“It does seem pretty strange,” I conceded, “to imagine God anxiously waiting for instructions from us.”

“And besides,” he said, “what most people pray for is pretty selfish, and probably the exact opposite of what somebody else wants. Just keeping track of all the contradictions from all those different requests would probably drive him crazy.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” I suggested. “Yet maybe it’s best not to assume we can analyze God’s psychology. In any case, if God can create a universe simply by saying so, keeping all of humanity’s prayers sorted out might not be such a big challenge.”

“Not necessarily,” he said. “I think there are times when prayer can help the person praying to feel better about a problem. And I think there’s a form of prayer that simply accepts the will of God, whatever that turns out to be. What I think won’t work is the idea that we could tell God what to do, and he would have to do it. Or that he wouldn’t automatically cause events to turn out in the way that’s best for all concerned unless someone asks him to.”

“Actually,” I said, “I can agree with quite a bit of that. Often prayer does give us both a sense of peace and also a sense of acceptance of God’s will. And I heartily affirm that we are not going to boss God around. But even so, it’s simply not true that God will automatically cause events to turn out the way that’s best for all concerned.”

“What! How can you say that?”

“God knows it would be best for you to eat a balanced diet, brush your teeth, and get your exercise; but God doesn’t make those things happen automatically. When you get behind the wheel of a car, God knows it’d be best for you and for those nearby that you drive responsibly; but there’s certainly no guarantee that you’ll do it. You and your friends can work together for the common good, or you can become an angry mob; God knows which of these alternatives is preferable, but does not automatically make it happen.”

“No, but wait,” he said. “Those are examples of how human actions can cause various effects. They’re not about prayer at all.”

“Yet I think they show,” I suggested, “that God has given us genuine agency concerning how events will take place. We can take initiative and make decisions that have real effects. Will you take care of your health? Will you be a responsible driver, or an inattentive one? God knows what’s best, yet gives us the freedom to make decisions which affect what actually happens.”

“OK, maybe for human actions that’s true. But not for prayer.”

“Why not?” I asked. “God has chosen to let us have some significant effect, for better or worse, on what happens in this world. If we get to do that at all, I see no reason to claim that God won’t let us do it through prayer.”

“Look,” he said. “When you brush your teeth, they’re brushed. That’s cause and effect. But when you pray for a new job, do you have a new job? Maybe, maybe not. That’s the difference.”

“But that difference comes from the fact that prayer is more powerful.”

“More powerful? If it doesn’t work?”

“If you pray for a new job, and God grants your request and gives you that new job, then through your prayers you’ve had quite a powerful effect on events taking place in the world: an effect that interacts with other people over an extended period of time. Isn’t that an effect well beyond the reach of your toothbrush?”

“Now wait a minute,” he said. “Lots of times it doesn’t happen that way.”

“That’s right. God does not allow us to exercise that much power every time we want to.”

“But doesn’t that just bring us back to what I said before,” he asked, “that God doesn’t answer those kinds of prayer?”

“It seems to me that you are insisting on an all-or-nothing framework here: God must either fulfill every prayer request, or else answer none of them. Yet how do we know those are the only two choices? How can we assume that God cannot decide, on a case-by-case basis, what to do about any given request?”

He was quiet for a moment. “So what you’re saying is, sometimes God might actually allow us, though prayer, to make that kind of difference in the world.”

“Indeed, through prayer,” I agreed. “God grants us a certain amount of power to change things, in a number of ways. Some are as simple as how we drive a car; the initiative to drive and the moment-by-moment decisions on how aggressively to drive are both under our own control. Some, like a school system, require cooperation with other people; we may initiate a good idea, but others take part in the decision on how it will get implemented. And when it comes to prayer, we control only the initiative, and the final decision belongs to God – and yet sometimes our initiative is precisely the one that God decides to make happen.”