How does prayer really work? Part 1

In the second appendix called “On ‘Special Providences’ in the book ‘Miracles’, author C.S. Lewis gives what I think to be a very good explanation for how prayer might work. We hear it all the time. Some girl named Jane is down on her luck. She doesn’t have enough money to go on that trip to Europe she’s wanted to do since she was a child. Things look dire. She prays to God to ask Him if He would give her the money to go. Lo and behold, about a day later, the money is in an envelope at the mailbox! It’s just enough money to go, and it came from her grandparents. But there is a problem. The money was already on the way before Jane prayed. So, the question is: does the prayer make any difference? In retrospect, we can see that even if Jane didn’t pray, the money would have came anyway. How many prayers are like this? Do they have any kind of causal efficacy? How do we know when they do? How do we know things would have happened anyway, without the prayer?

Look at it this way. God is in control of everything, every atom - leaving aside the sense of ‘control’ for the moment. We inhabit the natural order - the order of events, connected with each other by cause and effect. This is what Lewis calls the gridlock, the grand interlocked event, like the gears in a clock - every event is related to every other either as a cause or an effect. Each event can be traced back to a ‘first event’ which got the ball rolling. The first event caused the rest, in a sense. In Nature, the scientists tell us that these events ‘go on’ obeying various laws of nature, like the law of gravity, or the law of thermodynamics, or the laws of electromagnetism.

Lewis speculates that God was the one that made this special ‘first event’, the event that caused the rest, made the rest what they inevitably will be. If God didn’t want Jane to get her money, then that ‘first event’ would have been adjusted or tweaked to make that happen. Not only was Jane’s money taken into account, but also the position of every atom for all time, including the atoms making up the dust particles in a different galaxy. But this is staggering when you think about it. The complexity of that ‘first event’ is enormous. It's the cause of trillions and trillions of other events in the vast causal web that is our space/time block. This just goes to show how awesome Omniscience is. Just as a Tolstoy can make all the events in War and Peace affect each other in just the right way, so can God on a cosmic scale with the story of humankind.

Lewis then develops a brilliant analogy containing one element I disagree with. But it doesn’t matter. The analogy is so amazing that it accommodates my own view anyway. My view is that God is related to time and so isn’t timeless; but Lewis puts God outside of time. But here is the analogy. I’ll quote him: “Suppose I find a piece of paper on which a black wavy line is already drawn, I can now sit down and draw other lines (say in red) so shaped as to combine with the black line into a pattern. Let us now suppose that the original black line is conscious. But it is not conscious along the whole length at once - only on each point on that length in turn.”

From God’s point of view, we’re all a bunch pre-made black, conscious lines at only one point of the line at a time. From that vantage point, God can make a pattern out of the black line using his red ink. Suppose our black line was an ‘S’; God could use His red ink to make an ‘8’, for example. Suppose further that the point on the black where we’re conscious progresses, moves, one point at a time. When I get to B, A is a memory, and when I get to C, B is a memory. Also suppose that the black line has freedom. It goes wherever it wants. The shape the black line takes is entirely up to us! So, when we reach point G down the road, we have chosen the shape the line will have at that point. But from God’s perspective, He has already seen us reach D, E, F, and G in accordance with the shape ‘S’, even before we were there. In fact, He sees us reach X, Y, Z (thus, completing the ‘S’ shape) at our death in the space/time block.

But what happens as we go from A to B to C to D and so on? God with His red ink has already made the pattern (suppose it’s the ‘8’ I already pointed out) He wanted. So, wherever I go with my black line to make whatever shape I’m freely making, I’ll see the red ink already there waiting for me!

To recap: we’re the black lines, with freedom, and consciousness, at one point of the black line at a time. If a part of Jane’s black line asks God for money for the trip to Europe, God could have chosen to make the red mark just at that point in the space/time manifold, thus making a certain satisfactory pattern. Jane prays at point F for money to be granted by point J, and God makes the red marks around J accordingly. But these red marks are perhaps a part of another pattern on another sheet of paper involving the black lines of grandparents! The black lines of Jane and the grandparents are so disparate, that from their point of view alone, they would have never dreamed they were related by an overarching red mark, producing the patterns that God willed. Perhaps the red marks are related to black lines before Jane was born or even after she dies! In answering Jane’s prayer at J on the black line, God used point E on the grandparents’ black line (corresponding to point H, say, on Jane’s line: thus explaining the sending of the envelope ‘before’ Jane even prayed), and the red markings thus produced the desired pattern.

Maybe our prayers ask for things that involve the adjustment of events before I was born or even for truths about events that will come after I’m dead.