The miracle of prayer
Chet Raymo quotes Kenneth Miller on prayer:
Finally, any traditional believer must agree that God is able to influence the thoughts and actions of individual human beings. We pray for strength, we pray for patience, and we pray for understanding. Prayer is an element of faith, and bound within it is the conviction that God can affect us and those we pray for in positive ways.
Wait. If we pray for strength, patience and understanding and find (or believe we find) that we have more strength, patience and understanding, that could simply be because praying is a way we get ourselves to have more strength, patience and understanding. It’s true that in that sense ‘faith’ may well work – and that in order to work the faith may have to include the conviction that God can affect us – but that can be true quite independently of whether or not God actually exists or actually affects us. That may be all Ken Miller means by that passage…but it would be a good deal clearer if he pointed out that how much strength, patience and understanding we have is something that we ourselves can (in general) help to determine, and that all kinds of mental tricks and crutches and games can help with that process.
Ah, but you have to be there to see how it works! If you attend a synod where a bishop is being elected, there is much talk about the movement of the Holy Spirit, and how the person selected, in the end, has been elected through the power of that same Spirit. Consequently, of course, the bishop can say, ‘by Divine permission, bishop of…’
It affects much more than just individuals in providing strength, confidence, patience, courage, etc. It validates choices and grounds power. In this sense it is not only a mental trick or crutch, it is mental smokescreen. Popes, Patriarchs, Cardinals, and ordinary priests and self-hypnotised preachers use this to confirm their authority, and people accept this authority because they are convinced that God influences their lives too. So the idea that God can influence our thoughts and actions has enormous ramifications in the practical world where people live and act, elect presidents and decide to go to war.