From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Giving Thanks, Taking Credit
Did prayer help rescue the miners?
Nine Pennsylvania coal miners who had been trapped by a collapsed tunnel were brought out alive last weekend. Many people publicly thanked God for answering the prayers that had been offered during the ordeal. Indeed, the New York Times featured a photograph on its front page showing a woman with a placard in her restaurant's window: "Thank you God, 9 for 9."
Did God really answer the fervent prayers of well-wishers? Did the prayers get God, so to speak, to change his mind?
Many people, including many Christians, feel skeptical about whether petitions to God make a difference, though the desire for his help in times of crisis is certainly understandable. These people value prayer as communion with God, as contemplation, as thanksgiving and obeisance, or as a sort of self-reckoning. But they see two problems with thinking that prayers can get God to do things.
One is that we understand the laws of nature pretty well, and there does not seem to be much room left for God to do anything visible in the natural world except by miraculous intervention. Will God actually interfere with nature's laws just because we ask him to? And is God's will subject to human will?
The other is that the whole process seems morally arbitrary. Why does God save some people and not others? If God can save some, why doesn't he save all? We never read that God is to be credited with the unhappy fates of the less fortunate victims of disasters. Isn't that a little odd, or at least asymmetrical?
What is needed, perhaps, is a rethinking of the picture of God that some of us have. There are many ways to do this, according to different theological traditions. One way is to see God not as a force outside the universe who listens to millions of requests and then fiddles with nature's clockwork to grant the requests that are sufficiently earnest or reverential. Rather, he may be seen in almost philosophical (Hegelian) terms, commensurate, of course, with the dictates of faith and doctrine.
God, said Thomas Aquinas and the modern theologian Paul Tillich, is not like a person sitting outside the universe. God is "Being-itself," the spiritual basis of all reality. According to this way of thinking, God is infinite consciousness, wisdom and bliss, underlying and supporting the material cosmos. He is the spirit that is the deepest reality of a complex universe whose basic laws are not machine-like at all--think of the astonishingly indeterministic laws of quantum physics. In such a universe, every event resonates with every other in an intricate way, and events themselves may be affected by mind, observation and interaction. Clearly they may be affected by the cosmic mind or spirit, too.
When humans pray, they try to place their minds in harmony with that spirit, to cooperate with it, to receive its power and perhaps to affect it by their petitionings. "Answers to prayer" are not, in this view, instances of a supernatural being putting an arbitrary number of requests into his "Yes" box. They are the responses of the cosmic spirit to the desires and intentions of all finite spirits. As God directs the universe into the future, such responses may often result in causal processes for good--and we call those "answers to prayer."
Among those who have taken such a view of prayer are William James, A.N. Whitehead and a host of theologians who see God as the ultimate causal basis of an organic, emerging and evolving universe. If that spirit resonates with the thoughts and feelings of finite creatures, it would be strange indeed if the universe were not affected in particular ways by those thoughts and feelings.
So it may be that human prayers and passionate desires, in conjunction with many other causal factors beyond our knowledge, increased the probability of the miners being rescued. To put it succinctly, God did hear and answer these prayers. In any view of the universe that takes God seriously as the supreme reality, one would expect petitionary prayer to work--though not always as directly as in this happy case.
Dr. Ward, an Anglican priest, is the author of "God: A Guide for the Perplexed" and regius professor of divinity at the University of Oxford.
