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Lewis once presented the problem in the voice of a skeptic akin to Kurt Vonnegut: I don’t think it at all likely that God requires the ill-informed (and contradictory) advice of us humans as to how to run the world. If He is allwise, as you say He is, doesn’t He know already what is best? And if He is all-good won’t He do it whether we pray or not?

In reply, Lewis said that you could use the same argument against any human activity, not just prayer. “Why wash your hands? If God intends them to be clean, they’ll come clean without your washing them…. Why ask for the salt? Why put on your boots? Why do anything?” God could have arranged things so that our bodies nourished themselves miraculously without food, knowledge entered our brains without studying, umbrellas magically appeared to protect us from rainstorms. God chose a different style of governing the world, a partnership which relies on human agency and choice. God granted the favored human species the “dignity of causality,” to borrow a phrase from Pascal. The skeptic, then, is objecting not merely to prayer but to the basic rules of creation

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