, 157
Kolb, J. W. 78 Nagel, Thomas 50, 126
Kretzmann, Norman 13 naturalistic explanation 65, 79, 89
Kvanvig, Jonathan L. 155 Nietzsche, Friedrich 116
Nozick, Robert 57
law of nature 17, 44, 45, 73
Leftow, Brian 13, 20, 48 objectivity 76, 88, 116, 118, 152, 155
Lehrer, Keith 43, 88, 91, 118, 137 occasionalism 44
188 Index
Odegard, Douglas 57 Rea, Michael 32, 69
omission 12, 13, 39, 117, 118 resource-independent
O’Connor, Timothy 49–56, 118 approach 145, 152
O’Keefe, J. H. 78 resource-relative approach 145, 152,
158, 164
Pappas, George 43 responsibility 12, 19, 23, 56–60, 89, 97,
Pascal, Blaise 148 101, 113–29, 141, 143
Pascal’s wager 147 blame 47, 115, 117, 123, 125
paternalism 140–1 praise 115, 117, 123
Paul, St 11, 81, 148, 158 realism with respect to
permission-required goods 106, 138–44, 116–18
164–8 revelation 62, 63, 64, 66, 67,
Peter, St 29–32, 86 68, 94
petitionary 9, 11, 14, 15, 24–6, 60 Rogers, Katherin 49
petitioner 10, 19, 31, 59, 60, 82, 83, 84, Rosenkrantz, Gary 15, 44
88, 89, 102, 103, 111, 115, 122, 134, Rowe, William 46, 47, 48, 53, 56, 59, 76,
139, 143, 145, 163, 164, 166 96, 122
Philippians, the book of 81 Russell, Robert John 17
Pinnock, Clark 12, 13
Plantinga, Alvin 17, 21, 44, 47, 66, 88, safety, epistemic 68–72, 91
91, 99, 136 Sanders, John 13
Plotinus 47 Sartre, Jean Paul 55
prayer Schlossberger, Eugene 116
answered prayer 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, scripture 29, 74, 81, 86, 137,
18, 24–42, 56–65, 73–99, 114, 154, 158
123–7, 142, 151–6, 163–4 sensitivity, epistemic 68–70
efficacious 22, 78, 89, 122, 161 skepticism 68, 69, 72, 90, 117,
other-person-directed 26, 98, 101, 124, 141
105–46, 153–6, 164–8 Smilansky, Saul 82, 97, 125
pointless 16, 58, 63, 82, 85, 103, 150, Smith, Joshua 32, 67
151, 169 Smith, Nicholas 23, 27, 109–13, 118,
self-answering 25, 26, 28 135, 161
self-directed 26, 101, 114, 130, Sosa, Ernest 70, 94
136–56, 164–7 Stanley, Jason 93
thanksgiving 11, 76, 81, 131–4, 159, Stevenson, Charles 115
160–1, 169 Strasser, Mark 57
token of prayer 24–6, 31, 38, 39 Strawson, Galen 55
type of prayer 11, 24–6, 31, 82, Strawson, Peter 117
133, 143 Strychacz, C. P. 78
Pritchard, Duncan 69–72, 91, 95 Stump, Eleonore 13, 19, 21, 22, 27,
Pruss, Alexander R. 22, 27, 33–40, 59, 41, 75, 106–8, 134–7, 140, 147,
73, 101, 104 164–7
psychic powers 78, 123 Sunstein, Cass R. 142
Swartz, Norman 20
quantum mechanics 17, 44 Swinburne, Richard 18, 23, 27, 47, 62,
Quinn, Philip 115, 122 65, 106, 118–28
Rachels, James 127 Talbott, Thomas 49, 61

Ravizza, Mark S. J. 46, 118, 126 Taliaferro, Charles 97–9, 109–12, 127
Raz, Joseph 33 Taylor, Richard 53
Index 189
teachings, religious 18, 63, 80, 81, 82, van Inwagen, Peter 43–7, 53, 55, 57,
84–6, 90, 103, 108, 123, 148, 151, 118, 124
157–9, 169 Veber, Michael 10, 27, 98–113, 140
Thaler, Richard 142 Visser, Sandra 49
theodicy 21, 33, 143
Thessalonians, the first book of Wainwright, William 20
81, 148 Waller, Bruce 124, 141
Thomas, St 19, 24, 30, 48 Weber, Michael 141
Thomson, Judith Jarvis 25 Weil, Simone 152
Timpe, Kevin 13, 15, 19, 21, 22, 27, 34, Wierenga, Edward 47, 48, 49, 56, 59, 61
41, 49, 106, 107, 118, 134, 135, 148 Williams, Thomas 49
Tooley, Michael 21 Wolf, Susan 115
Truetemp, Mr 88 Wykstra, Stephen 76
utility 61, 105, 147, 148, 153 Yandell, Keith 57

Yip, Andrew 23, 27, 109–18, 135, 161
Vacek, J. L. 78 Young, Robert 44
value 86, 110, 116, 135, 136, 137, 140,
141, 150 Zagzebski, Linda 20
instrumental 76, 79, 84, 150 Zimmerman, Michael F. 59, 121, 126
intrinsic 37, 76, 133, 138, 161 Zimmerman, Michael J. 57, 121

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1. Challenges and Defenses 7

1.1 The Question Clariﬁed

Challenges and Defenses 9

Challenges and Defenses 11

1.3 Divine Providence

Challenges and Defenses 13

Challenges and Defenses 15

Challenges and Defenses 17

Challenges and Defenses 19

Challenges and Defenses 21

1.5 Defenses of Petitionary Prayer

Challenges and Defenses 23

2.1 Types, Tokens, and Parts

Petitionary Prayer Characterized 25

2.2 Answered Prayer

Petitionary Prayer Characterized 27

2.3 Changing the Circumstances

Petitionary Prayer Characterized 29

Petitionary Prayer Characterized 31

Petitionary Prayer Characterized 33

2.4 Pruss and Divine Omnirationality

Petitionary Prayer Characterized 35

Petitionary Prayer Characterized 37

of reasons (by saying that God did A in response to C to a degree proportional to

Petitionary Prayer Characterized 39

Petitionary Prayer Characterized 41

Divine Freedom Challenges 45

Divine Freedom Challenges 47

3.3 Two Views of Divine Freedom

This argument is echoed in the First Vatican Council’s condemnation

Divine Freedom Challenges 49

By contrast, things are different for God. As C. S. Lewis remarks,

3.4 A Strong Libertarian Challenge

Divine Freedom Challenges 51

Divine Freedom Challenges 53

3.5 Divine Action and Contrastive Explanation

Divine Freedom Challenges 55

Divine Freedom Challenges 57

3.6 Another Challenge

Divine Freedom Challenges 59

Divine Freedom Challenges 61

4.1 Knowledge and Relevant Alternatives

4.2 Skepticism, Sensitivity, and Safety

Pritchard’s modiﬁcation to the notion of safety is sufﬁcient to answer

4.3 God’s Reasons

It seems that Job is in no position to question God’s decisions about

5.1 Defenses Based on Empirical Studies

5.2 Defenses Based on Religious Teachings

We should infer from this teaching that successful petitionary prayer

Other petitionary prayers attributed to Jesus raise fascinating questions that

5.3 Speciﬁc Examples from Scriptural Traditions

5.4 Divine Illumination

Unless we have more information about how God’s enlightenment is

5.5 Contextualism to the Rescue?

If contextualists are right about the shifting of standards for knowledge

6.1 Petitionary Prayer and the Problem of Evil

Divine Goodness and Praying for Others 97

Divine Goodness and Praying for Others 99

100 Petitionary Prayer

Divine Goodness and Praying for Others 101

6.2 Requests and Reasons