Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: lums@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu (Andy Lumsdaine) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Prayer and Paradoxes Message-ID: Date: 19 Dec 90 09:52:43 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics Lines: 35 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu I'd like to throw out a couple of questions I've been chewing on lately and see if someone can help me resolve them. 1) What is the actual mechanism by which God hears our prayers? Certainly, it's not acoustic, since one can pray silently. Does He pick up the electrochemical patterns in our brains that are composing our thoughts? Is it something deeper, something in our souls, that He picks up? If it is something deeper, what is it? 2) Does God answer our prayers before we pray them? Of course, He is outside of time, and can easily do so. However, and here is where the paradox comes in, if He answers the prayer beforehand, wouldn't the circumstances leading up to the prayer be changed, so that the prayer might not be prayed? I ask this because of an experience I had a few years ago. I had gotten away from my Christian walk and had gotten myself into a real mess in my personal life. In my despair, I prayed for deliverance -- I felt God's presence during that prayer more clearly than ever before or since. My prayers were answered in startling fashion and in short order. However, as I've been reflecting over this experience, it seems that God was working in my life well before then to answer that prayer, and even more remarkably, to bring me to the place where I could pray that prayer in first place. I don't expect any quick or easy answers to any of this. But, I would like to discuss some of these issues with other Christians so that, in any case, my understanding and appreciation of God can increase. Regards, Andrew Andrew Lumsdaine "We don't understand the software, and lums@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu sometimes we don't understand the hardware, MIT RLE but we can *see* the blinking lights!"