Volume 35, Issue 1, January 2018
Martin Pickup
Pages 84-104
https://doi.org/10.5840/faithphil201811193
Answer to Our Prayers
The Unsolved But Solvable Problem of Petitionary Prayer
There is a concern about the effectiveness of petitionary prayer. If I pray for something good, wouldn¡¯t God give it to me anyway? And if I pray for something bad, won¡¯t God refrain from giving it to me even though I¡¯ve asked? This problem has received significant attention. The typical solutions suggest that the prayer itself can alter whether something is good or bad. I will argue that this is insufficient to fully address the problem, but also that the problem requires another assumption which can be doubted, thereby opening up a new way to solve the problem.