How Could Prayer Make a Difference? Discussion of Scott A. Davison, Petitionary Prayer: A Philosophical Investigation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v10i2.2033Keywords:
Petitionary Prayer, Reasons, Value Theory, Collective Action, EcclesiologyAbstract
I critically respond to Scott A. Davison, Petitionary Prayer: A Philosophical Investigation. I attack his Contrastive Reasons Account of what it takes for a request to be answered and provide an alternative account on which a request is answered as long as it has deliberative weight for the person asked. I also raise issues with Davison’s dismissive treatment of direct divine communication. I then emphasize the importance of value theory for addressing the puzzles of petitionary prayer. Whether a defense of petitionary prayer is successful depends on whether it can support the sort of requests that are central to the theological practices of the religion in question, explaining how they could be known to be effective, and this depends on the value theory of the theology in question. As an example, I show the relevance the traditional distinction between temporal and spiritual goods could have for knowing whether one’s prayers have been answered. How prayers could make a difference also depends on the theology in question, raising issues of ecclesiology and collective action that demand further attention.
References
Adams, Marilyn McCord. 1988. “Problems of Evil”. Faith and Philosophy 5, no. 2: 121–43. doi:10.5840/faithphil19885219.
Bader, Ralph. 2016. “Conditions, Modifiers and Holism”. In Weighing Reasons, edited by Errol Lord and Barrie Maguire, 27–55. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Boland, Paschal. 1959. The Concepts of Discretio Spirituum in John Gersons’s “De Probatione Spirituum” and “De Distinctione Verarum Visionum a falsis”. Washington: The Catholic Univ. of America Press.
The Book of Church Order of the Presbyterian Church in America, 6th ed. http://www.pcaac.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/BCO-2017-for-Web-with-bookmarks.pdf
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1993, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Cohoe, Caleb M. 2014. “God, Causality, and Petitionary Prayer”. Faith and Philosophy 31, no. 1: 24–45. doi:10.5840/faithphil201312302.
Dancy, Jonathan. 2004. “Enticing Reasons”. In Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. by R. J. Wallace et al., 91–118. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davison, Scott A. 2017. Petitionary Prayer: A Philosophical Investigation. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Gavrilyuk, Paul L., and Sarah Coakley. 2014. The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Gert, Joshua. 2016. “The Distinction between Justifying and Requiring: Nothing to Fear”. In Weighing Reasons, edited by Errol Lord and Barrie Maguire, 157–72. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Jönsson, Arne. 1989. Alfonso of Jaén: His Life and Works with Critical Editions of the Epistola Solitarii, the Informaciones and the Epistola Serui Christi. Lund: Lund Univ. Press.
Lord, Errol, and Barrie Maguire. 2016. “An Opinionated Guide to the Weight of Reasons”. In Weighing Reasons, edited by Errol Lord and Barrie Maguire, 3–26. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
—, eds. 2016. Weighing Reasons. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Luhrmann, Tanya M. 2012. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American evangelical relationship with God. New York: Knopf.
Mangano Ragazzi, Grazia. 2014. Obeying the Truth: Discretion in the Spiritual Writings of Saint Catherine of Siena. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
McGinn, Bernard. 1991. The Foundations of Mysticism. New York: Crossroad.
—. 1994. The Growth of Mysticism. New York: Crossroad.
—. 1998. The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350). New York, NY: Crossroad Publ.
—. 2005. The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany: (1300–1500). New York, NY: Crossroad Publ. Co.
Murray, Michael J. 2004. “God Responds to Prayer”. In Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, edited by Michael Peterson and Raymond VanArrogan, 242–54. Blackwell.
Pritchard, Duncan. 2008. “Sensitivity, Safety, and Anti-Luck Epistemology”. In The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism, edited by John Greco. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Sosa, Ernest. 1999. “How to Defeat Opposition to Moore”. Noûs 33, no. 13: 141–53. doi:10.1111/0029-4624.33.s13.7.
Stump, Eleonore. 1979. “Petitionary Prayer”. American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 2: 81–91. www.jstor.org/stable/20009745.
—. 2010. Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the problem of suffering. Oxford, Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford Univ. Press.
Voaden, Rosalynn. 1999. God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press.
Wainwright, William J. 2011. “The Spiritual Senses in Western Spirituality and the Analytic Philosophy of Religion”. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 3, no. 1: 21–41. doi:10.24204/ejpr.v3i1.379.
Yoshikawa, Naoë K. 2011. “The Making of The Book of Margery Kempe: The Issue of Discretio Spirituum Reconsidered”. English Studies 92, no. 2: 119–37. doi:10.1080/0013838X.2011.553919.
