Scott Davison has written the most meticulous, sustained and systematic philosophical investigation in print of petitionary prayer in the context of the theistic tradition. The bibliography alone, with almost 300 entries, is an impressive guide to work in philosophical theology (mostly contemporary analytic, but also classical sources) on petitionary prayer and related topics in metaphysics, epistemology and value theory. Davison knows this sub-field of philosophy of religion well (thirteen of the entries in the bibliography are works by Davison), and his expertise is evident in each of the ten chapters. The work is tentative in its conclusion (chapter 10), as well as in its preface. Davison reports setting out to establish that petitionary prayer is pointless, but concludes with the proposal that it has many benefits of different kinds and that, while one may be a devout, practising Christian who forgoes petitionary prayer, nonetheless the practice may be integral to a philosophically defensible practice of this form of prayer. It should be noted straightaway that Davison rightly notes that petitionary prayer is only one of many forms of prayer (confessional, meditative prayers and so on), so his focus is not prayer in general but a particular practice that involve beseeching God to ‘give us this day our daily bread’ or, more particularly, please cure our mother of cancer. In the course of his investigation, Davison does not leave a stone unturned when it comes to testing accounts with thought experiments, narrative and biblical accounts.
If the book has a fault, and I am not sure that it does, it is that in the course of Davison's refining of the concept of petitionary prayer, he presents us with a virtual blizzard of examples and counter-examples in terms of narratives and counter-examples. Consider this version of what Davison describes as the Contrastive Reasons Account of petitionary prayer:
S's petitionary prayer provided God with some reason to bring about E, but God had independent and conclusive reasons for bringing about E, God's desire to bring about E just because S requested it did not play an essential role in any true contrastive explanation of God's bringing about E. However, it could have easily been the case that God's independent reasons for bringing about E were not conclusive, and if that had happened, then God's desire to bring about E, just because S requested it would have ‘tipped the scales’ to make God's total reasons in favor of bringing about E conclusive. (p. 41)
This analysis, along with a myriad of other cases, is the result of very careful testing with ostensibly real and hypothetical cases of petitionary prayer. There is a useful table in the Conclusion (p. 165) in which Davison outlines eight major positions on petitionary prayer and the challenge each faces.
This book is definitely a landmark work on petitionary prayers in analytic theology, philosophical theology and philosophy of religion. It would have been interesting if there were more attention to cross-cultural philosophy of religion, feminist theology and other relevant contemporary concerns, but this should not distract from the value of this contribution.
