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Originally Posted by Original Position
I think you have a legitimate question here. That is, intercessory prayer is now and has been throughout the history of Christianity an important and common kind of prayer. Yet under orthodox conceptions of God it is mysterious why exactly we should do it for some of the reasons you've brought up.
What I've been objecting to here is that I think you are letting the Christians off too easy here. Yes, we can speculate about various reasons why intercessory prayer might be common, including as a reinforcement of authority of the religion. However, that doesn't resolve the specifically theological question. You are giving a sociological explanation, and presumably one that Christians will typically not think is the complete story. However, note that all of the objections you raise are theological objections: if god is omniscient, then why do we need to tell him what we need? If God is going to do what he's going to do anyway, why ask him for anything? and so on. Your speculation that people pray as a reinforcement mechanism doesn't answer those questions at all and ends up just being a distraction.
Well, the way I was looking at it was that once I'd ruled out any theological reasons, all that was left was sociological reasons, and I was ruling out theological reasons. So far, the theological reasons put forward seem to either be pointless (in that it doesn't seem that they could have an effect on/with god) or self serving and therefore actually sociological (if we use 'sociological' as a catch-all for all non-theological reasons). Maybe there should be a third category of 'personal'.
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Originally Posted by Original Position
I was here sketching out the reasoning behind your view, so if you don't think this reasoning is correct, please tell me tell it is supposed to go.
Simply that prayer is solely a belief reinforcement mechanism.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Original Position
Yes, they are not mutually exclusive, but the answers to them are typically different. For instance, you talk a lot about how McDonalds and other major corporations create false needs or desires in people for their products through the use of advertising and social pressure. That is plausible enough as a way of explaining why so many people eat at McDonalds. However, it isn't plausible to think that this is also the motivation of the people going there. They usually aren't thinking: I'm going to go to McDonalds to fulfill a false desire placed in me through the most recent billion-dollar marketing campaign of McDonalds.
I'm saying that it doesn't matter if they understand why they're doing it or not, it can still have the same effect. Sometimes it's unknowing, sometimes (as with the 12 steps example), it's often knowing and still effective. It's particularity clever IMO when the point is obvious, and people still do it. National anthems might be another example. People sing them fully understanding that it's an act of patriotism, that strengthens patriotism, but they do it anyway because they like feeling patriotic and consider it important.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Original Position
Why have you come to think this? You've presented no evidence in support of this hypothesis (it is not the null hypothesis). If you think the ordinary theological justifications for prayer don't make sense, then you can reject the hypothesis that people pray because they are motivated by these theological beliefs to pray, but that doesn't mean that they are praying for these other reasons that you are proposing here.
For instance, I would probably challenge your main premise here. That is, yes, Christians do claim as a matter of theology that God controls all things etc. However, they also hold many beliefs and do many things that contradict this theological claim (see Jason Slote's Theological Incorrectness (PDF) for support here). Thus, the fact that "official" Christian theology so often posits an omnipotent and omniscient God in control of everything doesn't mean that Christians don't also act and believe that their prayers affect God's actions because they hold contradictory beliefs to the official theology.
This is something that it's a little tricky to provide evidence for
How do I prove that prayer isn't influencing a god I don't even believe in? I could cite some studies but I'm sure you already know about them. But I don't see how, logically, intercessory prayer is effective and so the person praying might as well be talking to themselves as to god, it actually makes no difference if god is listening or not in terms of the divine part of the outcome. They may believe that they can influence god, as you point out, or they may be getting something else entirely from praying.
I've started reading that PDF but it's quite long so you'll have to give me some time.