On the Causality of the Prayer of Petition: C.S. Lewis, Peter Geach and Thomas Aquinas

Abstract

If God is all-wise and all-good, what is the point of asking Him for things in prayer ? The article examines the answers to this question given by three Christian thinkers: C. S. Lewis, Peter Geach, and Thomas Aquinas. All three maintain that petitionary prayer should be seen as a divinely instituted way of causing things. They differ widely, however, on how prayer’s efficacy is related to God’s overall plan for the world. It is argued that Lewis’s and Geach’s accounts face difficulties that Aquinas’s succeeds in avoiding, especially as regards the role we play in the execution of God’s plan.