Isaac Choi

Why would God institute the practice of efficacious petitionary prayer? Why would God not simply give us what we need before we ask? This chapter examines recently proposed solutions to this puzzle and argues that they are inadequate to explain why an omniscient and perfectly good God would act differently in response to prayer. The chapter proposes that God has reasons to not always maximize a creature’s good, even in a sinless world, and that petitionary prayer functions as a means to reward those who trust God, to enable us to actively love those we cannot otherwise help, and to give the petitioner personal evidence of God’s existence and care for her, creating a virtuous cycle of increasing faith. The proposal is refined by responding to several objections involving human responsibility and the epistemology of divine action.

Chapter 11 explores whether the majority opinion in Christian theology should be deferred to, or strongly preferred, whether it be the majority opinion over the history of the church (as in G. K. Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead”) or the majority opinion of contemporary theologians. It is argued that because of the vast differences in accessible evidence between past and present-day theologians, diachronic majority opinion is not a good indicator of where the truth lies. In the synchronic case, ignorance of minority arguments, biases, selection effects, and the difficulty to deciding who gets to vote present many opportunities for majorities to be wrong. Finally, it is considered whether the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit could rescue the democracy of the dead, but the conclusion is reached that given the gentle way God corrects us, diachronic majority opinion, apart from belief in a very basic set of truths, is not epistemically bolstered by the Spirit.

This chapter deals with two different problems in which infinity plays a central role. It first responds to a claim that infinity renders counting knowledge-level beliefs an infeasible approach to measuring and comparing how much we know. There are two methods of comparing sizes of infinite sets, using the one-to-one correspondence principle or the subset principle, and it argues that we should use the subset principle for measuring knowledge. The chapter then turns to the normalizability and coarse tuning objections to fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God or a multiverse. These objections center on the difficulty of talking about the epistemic probability of a physical constant falling within a finite life-permitting range when the possible range of that constant is infinite. Applying the lessons learned regarding infinity and the measurement of knowledge, the chapter hopes to blunt much of the force of these objections to fine-tuning arguments.

Why would God institute the practice of efficacious petitionary prayer? Why would God not simply give us what we need before we ask? I examine recently proposed solutions to this puzzle and argue that they are inadequate to explain why an omniscient and perfectly good God would act differently in response to prayer. I propose that God has reasons to not always maximize a creature’s good, even in a sinless world, and that petitionary prayer functions as a means to reward those who trust God, to enable us to actively love those we cannot otherwise help, and to give the petitioner personal evidence of God’s existence and care for her, creating a virtuous cycle of increasing faith. I refine this proposal by responding to several objections involving human responsibility and the epistemology of divine action. Along the way, I offer several ways petitioners can recognize God’s having answered a prayer and how God might help us with some common obstacles to prayer.