The Dignity of Causality

It is difficult to identify a weightier subject in the Christian world view than prayer. With such a simple six-letter word come not only issues of God's existence but his power, sovereignty, design, and love. Am I to believe I could alter God's plan or change his original intent in some way? Why does he seem to answer prayers in a way that bring me pain or loss and likewise avoid answering prayers that would certainly affect my life in a positive way? Does prayer change God, me, or anything else? Or is it a crumbling relic from ancient superstition?

Once when I was much younger than I am now, I decided I would put the efficacy of my prayers to the test. I grabbed a coin, a 1979 nickel, if I remember correctly. I prayed, “Lord, for the sake of my belief in the power of prayer, allow this coin to be tails.” I concede, whatever your stance on prayer, you will probably find this to be one of my weaker theological moments, but I proceeded to flip the coin. It was tails. I marked tails on my Score Sheet of Reliability and began praying again. “Lord, please, for the sake of my belief in the power of prayer, allow this coin to be tails when I flip it.” I flipped the coin again and it was tails. I picked up my pen with a somewhat confident eeriness to put a second check mark under my Tails heading. I prayed again...a third tails. I paused a moment, looked at the three check marks, and continued. I prayed once more, flipped the coin, and peered down to my sweaty palm to read the result. It was heads. Some may find this story rather amusing, perhaps sad, or potentially sacrilegious. However, I will say, there was no insincerity in my attempt to see evidence of my prayers. I can't answer with certainty whether this was a genuinely selfless search or if part of me wanted to be the cause of bringing something miraculous to the universe, something like 50 straight tails coin flips.

What are we to make of such an unpredictable tool as prayer? If events that we pray for don’t come to pass, it suggests that prayer doesn't work. But if events do come to pass, we could assert a lack of evidence that the event was ever not to occur. I have often heard it said, "Some prayers do not come to be, not because prayer is too weak, but instead because prayer is too powerful." Is it really so powerful that God must limit its effectiveness or is this just an excuse for the times that prayer doesn't appear to work?

As I have gotten older and a little more cynical, I have found that the most realistic part of the gospel of Christ is in Gethsemane. How many times, admittedly in a much less dire moment, have I sat by myself and asked desperately for a certain event to not take place, much like Christ did in the garden. I am fully aware that there will be many more times when I am looking at the casket of a loved one or into the pain of myself or someone else and utter the same prayer Christ uttered before his execution, "Lord, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me." C.S. Lewis accurately says, "In Gethsemane, the holiest of petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from him. It did not. After that, the idea that prayer is recommended to us as a sort of infallible gimmick may be dismissed." If prayers can, at the very least, be proven ineffective in some instances, is this evidence that we may not fully understand the purpose of prayer or is it evidence for a belief in life's randomness? (Atheists rejoice.)

I remember when I was growing up, all my friends believed in Santa Claus. My parents, attempting to shield me from the devastation that comes when a child comes to know the reality behind the story, decided to be upfront about this myth from the beginning. Instead of believing in Santa, I found pleasure in my role as the brat who would shatter my peers' dreams of the jolly old man. I recall my proof, which I laid out for a buddy, about how someone could not be in two places at once and how there simply wasn't enough time for Santa to fulfill his duties, given the number of households he would need to visit. Should I use a similar proof, referencing time and sheer volume of clientele, to disprove a god who can both hear his creatures’ prayers and also have the ability to answer them? This is saying nothing of the laws of physics and the like that he may need to suspend in order to answer certain prayers.  

In a lecture on the relationship between faith and science, Professor John Lennox describes an encounter with a professor who was speaking against him, in regard to a presentation Lennox gave concerning rational belief in God. "Mr. Lennox is a dangerous man,” he said. "Lennox is asking us to believe in the same God that ancients believed was the source of lightning and the weather. We now know that lightning is just massive electrostatic discharges caused by unbalanced charges in the atmosphere." Lennox replied, "The god who went away when we figured out what lightning was, is not the God I believe in!"

Perhaps this is relevant to our questions about prayer. A god that goes away with the discovery of charges in a cloud, synaptic exchanges in a brain, or the evolutionary process of a frog, doesn't seem like a god worth praying to. In this picture, God seems to be a pleasant illusion to quench our need for explanation and emotional desire for comfort in certainty. Praying to a god like that allows us to maintain the notion that we have primary control of our lives, while acknowledging a few areas of uncertainty in which involving a lucky rabbit’s foot couldn't hurt.

But if there is a God - not just over areas of uncertainty, but over all areas, including those of which we are certain - a God of the whole show, what sort of God would this look like? If there is a God responsible for the entirety of what can be - artistically imagined in the human brain, seen in the beauty and danger of the natural world, studied in the constants and theories of mathematical and scientific reasoning, and felt in the love and loss of relationships - what sort of a power is there in that God? Still further, if God is an inventor of all that we understand and much that we do not yet know, wouldn't his position as the least derivative of all that exists render him the least fully comprehensible to us?

Perhaps the efficacy of prayer is understood not solely on evidence regarding whether particular prayers come to fruition but in the understanding of what sort of being we are praying to. Logic says that there is either an intelligent agent behind the origin of our universe or there is not. Anything in between doesn't seem to hold weight.

When I consider the size, the power, the creativity of a God who is capable of creating the whole show, this must affect my belief in the efficacy of prayer. If my image of God begins to approach his reality, if he does indeed exist - a most brilliant mathematician, artist of love, and original father of life - it quickly humbles my approach to such a being and my submission to his plan over my own. If instead, I view a god with powers of a genie or a fairy godmother, I will pray with self-assured boldness that I know best what I want and what to ask for. But a God of the whole show demands that I fall to my knees immediately and repeatedly to satisfy possibly the most obvious need - the need to thank that which gave me life. For there may be no more certainty in a man's mind than his understanding of the lack of involvement he had in bringing himself to life. 

Therefore, if we truly believe that such a God exists, we should start every prayer with an expression of gratitude merely for the ability to produce words by passing air through our vocal chords. Then the answer to any request in my prayers becomes secondary, though not irrelevant or forgotten, to prayer as a necessary form of worship. In short, my submission to pray is to at some level acknowledge a God powerful and loving enough to allow me life. Again, we go back to Gethsemane to the "holiest of petitioners". Christ says, "May this cup be taken from me," but continues, "yet not as I will but as you will,” showing that his primary intent in prayer was to align his will with his fathers.

However, it still begs the question, if our actual requests to God are secondary, why would God even consider them? French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, "God instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures the dignity of causality." C.S. Lewis piggybacks on this thought as well, saying that "not only in prayer, (but) whenever we act at all he lends us that dignity. It is not really stranger, nor less strange, that my prayers should affect the course of events than that my other actions should do so. They have not advised or changed God's mind - that is, His overall purpose. But that purpose will be realized in different ways according to the actions, including the prayers, of his creatures." So perhaps God considers our prayers for the same reason he endowed us with the power of free will.

But if we have such power of causing things to occur, which is obviously easier to prove of our actions than our prayers, can we alter, in a negative way, God's plan or intention? I think to fully admit that we have free will is to admit we can act against and outside of the will of God, to alter situations, to "to wield our little tridents" as Lewis says, for negative purposes. But can this change God's ultimate purpose? Is the plan of this God, all-knowing and all-powerful if he really does exist, disposable? Again, the understanding of God's power here seems vital. If he is God, he is God of all. His narrative would be found in rocks, trees, solar systems, and the minds of every being. We may act against or outside his will in the temporary details of our lives but how would this alter the eternal plot line of his will?

It makes me think of a display of the normal distribution curve in the Museum of Science in Boston. Small black balls are released from the top of a great grid of pegs. The balls fall one by one, matriculating their way off each peg, bouncing left, bouncing right, to find themselves resting in little compartments at the bottom, arranging in exactly the same bell-shaped distribution every single time. Perhaps our individual lives, decisions, thoughts, and yes, even prayers, may go left and go right, inevitably resting in the ultimate design. 

  

Yet another logical question arises. If we claim there is a God with a will for us to follow, but that we will succumb to his ultimate design whether we live according to his will for us or not, why should we bother living and praying to live according to such a will? Why attempt to live according to the words of Christ? Why attempt to display his power and authority in our lives?

Perhaps we should look one more time at the dignity of causality. We clearly have the ability to live the way we wish. Does this power of causality, whether in prayer or action, display evidence for the kingdom of Christ? Is this how Christ's kingdom of love, sacrifice, compassion, and redemption manifests itself as the ultimate truth? Yes, honestly, answered prayers, unanswered prayers, selfish acts, and selfless sacrifice have rung true this bell of Christianity for me. Like my astonished eyes witnessed the black balls at the museum of science again assemble into that perfect distribution, I have seen the constant pattern of God's design of death and sacrifice giving way to new life, separation giving way to reconciliation, selflessness and humility shining brighter than self-seeking arrogance, and unity within diversity, by way of adopting the other. I continue to find no more fulfilling and transformative power, feel no more redemptive newness, understand the conflict within me more clearly, and acquire no more exciting and eternal hope than that which is found in the message of Christ. It may sound selective and a bit bold to speak of one ultimate and exclusive truth over any other, but to quote John Lennox once more, "It is of no arrogance to take from Christ something that is not offered anywhere else." The dignity of causality, in my prayer and in my action, continues to verify this to be so.

-Tim