Can prayer be proven to work?
- Lewis tells of going to the barber one day and his barber saying I was praying that you’d come today. Of course, this could be because of prayer or some mysterious telepathy or just coincidence.
- He also tells of a woman who had cancer and doctors and nurses alike were saying she doesn’t have long to live, a few months at the most. Someone prayed for her and a year later she was strong and walking again. Of course, medicine gets things wrong many times so proving it’s diagnoses wrong is not necessarily a supernatural or even uncommon thing.
- Is there any anything that could really prove the efficacy of prayer? The thing we’re praying for could happen but who’s to say it wasn’t going to happen anyway. A very clearly miraculous thing could happen but who’s to say that it happened because of our prayer. I suppose there’s no definitive way to prove prayer or rather–as Lewis puts it–a compulsively empirical proof as found in the sciences cannot be found.
- Even if all the things that people pray for were to happen, this doesn’t really prove what Christians refer to as the efficacy of prayer. Because prayer, unlike compulsion, is a request. And if an infinite, all wise, all knowing being is listening to the requests of finite, often foolish beings, then it makes sense that sometimes he wouldn’t grant the requests. They could be short sighted or unwise or selfish, etc. So if there were people for whom all prayers were answered it wouldn’t prove the Christian doctrine, because in the Christian doctrine some prayers will definitely not be answered. It would just prove that these people have some kind of ability to control, or compel, the course of nature.
- There are some passages in the New testament that seem to suggest that our prayers will be answered invariably. But that’s disproven by the fact that the purest of beings prayed in Gethsemane three times that the cup passes from him and this prayer was not answered.
- In science we often use experiments to prove things and you might contrive that we set up an experiment for prayer. Say we pray for people in one hospital and not for the ones in another. Lewis says this is a useless experience because the real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers is at variance. You’re praying not for the improvement of the health of people but simply to see what happens. Prayer, is not just words uttered. If it were, Lewis says, then a band of well trained parrots would do just as well as people. “Simply to say prayers is not to pray.”
- This lack of proof can be a source of dismay but Lewis suggests that if you think of the fact that prayer is a request and compare it to other requests then it makes sense. We make requests to people all the time. When when they accept, we can’t always draw a causal relationship between our asking and their granting. You ask your neighbor to feed your cat and they agree, it might be because they aren’t the kind of person to let a cat starve anyway and they would have done it even if you hadn’t asked.
- The assurance that we get when we ask for things from people doesn’t come from some empirical evidence. It comes from our relationship with them. Not from knowing things about them but from knowing them. Those who best know a man know when he did a thing they asked whether he did it because they asked. In the same way, those who best know God know whether Lewis went to the barber shop that day because the barber prayed.
- This explains to me why we say prayer is aligning you to the will of God. This is almost grasping at what is happening but is not quite the explanation. Through prayer we get to know God, or more accurately, He reveals himself to us. Then the more we know him, the more we know what He would and would not grant. The same way that by knowing my father, I know sometimes before I even ask whether a request of mine would be granted.
- Important to note that this doesn’t come from a knowledge about him. Because a knowledge about him would say he can do what I am requesting. But a knowledge of him will tell me whether he will or not.
- What He does is learned from what (or who) He is.
- On the question of whether our prayers, and indeed our actions can alter the course of God’s actions or change his mind. God doesn’t need anything outside of himself to move things along. He could give us nourishment without food or knowledge without reading or being taught. But he allows His purposes to be realized in different ways according to the actions, and prayers, of His creatures.
- Lewis is clear about the fact that this is possibly not a complete explanation of things, but just a mental model to think about it and that the full reality might be beyond the comprehension of our finite minds. But at the least we can expel bad analogies and parables. Prayer is not a machine that produces set outcomes for set inputs, it’s not magic, it’s not giving advice to God.