If God Knows the Future, Why Pray? (Interview with Dr. Scott Davison) 

God always answer prayers. Sometimes it's "Yes." But sometimes it's "No." And sometimes it's "Wait." He always answers "Yes" to prayers requesting for wisdom, salvation and forgiveness.

If there is an omniscient God and God does what God wants, then you are insulting God when you pray to God because you are implying God doesn't know what God is doing.

I think some discussion of the Trinity (and each of its aspects) and how it all relates to prayer would be interesting and maybe essential.

I felt compelled to click this because I wanted to see how they strung out "No" to 53 minutes.

Nothing Fails Like Prayer

Prayer is pointless. People pray to feel like they're doing something, but in reality they're doing nothing.

Some time later the son of the woman who owned the house became ill. He grew worse and worse, and finally stopped breathing. She said to Elijah, “What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?” “Give me your son,” Elijah replied. He took him from her arms, carried him to the upper room where he was staying, and laid him on his bed. Then he cried out to the Lord, “Lord my God, have you brought tragedy even on this widow I am staying with, by causing her son to die?” Then he stretched himself out on the boy three times and cried out to the Lord, “Lord my God, let this boy’s life return to him!” The Lord heard Elijah’s cry, and the boy’s life returned to him, and he lived. 1 kings 17 17-22

If God I timeless, he must he must be outside of time and in all time because he is infinite therefore he knows everything that will happens in the future. And he must know possible futures otherwise he is not all know and would have no idea who will be saved. Which goes against what we read in the bible.

43:00. I think the same question could be posed, “Why doesn’t God answer the prayers for married couples not to get divorced, cars not to get repossessed, people to not get evicted from homes, homosexuality not to run rampant.” The list goes on an on of things that happen in this world that are a result of the fall. Dr. Frank Turek often says that if God wanted to remove all of the evil in the world, he may start with you.

I'm a believer but I don't have the FIRST clue about prayer or how it works. Some people have some crazy ideas...but I'm kinda like my buddy who says..."I only pray about stuff I can't control. Like other peoples health etc....but everything else is up to me...and God couldn't care less." He lives a GREAT life and he's not religious...but he's a believer in Jesus....and he's never tortured while dangling on a string waiting for God to do something for him. That's the worst part as a believer...waiting for God to do something and it never comes. Crappy way to live. It's enough to make you give up faith altogether! So...I believe...but prayer? When I start to see God speak to me...or answer prayer in ways I KNOW is for real, then I'll stop being so pessimistic about how it works. Doesn't mean there isn't a God...just means prayer isn't what some people think.

38:42 Davison assents to the theory by Swinburne that, roughly, God won't answer the door to call 911 for an accident down the street, because the person knocking is either a) not morally blameless and/or b) has more than a single reason (perhaps they want to help but would also appreciate the accident not blocking the street). One wonders if he's considered that pastors, being paid to be pastors, might not have their prayers listened to?

Why are so many Christians resistant to the idea that the effects of prayer should be measurable? Do you not believe that the hand of God is noticeable in this world?

I think Dr. Davison was referring to art prodigy Akiane Kramarik. At age 8 she painted a portrait of Jesus that was featured in the book _Heaven is for Real._

What happened to joshua interview on Evolution?

Christians, is prayer falsifiable? Is there a way to ascertain praying does not work?

I would like a clarification about your comment about Charismatics? I’m not a Charismatic, but I am a Oneness Pentecostal and realize there are similarities in our communities in believing in Spiritual gifts being active today.

If God doesn't exist and people still pray, on what standard is it objectively bad?

It's never worked and never will. How many times do you have to pray before you realize no one is there?

Is prayer even necessary? More often than not it's our choices and actions that seem to have more of an effect than just praying. You have a better chance of helping a starving child in Africa by donating than by praying for them.

If prayer was proven effective, I would be a Christian. But it isn’t. This single issue is evidence against the Christian god

TLDW: We don't know if or whether god answers prayer. This is equivalent to asking how many angels can sit on the head of a pin.

Anyone can recommend an edifying book on the types of prayer, how to pray, and perhaps the history of Christian prayer?

If you pray to God and your prayer isn't answered it was either God's will that your prayer wasn't answered or you didn't pray hard enough i.e. without enough conviction. Or, more likely, praying to God for anything was a total waste of time. If you consider that your prayer has been answered it means you've conned yourself into thinking that God had something to do with it since there is, by definition, God being apparently beyond space and time and impervious to access by mortals, no objective means of distinguishing between something occurring by his hand and mere coincidence. You pray for the recovery of a loved one from serious illness. They recover, perhaps against all medical predictions. It means they've recovered. People sometimes do. Utterly fallacious to associate God with it. And that is even if he does exist.

A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness-a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness. Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group. Religious fundamentalism refers to an ideology that emphasizes traditional religious texts and rituals and discourages progressive thinking about religion and social issues. Fundamentalist groups generally oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life. For this reason, they are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of supernatural beliefs, and towards science, as these things are seen as existential threats to their entire worldview. Since religious beliefs play a massive role in driving and influencing human behavior throughout the world, it is important to understand the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism from a psychological and neurological perspective. To investigate the cognitive and neural systems involved in religious fundamentalism, a team of researchers-led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University-conducted a study that utilized data from Vietnam War veterans that had been gathered previously. The vets were specifically chosen because a large number of them had damage to brain areas suspected of playing a critical role in functions related to religious fundamentalism. CT scans were analyzed comparing 119 vets with brain trauma to 30 healthy vets with no damage, and a survey that assessed religious fundamentalism was administered. While the majority of participants were Christians of some kind, 32.5% did not specify a particular religion. Based on previous research, the experimenters predicted that the prefrontal cortex would play a role in religious fundamentalism, since this region is known to be associated with something called ‘cognitive flexibility’. This term refers to the brain’s ability to easily switch from thinking about one concept to another, and to think about multiple things simultaneously. Cognitive flexibility allows organisms to update beliefs in light of new evidence, and this trait likely emerged because of the obvious survival advantage such a skill provides. It is a crucial mental characteristic for adapting to new environments because it allows individuals to make more accurate predictions about the world under new and changing conditions. Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex-specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Additionally, the vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs. For example, one study showed individuals with vmPFC lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than people with normal brains, while another showed a direct connection between vmPFC damage and religious fundamentalism. For these reasons, in the present study, researchers looked at patients with lesions in both the vmPFC and the dlPFC, and searched for correlations between damage in these areas and responses to religious fundamentalism questionnaires. According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since religious fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of religious fundamentalism. The results showed that, as expected, damage to the vmPFC and dlPFC was associated with religious fundamentalism. Further tests revealed that this increase in religious fundamentalism was caused by a reduction in cognitive flexibility and openness resulting from the prefrontal cortex impairment. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using a standard psychological card sorting test that involved categorizing cards with words and images according to rules. Openness was measured using a widely-used personality survey known as the NEO Personality Inventory. The data suggests that damage to the vmPFC indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by suppressing both cognitive flexibility and openness. These findings are important because they suggest that impaired functioning in the prefrontal cortex-whether from brain trauma, a psychological disorder, a drug or alcohol addiction, or simply a particular genetic profile-can make an individual susceptible to religious fundamentalism. And perhaps in other cases, extreme religious indoctrination harms the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness. The authors emphasize that cognitive flexibility and openness aren’t the only things that make brains vulnerable to religious fundamentalism. In fact, their analyses showed that these factors only accounted for a fifth of the variation in fundamentalism scores. Uncovering those additional causes, which could be anything from genetic predispositions to social influences, is a future research project that the researchers believe will occupy investigators for many decades to come, given how complex and widespread religious fundamentalism is and will likely continue to be for some time.

I am in no way an advocate for charismatic Christianity, but did you just day they are not Christian? Do Explain.

This is rich... so basically you must admit that Mark 11:24 is a straight up lie? Your book keeps on letting everyone down between all the obscure unfullfilled prophecies and the lies...

It seems to me, that if God perfectly knows the future, then neither He nor we have any free will. The Bible seems to scream that both we and He do have free will, and can affect each other. This doesn't take away from His omnipotency, but rather adds to it. Of course He could create a future which He cannot perfectly know if he so desired. He can perfectly control it at the points in time he needs to to create the kind of future where as many as possible choose Him, but chooses to not control it in such a way as to take away our free will. Creating free will might be the very point of the whole story.

What about the position that since God is all knowing, that all thought and all desire (conscious and subliminal) is prayer, even the bad thoughts and wishes? So in that view purposeful prayer may be useless, in the way that people are in constant connection and in prayer. This would also lean into the thought of committing sin through thought (prayer).

Whoa, Cam! Did you say in the beginning that you aren't sure if charismatics ought to be considered Christians? I challenge you to a formal debate, good sir.

Mark 11:24, NIV: "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." ... Mark 11:24, NASB: "'Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you." So god must not exist....

Walk into a childrens hospital and see how effective prayer is.. The efficacy of prayer has been studied. It failed. - How about this example. Does your prayer help you pass a test? If it actually did help, wouldn't that be cheating and outlawed?

Funny discussion

Prayer is pretty much talking to yourself

Because you don’t know the future..✝️

Seems even after this, village-Atheists still think prayer is an incantation spell.

So... this "God" character you mention already knows if you'll pray or not and also won't change anything he's already determined? Also there's no way of knowing if "successful" prayers are actually a thing? Now that was helpful! Seems every claim about prayer uttered in this video is basically unfalsifiable... how convenient.

I mean... Jesus clearly and repeatedly prayed to the Father before a miracle occurred as a model to us, and commended us o do the same. I think all the models of prayer here and the idea of being a direct cause of the answered prayer try to put God in a box; God is a multitasker. Just as Christ died for the whole world yet no less for the love of you, individually, I don't think there's any conflict in something that God did indeed already intended to do (in His sovereignty) also being a granting of your petition- nor do I think it's any less of a granting of your petitionary prayer if He has additional reasons beside your having prayed it to have done so. As usual with our amazingly-complex, incredibly-talented God, it's not a case of either-or, but of both-and. god's God at having multiple purposes, meanings, intentions, and lessons in everything that He does.

Christians: "God exists. Now what other things must I believe in order to make that consistent with my observations?" Rational people: "Here are my observations. What can I conclude based upon them?" Scientists: "Here is my hypothesis. How can I disprove it?"

There's nothing bizarre about using an experimental setup to measure the effect prayer has on patient recovery. I see no reason why that couldn't work. Full disclosure: atheist talking (Far from the only atheist here, I see. Sorry about that, Christians!)

"philosophy is sometime not the best source of practical advice.." This is my favorite line from the whole interview. The only evidence for god, is from philosophy.