Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Causality of Prayer and the Execution of Predestination in Thomas AquinasStephen L. BrockIntroduction: The Question of the Reasonableness of Petitionary PrayerIn a lucid and witty essay published in 1945, C. S. Lewis addressed a common objection to the practice of petitionary prayer.1 This practice is not confined to Christianity, of course, but at least in relation to the Christian conception of the deity, it can seem to make little sense. The problem is simple. If God is all-wise and all-good, what is the point of asking him for things? He is already perfectly aware of our true needs, and he already wants to provide for them. Many of our requests are ignorant and misguided, and the others, it seems, will be at best superfluous. Nevertheless, as Lewis observes, petitionary prayer is part of the whole Christian tradition. Jesus himself practiced it, urged his followers to do so, and taught them how. Lewis wanted to explain that the real purpose of the practice is not to inform God of our needs or to twist his arm. Rather, petitionary prayer functions as a kind of cause, a way of bringing things about. It does so by divine institution and as a kind of share in God's own causality. And so understood, it makes perfect sense. I think Lewis is right about this.Another matter, however, is Lewis's particular way of conceiving the causality of petitionary prayer, especially as to its relation to God's own causality and care for the world. I grant that his conception is quite [End Page 15] straightforward and clear, and that it even has a strong initial plausibility. Indeed, I suspect that it gives voice to the way in which many thoughtful people who pray for things conceive of what they are doing. This is why, even though it is not the main focus of the present essay, I think that it serves as a good way of entering to the topic. But I do hope to show that it contains some serious problems.In what follows, I shall first set out Lewis's answer to the question of the reasonableness of petitionary prayer. Then I shall raise one of the problems that I think it faces. This has to do with another attribute that has traditionally been ascribed to the Christian God; namely, omniscience, the knowledge of all things, including all temporal events, past, present, and future. In the essay on prayer, Lewis does not address this problem. But from things that he says elsewhere about temporal events and how God knows them, I think we can gather how he would have solved it.Rather than evaluating this solution myself, I shall turn next to another twentieth-century British thinker, the philosopher Peter Geach. Although Geach agrees with Lewis in ascribing a causal function to petitionary prayer, Geach's way of understanding temporal events and God's knowledge of them contrasts sharply with Lewis's. In fact, Geach argues—I think persuasively—that a position like Lewis's actually ends up making petitionary prayer unable to function as a cause, and therefore renders it pointless. At the same time, however, Geach's own account of how petitionary prayer fits into God's overall plan has something very important in common with Lewis's. And in my opinion, what they have in common is very problematic.This will bring me to my main theme, which is Thomas Aquinas's view of the matter. Like Lewis and Geach, Thomas does regard petitionary prayer as a divinely instituted way of causing things. On their temporal status, his position is similar to Geach's. But on how prayer and its effects fall under God's providential plan, Thomas differs greatly from both authors. I find his account far more satisfactory. Unfortunately, it is also considerably more complicated and philosophically challenging, and my presentation of it will have to be correspondingly longer.The distinctive features of Thomas's view mostly pertain to the metaphysics of divine transcendence. My main task will be to show how, in his account, the full determinacy of God's eternal plan, including that part of it called...