Q&A: Prayer Is Not a Miracle
Prayer Is Not a Miracle
Question
You write that an answer to prayer is necessarily a miracle. At first glance, that is not inevitable. Unlike us, who are bound within the film of time, God is outside time and everything is spread out before Him, so He can arrange the initial conditions to fit the prayers that people will pray. That is, He already knows in advance whether or not we will pray, and He knows whether He will answer our prayers.
Answer
Completely inevitable. An answer to prayer means that without the prayer, X would happen, and because of the prayer, Y happens. Forward or backward or from the side—bottom line, reality changes from what would have happened naturally.
Initial conditions are also a natural product, and if the Holy One, blessed be He, changes or adjusts them, that itself is intervention in nature.
Discussion on Answer
Keren wrote again:
I’ll try to sharpen the question: does prayer cause x to happen instead of y? Yes.
Is that a change from nature? No. That is how it is supposed to happen according to the natural chain of events from the creation of the world.
If I do not pray, y will happen and not x, but that too happens naturally. The difference between the situations is that when God creates the world, He sees what I choose, because from His perspective time is spread out before Him like a strip of film from a video camera.
God does not change the initial conditions each time; rather, from the outset He created them to fit all our choices and prayers.
My response,
Let me say in advance that I will not answer in another thread that gets opened on this issue. If there is some technical problem, it should be solved (you can contact the site editor). I can’t function like this.
If the whole thing is rigged, then everything is deterministic, period. I’ve already explained here several times that in my view there is no possibility of foreknowledge together with free will. You can search here and find it.
Keren wrote:
The claim is this: a space of uncertainty is something one can pray about. In truth, if that uncertainty were analyzed fully, it would already be resolved. The resolution takes the prayers into account. God created the world while taking the future into account. In other words, prayer does not change nature; rather, nature was determined from the outset according to the prayer of the present. Sorry for repeating the claim in different words—I think I wasn’t understood.
My response,
Indeed, you still were not understood. To me this sounds like empty verbiage.