On the day of my daughter’s birth, I felt abandoned by God. My wife had been induced the night before and had endured contractions throughout the morning. It was the worst pain she’d ever felt.
For delivery, a mother’s cervix must dilate to ten centimeters to allow the baby to pass through. Around noon, my wife was nine centimeters dilated, and we anticipated our baby’s arrival soon. It would not be soon. Labor stalled.
That evening, to complicate stalled labor, the baby now faced the wrong way, making a cesarean section probable. Hoping to avoid this, the doctor tried to turn the baby manually with her hands. It was awful to watch—and unsuccessful. I comforted my wife, and we cried together. We begged God to be with us, but we didn’t feel his presence or sense confirmation of an answer. My wife was in so much pain, and I just wanted it to stop.
For much of my life, I have wondered if petitionary prayer like this really makes a difference. Some think the difference prayer makes is not in God but in us. Christians through the ages have believed prayer forms us into the people God wants us to be.
I don’t doubt this. But I think the change must be more than just in us. Prayer is hard—“irksome,” as C. S. Lewis put it—and without a real chance that it could make a difference in the world, it becomes harder still. Why pray for the lost or the wounded unless they might be saved or healed? If prayer makes no difference in what God does, then as Dallas Willard says, it becomes “psychologically impossible.” Furthermore, the authors of Scripture, from the Old Testament (Ex. 32:9–14) to the New (Matt. 7:11; John 16:24), treat prayer as something that actually affects what happens.
Still, petitionary prayer never made much sense to me. If God is all-knowing, he knows what’s best. If he’s all good, he’ll do what’s best. What does my asking have to do with it? This philosophical problem hindered my prayer life. Thanksgiving and confession were natural. Gratitude seemed an obvious response to good gifts, confession the appropriate prerequisite to God’s forgiving. I even tried contemplative prayer. But I never felt comfortable asking for things.
Until my dad.
Dad was raised Catholic but lost his faith, if he ever had it, somewhere between high school and my parents’ divorce. Then he received a pair of life-changing medical diagnoses. When I received the news, I worried. I didn’t know where he stood with God, and I didn’t know how much time I had left with him.
Every time we parted after a visit, I’d brace myself for intense uncertainty and fear. On one particular drive home, with car taillights blurry through my tears, I remembered Jesus’ story about 100 sheep (Luke 15:3–7; Matt. 18:10–14). One goes missing, so the shepherd leaves the 99 and searches for that one lost sheep. That became my prayer: God, please go get my dad.
I wanted so badly for him to experience the healing I’ve experienced since knowing Jesus, not just for his physical ailments but for his soul-level ones. I was also scared—I didn’t want to see a heaven without my dad in it. Only a few times have I prayed for something so hard, with such conviction and desperation. I never told my dad I was praying for him, and faith wasn’t a topic of discussion.
Then one day, as I sat across from him at his kitchen table, he told me, “I’ve been talking to God.” He had been praying every morning. Apologizing for the things he’d done wrong. Asking for help. Tears welled up in my eyes as I told him about my prayers for him. He wept too. A couple months later, the week before my wedding, he gave his life to Jesus.
I felt sure my dad’s conversion was an answered prayer. The lost sheep had been found, after all. But a thought lingered: Couldn’t God have been planning to save him anyway? Did my petition really do anything?
As a philosopher in training, I’ve found that the biggest barriers to the possibility of God answering prayers seem to come from his very nature. His moral perfection was the trait that frustrated my prayers the most.
Here’s the challenge: Anything you pray for makes the world either worse or better. Because God is perfectly good, he’s always going to do what’s best. Therefore, he’ll deny your request that would make things worse (making it misguided). James admonishes in his epistle, “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” (James 4:3). But if you ask for what’s best, well, he was going to do that anyway (making it superfluous). “If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us,” and “we know that we have what we asked of him,” writes John.
Assuming God will always do what’s best, could prayer still make a difference? I’ve come to think so.
It could be that God doing something in response to an ask is better than him doing the same thing without an ask. Take parents, for example: Is it better to take your child to the park out of the blue or after he or she says, “Daddy, can we please go to the park?” Isn’t there more value in the ask-response dynamic than in merely giving without a request? The relationship is strengthened. The askers are more grateful. They exercise agency, and the listener takes their preferences into account.
This means it’s possible that my prayer for my dad really did something, that it was better for God to rescue him in response to my prayer than without it.
Philosophers have generated potential “value adds” petitionary prayer might provide. Eleonore Stump suggests it can foster friendship with God by guarding us against being spoiled or overwhelmed by him. Michael Murray and Kurt Meyers believe it can reinforce our dependence on him. Philosopher Isaac Choi argues it can expand our responsibility and the reach of our love.
No single proposal applies to all types of petitionary prayer. But if any proposal is true, there’s no contradiction between petitionary prayer and God’s moral perfection.
As the night at the hospital wore on, one centimeter of cervix still blocked our baby’s birth. Guided by the doctor, my wife pushed, but it didn’t work. Sometime later, another attempt with no success. Now, because the baby had been positioned so low for so long, a caesarean section would be difficult and dangerous. I sat by my wife’s head, comforting her. I told her that she had done everything right, that she had been brave and strong. We continued to pray, but we felt abandoned. God’s silence weighed on us.
When the doctor came back, the pushing began for the last time. Suddenly, hope: My wife’s cervix finally dilated to ten centimeters, the baby positioned just right. Through excruciating pain, my wife struggled with all her strength. Then I watched our baby’s head emerge and her little body follow. It was over. Our little girl was here.
Can we ever know that a prayer was answered, that something happened because we prayed for it? Can I know that my prayers for my dad affected his return to God or that my wife’s and my cries for help were answered in that first infant cry as our child entered the world?
It seems the answer is no. We don’t know what would have happened had we not prayed. Nor do we have access to God’s reasons for doing something. And prayer isn’t the kind of thing you can prove by scientific method: There’s a person on the other end of our requests, and he can approve or deny them.
But if we can’t know the counterfactual, access God’s reasons, and empirically test whether prayer works, knowledge of answered prayer appears impossible. Or is it? Choi has suggested a few factors that might help us determine whether a prayer was answered: timing, specificity, and internal assurance.
In 1 Kings 18, Elijah participates in a showdown with Baal’s prophets, where both try to get fire to consume a sacrifice. Baal’s prophets pray, and not a single spark flies. Elijah prays, and immediately fire consumes the sacrifice. The fact that this action occurs so close in proximity to the prayer and not, for example, when Baal’s prophets are praying, points to it being answered. Timing provides indirect evidence.
And the more specific the prayer, the less likely the circumstances matching it exactly would happen by chance. If I pray for rain tomorrow and it rains, I can’t draw much from that. But if I pray for it to rain only in my neighborhood between the hours of 2 and 5 p.m. and then that happens, the heightened specificity provides more indirect evidence for answered prayer. Combine this with the timing, and the probability that you got what you prayed for by coincidence drops significantly.
There’s also the possibility God himself gives us an internal assurance that he has answered our prayers. In 1 Samuel 1, Hannah is infertile and prays for a son. After this prayer, “her face [is] no longer downcast” (v. 18), and she soon becomes pregnant. Somehow, it seems, she knows God will answer her. Why couldn’t the Holy Spirit produce beliefs like this in response to prayer?
Knowledge of every answered prayer may be beyond our reach. And we may not be able to distinguish whether an answer is “no” or merely “not yet.” But if we put these lines of evidence together, knowledge of at least some answered prayers is possible.
I learned later there was more going on in the hospital the night of my daughter’s birth. Our baby’s grandparents waited in the hospital lobby, receiving text updates from my mother-in-law in the delivery room. She told them about the stubborn cervix, the mispositioning, and the failed attempts at pushing. My dad was in that lobby, and when he heard this, he stood up, told the others he’d be back, and walked outside alone.
He found a “secret” place to pray. But instead of talking, he started crying. He told God that he knew he had failed him in many ways and that he vowed to do better. He said despite his sins, he was there to ask for something: help. Right now.
Then he got specific. He asked God to be in that delivery room, to dilate that last centimeter, to put that baby girl in the proper position, and to deliver her without a C-section. He told me later that he believed, in that moment, in his heart, there would be no C-section. He collected himself and returned to the lobby.
My father-in-law was considering whether to run home to let the dogs out, but my dad told him, “I don’t think there’s gonna be a C-section.” He stayed, and almost immediately, my mother-in-law texted: “She’s trying to push. Don’t go yet. We’re gonna do this!”
A little while later, another text: “She’s here.”
My dad went back to where he had prayed. Through tears, he thanked and praised God. Timing. Specificity. Internal assurance.
So what’s the point of prayer? One answer seems to be participation. Through prayer, we get to be a part of what God is doing in the world. As Blaise Pascal put it, God lends us “the dignity of causality.” Dallas Willard expands on this: “Prayer … is an arrangement explicitly instituted by God in order that we as individuals may count, and count for much.” This vocation traces back to Eden, runs through the whole of Scripture, and culminates in Jesus’ proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom. God is forming partners who can share in his work and reflect his goodness in the world.
If this is true, if petitionary prayer works, then I got to participate in my dad’s conversion, and he got to participate in my daughter’s birth. And that’s better than if God had done those same things without our requests. Through God’s gracious invitation in prayer, we got to share, however humbly, in his good work. We got to be conduits of his love.
Maybe that’s the point.
Noah M. Peterson is a philosophy of religion graduate student at the University of Birmingham, a 2025–2026 Christianity Today Young Storytellers fellow, and a senior editor of a think tank based in Washington, DC.
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