Paradox of Prayer vs. Free Will

Okay, I see the point. I guess the whole freewool thing isn't that important unless you really want to go against God. I suppoes you just wouldn't pray then? Go easy on me, I am new. lol

Z.e.e.Being as I am a devout atheist it might be a wee bit hypocritical of me to do so.Since you are new I will not tag you on the God vs. free wool issue in your post.Damn shame since it is so expensive nowadays.LOL

Ok, pretend we've both bought tickets for the "Quantum Lottery." Instead of spinning bingo balls, it's atomic decay that determines the winner - if the atom decays at time X, I win. If it decays at time Y, you win.Hypothetically, I pray to God because momma really needs a new pair of orthopedic shoes.The atom decays at time X, as it turns out. I win. Did God influence the outcome? Let's pretend that we know he assured me that I would win, but I might have won anyway. Did he know that the atom would decay when it did in advance, or did he actually cause that outcome?Unless you know what was going to happen but didn't, it's hard to argue that the outcome was unfair - for all you know, you would have lost anyway, even if God wasn't a factor. Exactly how does your free will suffer as a result?The flaw in your argument appears to be the suggestion that human volition is the only non-deterministic agency in the universe, and I just don't see how that's true. There's plenty of random things in the universe that God could influence to make shit happen, and none of those things impact human volition in the least.

rashfrog I am sorry if I have trouble understanding how there is a difference between God knowing in advance and actually advancing that outcome. I have had this arguement before and I have never gotten a proper answer. By what means can God know the outcome of something without somehow influencing said outcome?
For you or I to know something it needs to have occured. How can God know {past tense here} the outcome unless he has a prior knowledge of it? If he has a prior knowledge of it without affecting the outcome he foresaw then the universe,in some small part,does not operate under his control.If there is a part of the universe not under his"jurisdiction" then yes I suppose you are right and free will can occur.Now we face the issues brought up concerning the limits this imposes upon him. Again I am too dense to see how random things can be influenced and remain random. Perhaps you could clarify?

Maybe I'm starting to get the sense of what you're talking about, but it looks like you're talking about the conflict of free will and foreknowledge, not free will and answered prayer.If God has perfect foreknowledge, can you even say he's answering prayers? That would imply that God has a choice - but if what you say about foreknowledge is true, not even God has a choice about the future, because he already knows the outcome.Perfect foreknowledge does confict with free will, but I don't see where prayer fits into it. Maybe I'm not so sure what we're talking about, after all. It's the difference between something random and something pseudorandom. It's the difference between tossing a coin and getting hthhthtt, and "programming" a coin to return that outcome.

crashfrog Let us say that a person makes a prayer for the safe return of a loved one from a war zone and God does intervene to answer the prayer. In doing so he must necessarily alter the actions or events that allow for the person to reach safety.Any actions or events that would be detrimental in a war zone necessitate that individuals that would harm this person are now altered to allow safe passage.In doing so the freewill of the individuals involved must be changed in order to fulfill the requisites of an answered prayer.Here is where the paradox appears.We can either allow for answered prayers and by that instigate a restriction on free will or we can allow free will but prayer cannot be answered or else we necessarily make it no different from blind luck.

Right, but there's ways to do that beyond reaching into someone's head and changing their behavior. For instance, there's a random chance that one's weapon might jam, and fail to fire the lethal bullet.Leaving aside the question of whether or not anything is actually random in a world where God can intervene; how can God's intervention via mechanical failure restrict free will? Presumably, "normal" mechanical failures don't restrict free will, right? If not, how can a purposeful one?

I will give an example of how a couple of my prayers were answered without violating our freedom of volition.Going back to the end of last summer... I had a very tight group of highschool friends. I was always concerned with their spiritual welfare and prayed often for them.
At the time when we were about to leave for our respective colleges, I prayed that God would give me a chance to speak to them about Him and help them work some things out before we all went our separate ways. I prayed about some personal things for them which I won't mention because of space and privacy. So the next day they came to my house. We rented a movie. It had terrible acting, a dumb plot, and there was already a pornographic scene in the first five minutes. So I left my friends and went to the other room to think and to read Christian literature book. After they had finished the movie, they came in thinking it was odd that I just got up and left to read. We talked about how stupid the movie was, and then they asked me what I was reading. That got us into a discussion lasting hours about God and Christian doctrine thereby answering my prayer. This was the first time I can remember ever having a conversation of any length about these things. So the next day I said, "Thanks God, that was great, let me do it one more time before we all leave for college." So the next day we are all hanging out and someone is talking about how they had been to the funeral of a catholic and how depressing it all was. Of course I had to explain the errors in catholic doctrine that made it so depressing, and this led us into another discussion lasting hours. We had never discussed these things before other than a fleeting mention of God. Since then I have had many other discussions with some of them.The free will of no person was violated. A seemingly random set of events and personal choices led all of us together to discuss the things I had asked God for a chance to discuss.The skeptic may claim that I attempted to answer my own prayer by dragging them into the conversation. This is impossible considering I had completely forgotten about that prayer until about 15 minutes into the first conversation and even then somewhat dismissed the the thought. What really got me was finding myself in the second conversation remembering my prayer from the night before.The skeptic may also claim that God's free will is completely left out of this and that this would have happened even if I did not pray that prayer.I do not claim to know or understand the means by which God works these things together for my good and to answer my prayers, but he does. I am certain of this because of the recurrence of other more amazing and more personal occasions than the one above in which an answer has been tied to a prayer either by proximity or by unexpectedly specific answers. Many times God answers prayers within hours or days of them to validate them for us. Sometimes the specifics are the validation of them.Perhaps if it had not rained that day fewer people would have rented movies and we could have gotten our first choice instead of that awful one and I would have never left the room to read and we would have never discussed those things. Perhaps if it had not rained, that boy would have never had an accident and died, and one of my friends would have never gone to a disturbing funeral and we would have never gotten into the second conversation. I don't know. It is impossible for anyone but God to understand the complexities of the interactions in our lives and it is impossible for anyone but him to work things together so that prayers receive a taylored answer. Outside of our time domain he knows everything including when and what we will pray and has already determined how he will respond to those prayers in time. Occasionally he will respond with a miracle if it will benefit our faith and spiritual life, but more often than not he simply gives us the answer we asked for within the natural bounds and course of history that he has set for our present lives.An example of what I mean by specifics:
My pastor has told this story of the early days of Dallas Theological Seminary when it was in danger of going bankrupt. The faculty held a prayer meeting and prayed that God would provide the funds to continue. One man stood up and said, "Father, we know the cattle on a thousand hills are thine, please sell some and give us the money." At that moment a rancher walked into the office outside the prayer meeting and handed the secretary a check telling her he decided to sell all his head of cattle and give it to the seminary. The secretary walked into the meeting and gave them the check.A missionary to communist Russia who spoke at a chapel service last semester described this story:
He and another man were traveling across Russia to their mission destination. They were supposed to have papers in order to pass by numerous checkpoints along the way. Without the papers they would be thrown in jail. The man he was with lost his papers near the begining of the trip. They prayed that God would blind they eyes of the guards so that they would not see him and ask for his papers. They drove on and passed through checkpoint after checkpoint without having one guard cast an eye on the man in the passenger seat. At some points his car was searched, but none seemed to realize he had a passenger.Missionaries always have amazing stories to tell of miracles and prayers.If this is not enough information about prayer, I also wrote a freaking long post in the What is True Christian topic about prayer that may give you some more things to pick at.

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"It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honor of kings to search out a matter." Proverbs 25:2

crashfrog It removes the choice of action which the person had the option of excercising in direct contradiction of a free will that some people believe God gives us. We may also assume that the fact that a person {if God intervenes}lived or died or was late for a train or broketheir foot and did not take a path they otherwise would have Etc.Etc. not only affects the free choice they may or may not have had but also affects all other future events in that persons life that otherwise would have happened up to and including people who do not yet exist at the time of the intervention.What of their choices?In a setting where probabilty is the key to the explanation of the inner workings of the world it is easy to account for the seemingly miraculous happenings where a person makes home against all odds but,more to the point,it answers the accounts where a person does not make it home without resorting to the vacuous phrase "it was God's will" or "all prayers are answered sometimes the answer is no."These offer little comfort and answer less than nothing for they are themselves wrought with contradiction and paradox. Normal mechanical failings are not because they are the result of random chance.This message has been edited by sidelined, 06-06-2004 02:03 AM

I'm not so clear on that, because while you describe in great depth what the outcome of what was presumably divine intervetion was, you don't ever explain exactly what God did.How do you know that God didn't possess your friends in order to steer the conversation? How do you know that he didn't harden the hearts of the movie studio (as he did with Pharoah) so that they might make the movie that so offended you in the first place?Without telling us exactly what God did, how are we supposed to come to any conclusions about it? Your prayer aside, we can presume that you have a desire to tell people about God, right?I submit that, given that it's more or less possible to relate any concievable situation to God, your desire to talk about it is more than enough to ensure that any conversation of sufficient length turns towards God, regardless of divine intervention.

Of course it doesn't. The shooter still had the choice to pull the trigger.You're confusing choice and consequence. Free will means we get to pick our choices. It doesn't mean we get to pick the consequences. I can choose to pull the trigger but what happens next is up to the laws of physics (or God, maybe), not to me.

crashfrogThe choice of action was the killing of the person not simply the pulling of the trigger.Change the weapon to a machete and now there is no intermediary between the choice and the action that could be altered to allow God to intervene without a direct action upon the will of the person killing.
I suppose you could have him slip in a patch of mud but the intervention and altering of the free will choice is nonetheless invoked even if it is hidden as a natural act.
And we must also assume that God knows He is altering the action whether the person is aware or not and is therefore guilty of violating the free-will he supposedly allowed.Just because he hides the action makes him no less culpable of breaking with his edict.Let us continue on to the person saved as a consequence. Now any actions he takes in his lifetime are permenantly altered from which they would have.As an individual we could argue this as acceptable but we do not exist in a vacuum. Now everybody who has dealings with him after the saving from death has occured must alter the actions they would have taken to accomodate his continued existence and they must do so without necessarily being aware that their lives have changed as a consequence of this and are therefore unaware that the choices they make in life are changed from where they would have.If we multiply this by thousands of prayers answered over the course of time then even though we are not aware of the changes again we do not have the freewill to make choices based on a world that was allowed to follow its course without intervention.P.S. You really are a night person aren't you? I was going to answer this right after you posted it but I couldn't keep my face out of the keyboard.Good thing as I probably would have posted an endless stream of unintelligible babble. KInd of like what I normally do.LOL

But that's not a choice, that's a consequence.I can choose to play the lottery, but I don't get to choose if I win or not. I can choose to swing the weapon. Whether or not it hits you is up to the law of physics. (This was made abundantly clear to me by the rules of Dungeons and Dragons. ) I think we're operating under two views of free will.I believe that free will means that, among the choices you might reasonably expect to have, your choice is not restricted - i.e. at a fork in the road, there is nothing but my own volition that compels me to go north rather than south. The fact that I can't make non-sensical choices, like choosing to go up, doesn't impact my free will.But you apparently believe that if any agency serves to reduce the number of choices avaliable, free will has been diminished or eliminated.I don't see how that makes sense, exactly. If I jump out of an airplane, I have no choice but to decend. Going up isn't an option, but no one would claim I lack free will. Descent is a consequence. Jumping was the choice, and I made it freely (presumably.)There's a difference between choice and consequence, but you don't seem to agree. Yeah, I'm the night desk guy at a hotel.

crashfrog Since the issue is the conflict produced by prayer influencing the outcome of a persons freewill through the direct intervention of God, then in your lottery scenario, if your friend prays for you to win, and you do, can your friend then claim it was because God answered his prayer? If not then as you say the outcome is random and things operate according to the laws of probability. If yes then we have that someones freewill{The person who would have won without the intervention of God} of choosing the ticket has been altered since he bought it with the idea of having an equal chance at winning. Correct and it will occur according to the laws of physics whether a person prays for it otherwise or not.{1} {2} I agree with statement #1.In #2 If God answers a prayer that necessitates a reduction in the number of choices available then according to #1 {which we both agree is correct} our choices have been restricted.If our choices are not restricted then prayer is ineffectual. If prayer can alter or influence our choice then restriction has been imposed otherwise God can not have taken action to answer the prayer.This is what I am advancing as an arguement.Prayer cannot be answered without God taking action to influence the outcome in which case our freewill must be restricted {or else God cannot have taken an action in the first place}Conversely if we are free to choose among actions,including those in direct opposition to the outcome of the prayer,{and within the laws of physics} then God does not answer prayers because it would result in a violation{restriction} of free will. If,by consequence,you mean those occurences that must result because of the laws of physics as a result of our choices then I do agree.However,as I am trying to point out,when prayer is said to be able alter the outcome of free choice{among those available} then choice can no longer be free since another persons will {the person praying} must be answered in direct opposition to what should have been a different outcome.

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What is the direction, up or down, of the acceleration of a freely bouncing ball at the bottommost point of its bounce, that is, at the instant its velocity changes from down to up?

But that's not an aspect of free will. Free will is making choices without coercion. It's not having perfect foreknowledge or control over consequences.Can anything random happen in a world with God? We keep getting back to this question, and I guess it's really the central issue. If nothing happens except by God's will, then nobody has free will in the first place. But if God leaves some things to chance, or doesn't have power over some things, I don't think his meddling in the lottery removes free will. You still chose to buy the ticket, and you did have an equal chance of winning, especially because no one can know if God intervened or not. Moreover, God's intervention can't be predicted either, because God has volition, too. Not in the least, again, because we have control over choices, not consequences. Pulling the trigger is a choice. The action of the bullet is a consequence. The failure of the gun to fire doesn't eliminate choice, nor does it eliminate your culpability for the choice - the police would still nab you for attempted murder. Free will implies no guarantee that the laws of physics will work the way we think they will. If God changes the rules mid-trigger pull, free will has still been preserved.The choice and the outcome are two different things. Free will guarantees non-coercive choice. It doesn't guarantee any outcome whatsoever. You make the choice and you take your chances. If God decides to meddle in the outcome of your choice, it doesn't matter - you made your choice, and the fact that the outcome wasn't something you expected doesn't mean your choice was any less free.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 06-06-2004 05:23 PM