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32. Petitionary Prayer and Attribution

As noted in Essay 31, metaphors may accrete to religious myths over time as different thinkers have imagined characteristics of a deity. One such characteristic, fulfillment of petitionary prayer, has parallels in economic analysis.

Petitionary prayer is also known as "intercessory prayer," i.e., a request that God intercede on behalf of the petitioner or others. One perception of intercessory prayer is that the petitioner is asking a recalcitrant God to "get with the program," MY program of course, and do what I think is right.

A perception of petitionary prayer is that it is like an order on Amazon that the party placing the order wishes for Amazon to fulfill. A difference is that a petitionary prayer may be lodged with God in hopes that the petition will be fulfilled free of charge, while the party placing the order on Amazon must pay for it before the order can be shipped. Does God require a quid pro quo before fulfilling a prayer request?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, article on Petitionary Prayer, leads me to infer that if God is omnicient, petitionary prayer may not be a valid concept:

According to traditional monotheism, God knows everything that can be known, is perfectly good, impassible (unable to be affected by an outside source), immutable (unchanging), and free. God is also able to do anything compatible with the possession of the qualities just enumerated. .... If God already knows the future, for instance, then how can petitionary prayer make a difference? The future, after all, is just the set of things that will happen. If God knows the future in all of its detail, then it seems that there is no room for petitionary prayers to be effective: either the thing requested in prayer is something that God already knows will be done, or it isn’t, and either way, it looks like the prayer can make no difference.
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/petitionary-prayer/#DivImmImp)

The article goes on to describe various positions that philosophers have taken in regard to petitionary prayer. It is the last section of this article that focuses on epistemology (the study of knowledge) that parallels a problem that we face in economics: the attribution problem.

Would it ever be possible to know or reasonably believe that God has answered a particular petitionary prayer? As one might expect, philosophers disagree about this question. Some theists think that for all we know, for any particular event that happens, God may have had independent reasons for bringing that event about, so we cannot know whether or not God brought it about because of a prayer (as opposed to bringing it about for other reasons....)

The attribution problem shows up in the economics analysis of the demand for an item. Here is an edited excerpt from my Managerial Economics text (https://dickstanfordlegacy.blogspot.com/2025/11/metext.html#c1):

The demand for any good or service is actually determined by many factors in addition to the price of the good or service. In fact, for some items the price may be a lesser-significant determinant of its demand. A more general specification of a demand curve may be given by

    (1)    Q_x = f ( P_x, I, T, B, ... , P_y, P_z, ... ),

where Q_x is the quantity demanded of the item, P_x is the price of the item, I is the income of the consumer, T stands for "tastes and preferences," B is the consumer's current level of indebtedness, P_y is the price of a relevant substitute good, and P_z is the price of a related complement good. The ellipsis symbols ( ... ) between B and P_y suggest that there are other non-price demand determinants that have not yet been specified (or even identified). Those following P_z allow for prices of yet other substitute and complement goods.

The attribution problem in demand analysis is the question, "To which determinant(s) of demand should a change of quantity demanded be attributed?"

In order to draw a two-dimensional representation of a demand curve in P-Q coordinate space, it is necessary to treat all of the non-own price demand determinants as if they were constant, even if they in fact were not constant. A revision of equation (1) to represent this specification is given by

    (2)     Q_x = f ( P_x / I, T, D, ... , P_y, P_z, ... ),

where the slash (/) is used to separate the single demand determinant that is presumed to be variable (P_x) from all the rest that are assumed not to change. Indeed, if any of the other determinants vary, it is technically not even possible to draw a discrete locus for a demand curve in the two-dimensional space of the P-Q coordinate axes.

Statistical analyses of data for the demand for an item may be conducted to assess the contributions of the "assumed constant" variables in the demand function, i.e., to identify attributions.

In like fashion, as noted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, statistical analyses of petitionary prayers have been conducted:

A number of people have tried to conduct statistical studies to determine whether or not petitionary prayer is effective. These studies try to measure the differences between groups of people, one of which is the subject of petitionary prayers, and the other of which is not. .... recent studies have suggested that the offering of petitionary prayer (and the knowledge that such prayers were offered) is not positively correlated with patient recovery.... This means that even if a study showed some statistically significant difference between the two groups of people, we could not be sure that it was due to the offering of petitionary prayers alone, as opposed to some other factor or factors.

The moral of this story is that it is no more appropriate to believe that a petitionary prayer has been fulfilled by God whose attention must span many things in addition to petitionary requests, than that a change of the quantity demanded of an item was caused by a change of the item price when there are other possible causes of change. In either case, the event may have occurred for some other reason that was ignored or unknown, or in the analysis of demand was assumed constant.

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