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[John Opinion]

What is the different between praying for something and just thinking about it? I went to church this morning - I stopped believing quite recently, but I still go sometimes for the coffee (and sometimes food) and I know a couple of people there. Since I stepped outside the belief system I've started noticing more and more how strange Christian language can be. Prayers talk about "lifting [X] up to God" or "bringing [X] before God" etc. These are nice metaphors, but don't seem to be anything other than that. So my question for believers is, is there really a difference between praying for things, and just thinking about them? If so, do prayers about a certain someone/something hold more weight with God than just thoughts about the same subject?

[jimwalton]

Our thoughts can easily be prayers, but all thoughts are not prayers, and not all prayers are just in our thoughts. Thoughts directed towards God can be worship, meditation, spiritual thoughts, or prayers. Prayers can be spoken, sung, or thought. Prayer is more specifically "communicating to or with God." It's not necessarily asking for things, and can sometimes just be turning our thoughts Godward. The Christianese language of "lifting X up to God" or "bringing X before God" derive from biblical language and are idioms about prayer.

Is there really a difference between praying for things and just thinking about them? Yes. I can be thinking about the wedding I'm going to this afternoon, but that has nothing to do with prayer, just as when I'm thinking about what I'll be buying at the store tomorrow or thinking about a book I just read or a movie I just saw. Those thoughts are not prayers. But when I intentionally turn my thoughts toward God I am now crossing into the territory of prayer. Prayer is a pretty wide subject area and can include many behaviors and mental/spiritual activities. Keith Green, many decades ago, even penned a song that said, "Make my life a prayer to you."

Do prayers about a certain someone/something hold more weight with God than just thoughts about the same subject? Yes, even though at times those those can be prayers, in which case the answer is "no". God knows our thoughts, but he hears our prayers. The nuance there is between his omniscience about thoughts and his responsiveness to prayers.

[John Opinion]

Is there any way of verifying whether God hears your prayers or not?

[jimwalton]

It's a great question. "Verification" is not the best way to express it, because this is more like historians interpret history (interpretation of circumstances and events) than it is science (mathematical verification). It is possible to know that God is answering prayer, though. I can try to explain.

The longer I know God, the more I understand how he thinks and works, and the more I am able to recognize his work in my life, in the world, and answers to prayer. Let me give you three illustrations. When you're married, you really learn how your spouse thinks, what they feel, and how their mind works to the point that you can finish their sentences for them, predict how they will act in certain situations, and what decisions they'll make. A second illustration: a historian who has studied his field of focus (let's say, Alexander the Great) for so long that he can see nuances that others don't see and understand tidbits that are discovered better than other scholars because of his knowledge of the subject. Third: a hunter in the woods, or a Secret Service agent protecting the President. He or she has been trained in what to look for. They see things the rest of us don't see. And those things are really there, but you need a trained eye to notice them.

Now back to God. The more specifically one prays, the more likely it is that one will recognize the answer to the prayer. But God's answers are not like science: a dead-on predictable cause-and-effect sequence that I can figure out with math or time with a stopwatch. There are nuances that we learn to see and accept, knowing how God works, how he thinks, and we learn to see that around us. His answers are not always exactly what I asked for, but I recognize his hand in the events as they work out. We also learn about time. In 2 Chronicles 32, Isaiah and Hezekiah prayed that Sennacherib be overthrown. It did happen 20 years later, and they knew that to be an answer to prayer. The thing is, you know what to look for, you learn how to recognize what you see, you learn how to interpret what is happening, and you recognize events and occurrences as the pieces of what God is doing.

As I said, this isn't math and science, it's relational and interpretive, like we also do as we interact with our friends and family. We learn, on the basis of our relationship, how to interpret what we see. I might have some friends over to the house, and my mom says something, and my friends are upset or something, and I say, "Oh, don't worry, what she meant is..." I know what she meant because she's my mom, and I know her and what she means when she says that. My friends don't. Prayer is like that. I can see lots of things that others can't. I see what I have learned to see. That doesn't automatically make it illegitimate, even though it's subjective, just like a Secret Service agent who sees a threat that others miss.

[Slip in the Stream]

How do you know for a fact that God can hear your thoughts? Sounds like wishful thinking to me.

[jimwalton]

It's a theological affirmation, not wishful thinking. We only know such a fact (that God can hear your thoughts) because the Bible tells us that about God. On other bases we come to believe in God, see evidence of him in history and in our lives, affirm the reliability of the Bible in not only its presentation of history but its interpretation of it, and reason about the scientific plausibility of miracles. On the basis of those affirmations and others we come to believe in God and the revelation of him in the Bible. And because we believe in God and accept the Bible as his revelation, we believe its teaching that God can hear our thoughts. And as we watch our prayers get answered, we find evidence that it is indeed true. It's not wishful thinking by any stretch.

[John Opinion]

What you've described there is the process of allowing yourself into a state of cognitive dissonance. Based on the presupposition that the God you are praying to exists, you then interpret your thoughts and reality in terms of the sort of answers your religion has taught you to expect.

In all three of your examples, the subject does not have any doubt that the object of their attention exists. The married man knows his wife is real, the historian knows that Alexander the Great is a person in history, and the secret service agent knows the president exists. These are verifiable facts. The God you are talking about might not be real. How can rule out that what you interpret as answers to your prayers isn't confirmation bias, or some other psychological phenomenon that is a product of your own brain? That's what I'm asking. I think you are implying that there is no substantial answer to this question. And if a question can't be answered, then it isn't really a question.

[jimwalton]

Cognitive dissonance? Not at all. We all have to presuppose the existence of something. All questions of existence—or, more accurately, knowledge of existence—are fundamentally presuppositional. We have to make at least a few assumptions to get on with it, or we cannot even begin. If nothing else, I must presuppose that I can reason, and that reasoning can bring me to a place of considered truth. In order to know a thing, we have to know what it is, and we also have to know HOW we know what it is. To know whether things really are as they seem to be, we must have a procedure for distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. But to know whether our procedure is a good procedure, we have to know whether it really succeeds in distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. And we cannot know know whether it really does succeed unless we already know which appearances are true and which ones are false. And so we are left to recognize some presuppositions. Is that cognitive dissonance? If so, then we all do that, and we can proceed. If not, then let's proceed.

You can't verify your procedure without first having knowledge, but you can't get any knowledge without first verifying your procedure. I'm all in on Kant, which means I would say the only option is to pick one or the other and run with it (choose a procedure that you assume but cannot prove will yield true knowledge, like positivism does with science; or choose some tenets of knowledge that you assume are true even though you can't verify them, which is called foundationalism and is the process used in nearly all of philosophy). The way to verify (or contest) truth in a Kantian system isn't to verify (or contest) the first principles, but to test for coherence: a system based on faulty assumptions (or an inaccurate procedure) will eventually either contradict reality, or contradict itself.

In other words, I am not merely presupposing the existence of a god because I think the arguments for his existence are far stronger than the arguments against his existence, and the arguments in favor of his existence are abductively sound. Beyond the recognition that theism is a rational pursuit, the credibility of the biblical record (with which I am confident you disagree) and its coherence with known facts about history and geography, as revealed by archaeology, and its making sense of the world and of life (among other things) convincing me of the veracity of Christianity, a specific theistic worldview. Having arrived at those conclusions from both the presuppositional and evidentiary branches, then I accept the Bible as a reliable revelation of God's character, part of which is that he hears and answers prayer. Therefore the argument does not collapse. My evaluation of God's actions are still based in judicatory reason and the evidence that time affords (the record of the Bible as a valid interpretation of history), and not just on presuppositions alone.

As far as prayers being confirmation bias, there is no logical ground on which that accusation stands. First of all, to establish confirmation bias we must first be able to construct a standard by which we can objectively identify what answers to prayer can scientifically be verified, and what we can reasonably expect as a line of demarcation between legitimate answers to prayer and contrived answers to prayer. Construction of such a standard is impossible, and therefore you cannot legitimately claim answers to prayer are confirmation bias.

Secondly, to claim confirmation bias you must be able to identify what circumstantial events are answers to prayer and which are not, which is impossible for you. There is no way to know all of what anyone anywhere is praying, and there is no way to identify with scientific certainty which events (or parts of events) are acts of God and which are not. Therefore you cannot legitimately claim answers to prayer are confirmation bias. As far as you or anyone else is concerned, they may actually be answers to prayer. In other words, the accusation of confirmation bias is an empty accusation that takes us nowhere in the discussion of the legitimacy of prayer and discerning answers.

As far as verifiable facts about the existence of God, you know as well as I that "verifiable facts" are not the only way to discern reality. Is time a verifiable fact, or a subjective and perceptual phenomenon by which we measure existence? It has no materiality, nor any verifiability, but we perceive it and reason by it. And what about relational realities such as love, forgiveness, kindness, etc., all of which exist but have nothing to do with verifiable facts? What about social constructs like justice, peace, anarchy, or law? They are not verifiable facts, but recognizable states of being by which we, again, perceive our environments. Your demand for a "verifiable fact" is using the wrong standard of measure for the wrong item, like trying to measure miles per gallon by using fahrenheit. In the case of God we must infer the most reasonable conclusion, not do a scientific experiment.

[Slip in the Stream]

I don't get it. Do you do wishful thinking for the God concept first, or wishful thinking to believe that the Bible is true first? Both of them are highly irrational. I still don't know what theological means, nor divine, nor God, nor soul, nor miracle. So theological affirmation is just a way to hide that you really are doing wishful thinking. At the end of the day, you've decided to have belief without evidence in belief without evidence, and I just cannot fathom why.

[jimwalton]

This answer is going to sound a lot like the previous one, but since you don't seem to have read that, I will rewrite it and rephrase some of it for you to read.

We all have to presuppose the existence of something. All questions of existence—or, more accurately, knowledge of existence—are fundamentally presuppositional. We have to make at least a few assumptions to get on with it, or we cannot even begin. If nothing else, I must presuppose that I can reason, and that reasoning can bring me to a place of considered truth. These are called "first principles." In order to know a thing, we have to know what it is, and we also have to know HOW we know what it is. To know whether things really are as they seem to be, we must have a procedure for distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. But to know whether our procedure is a good procedure, we have to know whether it really succeeds in distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. And we cannot know know whether it really does succeed unless we already know which appearances are true and which ones are false. And so we are left to recognize some presuppositions, in this case, that the concept of God is a rational conclusion given the logic and evidence.

You can't verify your procedure without first having knowledge, but you can't get any knowledge without first verifying your procedure. Kant would say the only option is to pick one or the other and run with it (choose a procedure that you assume but cannot prove will yield true knowledge, like positivism does with science; or choose some tenets of knowledge that you assume are true even though you can't verify them, which is called foundationalism and is the process used in nearly all of philosophy). The way to verify (or contest) truth in a Kantian system isn't to verify (or contest) the first principles, but to test for coherence: a system based on faulty assumptions (or an inaccurate procedure) will eventually either contradict reality, or contradict itself. In this case the existence of God neither contradicts reality nor itself.

In other words, I am not merely presupposing the existence of God because I think the arguments for his existence are far stronger than the arguments against his existence (though they are), and the arguments in favor of his existence are abductively sound. Beyond the recognition that theism is a rational pursuit, the credibility of the biblical record (with which I am confident you disagree) and its coherence with known facts about history and geography, as revealed by archaeology, and its making sense of the world and of life (among other things) convincing me of the veracity of Christianity, and specifically a theistic and biblical worldview. Having arrived at those conclusions from both the presuppositional and evidentiary branches, then I accept the Bible as a reliable revelation of God's character, part of which is that he hears and answers prayer. Therefore the argument does not collapse. My evaluation of God's actions are still based in judicatory reason and the evidence that time affords (the record of the Bible as a valid interpretation of history), and not just on presuppositions alone.