Suppose that you think there is a 5% chance that you have a powerful benefactor who can move heaven and Earth on your behalf. You can send out letters which he will read if he exists. It seems worth doing this sometimes. Sure, probably nobody is listening, but if someone is, the action has very great value.
Likewise, suppose you are an atheist. You think God probably doesn’t exist. Nonetheless, being open-minded, you think there’s some chance God exists—maybe 5%, maybe 1%. On similar grounds, it seems to make sense to pray. If there is a God, this action could have very great value. If there isn’t a God, then the action is at worst a waste of a minute every day—with the upside of various psychological benefits.
Each day, before going to sleep, I say a prayer in my head along the lines of “God, guide me towards doing what’s good and, insofar as it is conducive to pursuing the good, knowing what’s true.” I also sometimes pray for the welfare of specific people, as well as for various things to be made better in the world—e.g. I sometimes pray for the shrimp, conditional on them being moral patients. My sense is that the psychological literature is pretty clear that wishing people well improves your welfare and makes you more empathetic. Thinking hard about the importance of another person’s welfare is a good idea, even if there is no God.
And if there is a God, your actions might have various desirable effects. God, on standard views, hears our prayers, and sometimes his plans are different because of our prayers than they would have otherwise been. Even short of a direct miracle, God might, in his providence, order things towards bringing about the results of our prayers. At the very least, I don’t think this kind of thing is extremely unlikely if God exists, so it’s still a pretty good bet.
If God exists, prayer also has various other psychological benefits, other than simply increasing the probability of good things happening in the world. It helps bring you closer to God by communicating with him directly. While you shouldn’t expect to hear back, my guess is that attempting to communicate with God improves the quality of your relationship with God.
Here’s another intuition pump for praying: lots of atheists pray when they’re in life-threatening situations that they can do nothing about. For example, as a plane is going down, you might pray that the passengers don’t all die. This seems rational. But there’s a lot of stuff happening in the world that is of very great significance yet that relatively few people are praying about. So it seems like if it’s rational to pray when a plane is going down, it’s rational to pray that AI doesn’t cause human extinction, that we keep making progress against malaria and tuberculosis, and for the shrimp.
One objection to the efficacy of prayer: God already has a perfect plan for the world. Either what you’re praying for is consistent with it, in which case prayer is useless, or it’s inconsistent, in which case it’s also useless—God’s not going to change his perfect plan for you. But this is a general objection to doing anything. One could similarly argue that doctors shouldn’t try to cure people of cancer: either them having treatment is part of God’s ideal plan or it’s not. In either case, treating them is useless.
The error, as C.S. Lewis noted, is in the assumption that God’s plan can’t be sensitive to what we do. It may be that God wants us to make a difference to one another’s lives, so the world is set up to be such that what happens in the world depends on what we do. Prayer may then make a difference.
And, as described before, even if prayer doesn’t make a difference to what *happens *in the world, it might be valuable nonetheless. It might make us closer to God and to one another. Prayer shouldn’t be thought of as only about asking God for stuff.
This case gets weaker if you are extremely confident that there’s no God. But probably you shouldn’t be that confident. A lot of smart people disagree with you. In general, when smart people have thought hard about a question and disagree with you in droves, you shouldn’t be ridiculously confident that you’re right and they’re wrong. If we all followed this advice, on average, we’d have much more accurate beliefs.
I don’t think it makes sense for this to be a lengthy and protracted ordeal if you’re an atheist. But it seems like every day for maybe a minute, you should pray to God so that you can know, love, and serve him, if he really exists.
