Introductory

It is commonly thought that one of the main practical divergences between classical theism and pantheism lies in their differing attitudes towards prayer and, especially, petitionary prayer. Theists typically think it appropriate to pray to God in the hope that He will thereby intervene in affairs – indeed, they often hold that God Himself has enjoined them to make such requests – for, on their conception, God, though separate from, is not distant to, the universe which He has created, but rather intimately engaged with it. On the other hand, both against pantheists and by many pantheists themselves,Footnote ¹ such prayer is often held to be quite inappropriate; how can one pray for intervention from beyond the system of nature when one's thesis is precisely that there exists nothing outside that system?

In this paper I will argue for the exact opposite of these common positions. I shall maintain not only that pantheism can make sense of petitionary prayer but that, despite initial appearances to the contrary, classical theism cannot – at least not if we accept a certain plausible conception of the value of such prayer. Although they cover some of the same ground, the two arguments I shall offer are quite separately acceptable or deniable. I should also that say I make no attempt to establish the truth of either theism or pantheism or whether petitionary prayer ever really is answered; my concern in this paper is solely with questions of co-tenability.

The traditional objection to petitionary prayer

Before I present the argument against petitionary prayer in classical theism, let me first note a different, more familiar line of attack which is, in fact, unsuccessful and with which it should not be confused. A common worry is that petitionary prayer lacks any plausible rationale. For if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, and it is for the best that a certain thing should happen, then surely God will ensure that it does, whether it is prayed for or not. While on the other hand, if any state of affairs were less than optimal, surely God would not bring it about simply because He was asked to. Either way, it seems, God has no reason to seek, or respond to, prayer.

This argument involves a relatively simple non sequitur. For it may be that the whole business of making and answering prayers itself has a value which needs to be added into the equation. In which case it might turn out that to grant some desired or needed thing that has been asked for is a more valuable overall situation than simply giving the same thing unasked, or than giving something else better in itself but again unsought. God then would have prima facie reason to solicit requests from us. Various different values have been suggested in this connection. Prayer might be thought important because it forces us to recognize on whom we depend for the good things in life, or, reflecting upon which of our prayers are answered and which left unanswered, it might be valued as a way of coming more to understand the values and purposes of God, or, again, it might be regarded as a necessary precondition of any genuine personal relationship with God.Footnote ²

However, any response of this general type faces a serious problem. Even if it would be better were we to ask God for the good things in life, does that justify His withholding them from us unless they are requested? For while it may be best of all that things should be given because sought, a situation in which they are not sought and therefore withheld, may be considerably worse than one where they are just given anyway unrequested.Footnote ³

It is true that sometimes our moral task is to maximize good rather than minimize evil, and it may be that the state in which people openly ask and receive from God is so valuable that it is worth risking a worse outcome in the attempt to bring it about. Such calculations depend upon the odds involved, what stands to be gained and what lost, and also on whether those who may suffer are the one and same as those who may benefit.Footnote ⁴ But since it is not possible to give conclusive answers to any of these questions, the final value of this type of defence and hence of the initial objection can never be settled.

An alternative approach: the paradox of moral perfection

I want now to consider the possibility of a different kind of objection to petitionary prayer. The approach considered above was broadly consequentialist in nature – it considered the value of what was being asked, to which it then attempted to add the value of making and answering requests in general – but might not the question of whether or not prayer should be answered be deontological in nature? Perhaps God answers prayers, not because of the good consequences of doing so, but simply because that is the right thing to do, even if in terms of actual distribution it produces a ‘worse’ outcome.Footnote ⁵ This need not mean that God answers every prayer, for His duties in this regard must no doubt find a place alongside His other duties, but it is to suggest that He has a prima facie duty to do so.

We can begin to see why this might be so if we reflect upon what more is involved in answering a request than in meeting an unpetitioned need. An unasked donor gives, to be sure, but retains control over just what is given and to whom. The resulting relationship is paternalistic, in that the donor's assessment of what matters and what is needed remains the determining factor. Answering a request, on the other hand, is more than just meeting the needs of others, more even than just doing what they ask, it is doing it because they ask. And thus in request-granting, initiative and direction are relinquished; resources are placed in the hands of petitioners to be used as they, not as the donor, wishes.

The value that calls us to take this further step is respect for the autonomy of others. Where we have it in our power to affect others for good or ill, we must determine not just their interests, but their opinions, their preferences. For in questions of ethics it matters not simply what is chosen, but who chooses. To cede to others on issues which affect them the question what should or should not be done, of what matters or not, is to recognize that value itself is not something which can be imposed on others from without. It is not something to be handed down, ex cathedra, from on high as by a monarch. Rather it is something created by those who experience it. To solicit requests, to let others decide what matters to them, is to recognize the fundamental inclusiveness of valuing; things matter because they matter to the people they involve, however others or some abstract scale may rank them. One can give and yet remain self-sufficient and impervious, but to grant requests and thereby allow others to co-create with us our system of values is reach out and open oneself up to them in a way that paternalistic benevolence never could. It is to recognize that if things matter because they matter to sentient beings then all sentient beings have a say in what matters. If God values us for what we are, if He takes us seriously as inhabitants of the world who must live with any decision made, in short, if He loves us, He will seek and try to grant our prayers.Footnote ⁶

Objection might be made to the notion of value employed here. Surely our assessments do not impart value to things; they have value whether we like it or not. The value God finds in things is the value they truly have, and so to think of this as somehow ‘imposed’ upon us is confused. But such an ‘objective’ conception of value may be challenged; for a value which doesn't mean anything to us is no value at all. If something matters to me, then it does matter, however silly or pointless it is in itself, or to God. This is why we allow others to make poor choices, not simply that they may thereby learn to make better ones, but because in the end the only values we ever live with are our own.

The notion that God answers prayer out of respect for the autonomy of people, for all its intrinsic plausibility, runs headlong into another aspect of classical theism, the notion that God is a perfect and self-sufficient being. Dependent on nothing outside of Himself, He wills what He wills, from His own nature, simply because it is good, so how could our requests influence His will?

There are two superficially similar puzzles which should not be confused with our difficulty here. The problem is not that God is subject to morality, that He must act in accordance with moral obligations which He did not create. Some philosophers have found a problem with this idea, and have urged in consequence that God creates value, or even that He is value itself.Footnote ⁷ But in truth such moves are not necessary; for rather than a limit on perfection it can just as well be said that conformity to such external ethical standards is precisely what it is to be perfect.

Neither is the difficulty here that God in His plans must take account of the needs and desires of lesser creatures. To be sure, if He is morally bound to care for such creatures, then their wants and desires will affect what it is right for Him to do. But this does not introduce any problematic sense of dependence, for God could very easily discharge His duties here in a perfectly paternalistic way without soliciting their requests. He could choose, entirely by His own lights, which of those needs and desires He was going to satisfy.

The problem introduced by petitionary prayer is rather this. As an evaluating and purposeful being God has a will. Prayer, however, requires that we sway this will; for to pray is to ask that something should take place which would not otherwise happen, and that it should do so, moreover, because we have requested it. But it makes no sense to suppose that God's will might be swayed from outside, that the will of a perfect and self-sufficient being should be moved by that of another lesser being. God's perfection may be such that He in fact serves us, He may take risks concerning us, and He may even require our help to perfect His creation, but surely He cannot be persuaded by us to change His mind. For a God who changes His mind is one who has made, or is making, a mistake.

A number of objections might be raised to the idea that petitionary prayer requires us to sway God's will.

(1) To begin with it might be said that surely we could pray for something which God wanted to bring about anyway, in which case there would be no need to sway His will. No doubt the aim to will what God wills is a fine aspiration, but insofar as it is achieved, it renders prayer utterly ineffective; for it leaves us pushing at an open door. If God grants only those requests which correspond with what He wants to do anyway, He fails wholly to treat petitioners as autonomous beings, and petitionary prayer is worthless.

(2) Alternatively it might be said that we could pray for outcomes with respect to which God was neutral, His neither willing their occurrence nor their non-occurrence, in which case we would not have to sway His will. But once again, if this is the only sort of request God answers, prayer becomes worthless. For the value of prayer lies in giving up one's will to another, but if the matter is one in which you do not care either way, the offering has no value at all. To grant requests only where one is indifferent about the outcome is to undermine the entire value of granting prayer.

(3) But perhaps we need to adopt a more sophisticated answer, perhaps the choice is more subtle, more complex, than simply for, against, or neutral. Might it not be that, while in a certain sense, in answering our prayer, we are persuading God to act contrary to His will, in a higher deeper sense He is still acting in accordance with His will? Might it not be that, while He might prefer us to ask Him to do a certain thing, or plans to do a certain thing if no-one asks, His deeper will is to give us what we request, so that if we petition for things other than these it is only His superficial and not His deeper will that we have swayed?

The matter might be compared with free will. God gives us free will and so, does not intervene in the choices we make. But that doesn't mean He has no preference as to how we should act. It is a sad truth that very often we act other than He would will us to. But at a deeper level His will is that we should be free, and thus what transpires in the world remains in accord with that deeper will.

However, such a comparison is misleading. Petitionary prayer allows us to influence the world in ways beyond the power of our own free will – we can ask for things which we cannot bring about ourselves – but it would be a mistake to regard it simply as an extension to free will. For prayer is request, not incantation, and God can simply decline to grant our prayers in a way He cannot simply decline to underwrite our free will. Where free choice is granted God allows us to do what may be less than the best, but where prayer is answered we persuade God to do what may be less than the best. In allowing a less than optimum free choice, we still see displayed the more general will of God, that human choice should count. But in granting a less than optimum prayer, we do not see displayed a will of the same generality, that human prayer should count, for not all human prayer does count. Instead we see something more specific, a will that this particular prayer should count. But where the particular prayer is for something contrary to God's initial plan for the world, that is precisely to sway God's will.

In conclusion, thinking about petitionary prayer reveals for the theist a contradictory paradox in the very notion of God's moral perfection. It is precisely because He is perfect that He listens to us, that He allows our requests to influence Him, but His perfection in its self-completeness means that He can never be swayed by external agencies.

Pantheism and petitionary prayer

Having argued that classical theism is unable to accommodate petitionary prayer, I turn now to consider how things stand with pantheism. At first glance they look worse; there might seem no room at all here for a concept of prayer. However, in the following I want to suggest not only that – contra initial appearances – it does make sense for pantheists to speak of praying for things, but in fact that they are in a better position to do so, insofar as they are able to avoid the kind of problem we have just considered above.

But what is pantheism? At its minimum it says that God is the sum total of all that exists; that there exists nothing which is not a part or manifestation or aspect of God. This is often expressed in terms of substance, but perhaps need not be; although simply to hold that there is some force, or principle of order, that informs everything, or some common origin from which all things come, would not be enough to render a position pantheist as I am using the term. The definition I give here is broad and leaves open several varieties.Footnote ⁸ Petitionary prayer would seem to be a possibility in many of these, but not, however, in all versions. There are some constraints, and these I shall note as we proceed.

Differentiation within the whole

The first problem which the pantheist faces, it might be thought, is that of finding two terms for the petitionary relation. Does not the all-encompassing nature of the pantheist deity force us to eradicate the distinction between the petitioned and its petitioners which is required to make sense of, and to give value to, this type of prayer?

To this the pantheist ought to reply that, while certainly some differentiation is needed here, this is not in any sense which he is unable to provide. For although pantheists firmly reject the doctrine that there exist any beings or substances other than God, scarcely any pantheist advocates that divine reality itself is some completely undifferentiated unity. The pantheistic God is not the homogeneous one of Parmenides, rather it has a complex structure admitting differentiation both between the whole and its parts, aspects, moments, modes, features, or what you will, and between these differentiations themselves. No doubt the precise metaphysical nature of such complex unities is hard to understand and has occasioned much debate – witness the terminological proliferation here – but that something like this holds good is common to most pantheists.

So long as such differentiation is allowed, I suggest, room is opened up for a notion of pantheistic prayer. But rather than pressing on with explanations, at this stage some illustrations may be useful, so let me consider three models or analogies, to help us see what such a thing might look like. Think, first, of a committee. Where a committee decides upon some course of action we speak sometimes of the will of the committee – ‘It is the will of the committee that smoking should be banned.’ This is not quite the same as the will of any, all, or even the majority of its members, yet it is something that might well be formed in response to the will of one specific member. In their personal capacity they may ask that the committee do something which, in its collective capacity, it in response may then form the will to do.

Changing the illustration, we might think about a novel and, in particular, the relation between its overall narrative and its components. Taken in isolation or in the wrong order, the value, interest and significance that characters, places, actions, feelings, etc. may hold for us is quite other than that which they bear when woven together into a complete story. Corresponding to this, there are two ways in which novels may be written. An author may be driven by her overall message or plot, choosing characters, details, and incidents to fit in with or convey her larger theme, or she may focus on the details of characters and events allowing them to unfold in their own way and determine the direction and outcome of the final story. Alternatively, of course, and most interestingly for our purposes, an author may work in both of these ways at once, allowing individual detail and overall theme mutually to interact.

For a third, rather different, picture we might think simply of the self-healing capacity of a living body, considering, for example, the way in which a damaged organ will indicate its injured status to the rest of the body – sending out, in effect, a kind of distress call – in response to which resources from all around (such as antibodies) may be sent to attack a source of infection or to effect repairs.

Of course, these are only analogies and, if they are to assist us in understanding pantheistic prayer, some more theoretical account is needed. Let me now attempt to provide that. With respect to the theory of complex unities there are two different ways in which any part may be regarded, either in its own right or in the context of the whole in which it belongs. For example, a certain shaped piece of metal is only a carburettor in the context of a car, a circle is only an eye when placed next to another inside an oval above a smiling mouth, a line is only a side when drawn with three others in a square, a person only a colleague in a working environment, and so on. For the pantheist who regards everything we encounter as a part or aspect of the one whole which is God, this point can be generalized in the widest possible way. Every distinct element we encounter can be looked at in two different ways – from the point of view of the part, as a distinct item, or from the point of view of the whole, as an aspect or mode of God.

However, from the fact that everything can be seen in both ways it does not follow that it always should be, that it is indifferent in any context from which point of view we regard it. And indeed this is rarely the case; sometimes it is appropriate to attribute action to the part, sometimes to the whole, but usually to just one or the other. It is better to say that I write a letter with my hand, rather than that my hand writes the letter, but when we meet you will shake my hand, not me. Again its many colleges together make up Oxford University, but it is appropriate to attribute some actions to the former and some to the latter. Often which type of description is appropriate – one in terms of the whole or the parts – will be a function of one's perspective. Looking back on life, an overall pattern or course may be seen that was never visible at the time, thereby changing the mode of description appropriate for any one event in it. This is especially common of intellectual or spiritual biography. ‘At the time I should have said I went to Rome to study architecture’, says our author, ‘but I can see now that God was drawing me ever closer.’ Quite what determines the appropriate perspective on any occasion is, no doubt, a complex matter, but will include such factors as context, function, and overall narrative.

If it is true that some things are best understood as done by the parts and some as done by the whole which comprises them, room is opened up to begin to make sense of petitionary prayer. It involves a relation between one event (the request) we find most natural to regard as the action of a part, and another (the answer) we find most natural to regard as an action of the whole. Instead of saying that one part simply harmonizes with another, or that God simply answers His own prayers, there occurs a perspective shift between the first and second elements, and it appears that a request by some part is met by a response of the whole.Footnote ⁹ Of course, the relationship can also be described without any shift – the pantheist does not deny that God too is involved in our prayers, or that specific parts of the world contribute to their answers – but these symmetrical ways of viewing the relationship can not claim greater validity than the asymmetrical fashion. If God is not distinct from the world then the occasioning condition of God's action – say, stilling a storm – must be as much in the world as the action itself, but saying that leaves it open whether this condition should be found in general things of the same family as the storm, such as laws and prior conditions, or through something more specific, such as a prayer.

The moral responsiveness of the whole

We find ourselves on the way to an understanding, but there is still some distance to go. So far we have arrived at a way of regarding things that happen as divine activity in accordance with what we have prayed for, but it will be remembered that for petitionary prayer to be answered it must be the case, not simply that events turn out the way we have prayed they should, but that they do so because of the prayer. Can pantheists meet this aspect of the matter?

It is important here to distinguish evidential from metaphysical issues. For the question how we know that things occurred because we prayed for them is difficult even for the theist. The matter is helped by miracles or improbabilities – these make it easier for us to meet a ‘would not have happened otherwise’ condition that renders miraculous intervention more plausible as an explanation – but there are no arguments that force us to regard any events as answers to prayers. There is always more than one causal story that could be told.

It seems to me that on these questions the pantheist is in no better, or worse, position that theist; but turning to questions of metaphysics he might be thought to be at a disadvantage. For while the kind of mechanisms we could cite in claiming that the activity of one agent was to be explained by that of another distinct agent might seem (in their general shape at least) reasonably clear, the same could hardly be said for the way in which something attributable to the whole might be thought of as occurring because of something which happens at the level of parts.

Fortunately, the precise nature of such mechanisms can be left open so long as they are deemed possible and, where everything is interconnected with everything else, it is certainly not inconceivable that that the state of one part should bring about an activity of the whole to which it belongs. To take just one example, traumatic damage to one organ may flood the entire body with adrenalin. We can afford to be open in this way about the details due to the fact that the essence of the ‘because’ which we seek here is not causal, but moral. Prayer is not a simple causal interaction – it is not incantation – rather it is ethical in its operation. God answers our prayers because of the ethical significance of so doing. Though we struggle desperately to understand the exact principles at work behind the system, we understand that both our prayers and their answers are events which carry an ethical significance such that, when they are answered, this is because it is somehow better that they should be. A petition and its granting are two sides of distinctive moral equation. If the ‘response’ can be seen as having an ethical value correlated to that of the ‘request’ – if it is an ‘answer’ in response to a ‘question’, a ‘gift’ in response to a ‘plea’, a ‘solution’ in response to a ‘problem’, a ‘rescue’ in response to a ‘distress call’ – that is enough for us to understand the former as occurring because of the latter. The precise causal mechanics through which this ethical transaction is realized are secondary.

In this way we establish a further condition on the nature of our pantheistic system; it must be fundamentally moral in its construction. It must be an entity whose existence, features, or development can be characterized in ethical terms. Not everyone could admit this. It must be allowed that a significant number of pantheists think of their deity as ‘beyond good and evil’. And certainly if the whole moves without purpose, value, or meaning, perhaps in the manner of Schopenhauer's will, or under some quasi-evolutionary impulse (some interpreters think Spinoza's God is like this) then, even if on the odd occasion its unfolding accorded with our requests, we should not say it had answered our prayers. However, the greater number of pantheists have regarded their God, or Absolute, as a being of supreme ethical significance – not merely providing us with our greatest values but actually embodying them, such that ours is ‘the best of all possible worlds’, or at least, in the manner of some Hegelian Geist, on the way to becoming so. It is, of course, no easy matter to hold, in the face of all contrary evidence, that our universe governs its self in a fundamentally moral fashion, but it is at least no harder than to maintain that it is governed from outside by such principles – the two contrary hypotheses sharing the very same evidence.

The personhood of the whole

Granting what has been said so far, it might be thought at this point that we could introduce a new constraint on any pantheism which made room for prayer, namely that its God or Absolute be a person. For how could one pray except to a person? And how could a system be moral unless it was personal? But such an addition would not be widely welcomed, for many – perhaps most – pantheists would be unwilling to make this claim.Footnote ¹⁰ The impersonal nature of the Absolute is probably the most commonly cited reason why prayer is inappropriate on a pantheistic worldview,Footnote ¹¹ but that, I want to argue, is a mistake – God need not be a person in order to answer our prayers.

It might be objected that while any suitably arranged system might respond to the state of its parts – we are all familiar today with the way in whole environments may respond to the smallest changes within them – surely only a person could respond to prayer. For how could anything hear, understand and respond to our petition without being a person?

But for all its intuitive plausibility this thought does not stand up to further scrutiny. Indeed, it dissolves if we ask ourselves just what is added that necessitates the introduction of personhood in the shift from conditions which could be dealt with impersonally to prayers which, supposedly, could not. The most natural thought here is that prayer is cognitive. A stab of pain or a pang of hunger might (somehow) be detected, but a request for aid or food must be understood. By expressing them in prayers do we not communicate our needs, desires, and feelings to God? Yet, however natural, this thought cannot be correct. What more is added is not communication, for not even the traditional theist supposes that prayer provides God with any new information or understanding. Rather, as we saw above, the difference between the need–satisfaction relation and the prayer–request relation is an ethical one. The two are not ethically equivalent – the latter embodies a respect for autonomy that the former lacks – and so there may be reasons why, on certain occasions, an ethically charged entity might respond to prayers, but not needs. It is not necessary to think of the Absolute as personal to make room for prayer; it is enough that that it be possible to represent its activities as ethically responsive to us.

Yet, it might be objected, how could a system be ethical without being personal? But this too is a mistake. For there is nothing about the notion of a morally responsive system which entails personhood. There exist non-personal responsive systems: my central heating system is responsive to both time and temperature – it ‘knows’ when there is a cold snap and fires up in response – and nature is full of similarly complex responsive systems, for example, pond life responds in a variety of ways to a number of different types of water pollution. We can also, I think, make sense of non-personal moral systems. Systems of this second type are, admittedly, more puzzling. But Karma, objective telelogy, or the Platonic notion of the Good would seem to be examples of such ethical forces. But if both of these notions make sense, why can we not combine the two thoughts to arrive at the idea of a non-personal morally responsive system? For example, we can imagine a science fiction story involving a society where justice is dispensed perfectly by some super-computer, or one in which we meet alien creatures (perhaps plant-like, or bacteria-like) whose form of life was so different from ours that we found it hard to regard them as people but who nonetheless show a concern for us that we have to interpret as moral (perhaps they keep us from harm, or prevent us from hurting each other). At a more down to earth level we can describe an organisation or bureaucracy as cruel, insensitive, or as institutionally racist without attributing these characteristics to any individual people in them, or attributing personhood to the institution itself. And to attribute a certain event to ‘Murphy's law’, or to describe a certain outcome as ‘poetic justice’ – one in which someone ‘got their just desserts’ – carries no implication anywhere of personhood.

In saying that there may be moral systems which are not personal, I do not mean that they can have this character wholly without connection to people. (There could be no ethics without people.) For it is precisely and only through its relations and dealings with people that such a system may be judged moral at all. But the appropriateness of the attribution arises from the nature of its inputs and outputs; a matter of finding in its relations to us an ethical value correlated to that of our relations to it. And although a thing can only be judged ethical in relation to people, it need not itself be a person to be ethical.

I see no conceptual link between ethical response and personhood, but perhaps the worry is less one of incoherence than puzzlement; less ‘that can't be’ than ‘how can that be?’. What is the mechanism if it is not personal? The challenge here strikes me as rather like the question-begging ‘How could there be action-at-a-distance? How could there be mind-body causation?’–type dilemmas, because at this point I would turn the tables and resist the thought that a system with morally charged inputs and outputs is somehow ‘explained’ by being described as ‘personal’. No doubt, it is familiar and easy to picture such exchanges in personal terms but this does not in any fashion explain them. For what is it about being a person, apart from their ethically sensitive response (which an impersonal pantheistic system might manifest), that makes us consider people as a better model (or indeed the only possible model) of ethical agency? It is far from clear why adding such terms as ‘aware’, ‘conscious’, or ‘deliberate’ would clarify matters here.

Of course, reluctance to call the Absolute a person depends on just what or how much is meant by that term. Thinking of inputs and outputs one criterion of something's being a person might be that it passes the Turing test. And if that is what is meant then perhaps the pantheist deity is a ‘person’, for it can answer our requests. But that is small beer, for arguably all that is meant by ‘person’ here is ‘something which passes the Turing test’. If ‘person’ means more than simply that, I see no reason why that which answers our prayers need be a person.

The problem of the supernatural

Let me consider a fourth problem. It might be objected that surely the notion of divine granting of petitionary prayer requires some idea of the supernatural – it is the request to bring about by divine process what would not otherwise happen. But pantheists do not believe in the supernatural. For them there is nothing outside the totality of the world. So how can they possibly embrace such a notion?

It ought to be said that this objection is not well put. For even the classical theist, in praying, is not always asking for a miracle. Often enough she will be happy for any divine granting of her petition to be transmitted through natural routes. Not all divine action involves the violation of natural laws.

But nonetheless, prayer does seem to involve some conception of divine agency over and above that which is merely natural. For although we may be happy that our prayer be answered through some natural rather than supernatural means, it is no part of our conception of the natural world that even ordinary events should be set in train by prayer. That events should occur because they were prayed for is no recognized account in natural science.

At this point we need to be more careful in our understanding of pantheism. It is true that for pantheists there is no ‘supernatural’ – no realm of God separate from the world – but it is careless to express this view by saying that for them everything is ‘natural’. For if we take that to mean that everything is explained by known laws of nature, or even laws of nature similar to those known, there is no need to say this. But once we allow in currently unknown natural principles, all kinds of things might be possible. This is the view of Leibniz, who distinguishes between God's ‘most general intentions’ and His ‘subordinate regulations’. Miracles he regards as a planned component of the former – part of an overall plan where everything has its place – and though they run counter to the latter, such regulations are merely general patterns.Footnote ¹²

To illustrate: I always go to the quietest pub. You take that to be the ‘Tandem’, and were surprised when last week I was to be found at the ‘Scholar Gypsy’ instead. But once it is pointed out that last week the rugby club had their annual get-together at the ‘Tandem’ you realize that nothing irregular has taken place at all. This is the view also of Bishop Joseph Butler. While a miracle, he argues, is something quite unlike the known course of nature, it may still be a perfectly regular exemplification of deeper principles behind the surface order of things, especially moral or religious ones. All a pantheist need suppose, then, is that behind the known material laws there may lie deeper spiritual ones. But this is possible enough; the pantheist need not be a materialist reductionist, and may well hold that the deeper you penetrate into the nature of things the more significant their moral features become.Footnote ¹³

The paradox of moral perfection revisited

For the theist, petitionary prayer ran aground on what we might call the paradox of perfection. God's perfection, in its generosity, calls on Him to respond to the prayers of others, to respect their autonomy and include their views in His plans, yet at the same time, in its self-sufficiency, it prohibits Him from doing so. What I want to argue in this concluding section is that pantheism can avoid this fatal paradox. A key factor in the problem was that God appeared to be swayed by something external to Him, but in the pantheistic system there is nothing external, and hence this aspect of the dilemma does not even get off the ground. For the pantheist the will of God is not something distinct from the world, something controlling and if necessary subduing the course of nature. It is rather something infused throughout the world, something manifested even in the hopes and prayers of human beings.Footnote ¹⁴ Thus, for a pantheist prayer is not an external agency attempting to sway the will of God, but rather a spark of that same will, a moment in which ‘God speaks to God’.Footnote ¹⁵

One of the great deficiencies of classical theism is that it is hierarchical and domineering. Pantheism on the other hand is participatory and egalitarian. There is something deeply democratic about pantheism, which is why it has appealed to feminists such as Grace Jantzen.Footnote ¹⁶ Instead of a sovereign deity set over and above us, issuing rules from on high, divinity is shared out and we all of us in our ways set the values and agenda of the world. We see here a point about pantheism very often misunderstood by its critics. People commonly regard monism as a doctrine in which parts are merged into and subservient before the whole – a kind of metaphysical totalitarianism. But there is no need to view it like this. For the unity of the whole may lie precisely in its multiplex differentiation and co-operation; disseminated through the totality. Contrast an army or political party or religious cult, where the members serve the whole, with a family or a trade union or a church, where the unity exists to serve its members.

A possible objection might suggest itself at this point. It was objected that the perfect being of classical theism, being morally self-sufficient, could not have its will determined from outside. But is it any more acceptable to think of the pantheistic deity, which must also be regarded as perfect, as directed by its parts? Indeed, is it any different? Just as Spinoza held that a perfect being must be unique because He could not depend on anything external, it has sometimes been suggested that God must be simple or without parts because otherwise He would depend on them. The cases, however, are crucially different, for a complex being may still be self-contained. It need not look outside of itself for its values. Think, for example, of the ethos of some business or institution. That this may come under pressure from, and be shaped by, outside forces – political, financial and social pressures – is often a matter of great regret. Far better that it should remain true to its own values, we feel. Yet it would be absurd to complain that the institution's ethos was influenced by the many values, aims, and beliefs of its members. For that is its very nature; it only exists in and through such attitudes.

The exact relation between self-contained perfection and self-surrendering generosity remains a puzzling one. However, by accepting this dynamic and at the same time construing it as internal to the Godhead, a puzzle that breaks the theist becomes something the pantheist can embrace. The problem of how many wills can be reconciled with one perfect will becomes the more tractable puzzle of how many wills can be combined into one will.Footnote ¹⁷ Whatever the final details of that combination, my own position is in the end but the outworking of a simple thought: Is the world run according to God's plan? Do our requests and desires have any input into what happens? The only way we can say ‘yes’ to both of these questions is if our prayers and wants are somehow parts of God's plan.Footnote ¹⁸