1. A notable exception is James Allanson Picton The Religion of the Universe (London: Macmillan, 1904), ch. 12. Picton envisions a pantheistic religion complete with worship and prayer emerging from an enlightened and liberal Christianity. Another believer in the appropriateness of prayer addressed to pantheistic deity is Louisa E. Cohen Pantheism and Other Essays (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1926), 18–23.

2. These three answers may be found proposed by, respectively, Aquinas (Summa Theologicae, II.2 qu.83, art 2), Stump, Eleonore (‘Petitionary prayer’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 16 (1969), 81–91Google Scholar), and Michael J. Murray (‘God responds to prayer’, in M. L. Peterson and R. J. VanArragon (eds) Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 242–255).

3. This essentially moral objection is put forward by D. Basinger ‘God does not necessarily respond to prayer’, in Peterson and VanArragon Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, 255–264.

4. This is the crux of the issue with regard to praying for other people. It hardly seems just for God to let you suffer in order to foster and strengthen his relationship with me.

5. My point here is not to deny that prayer has these further good consequences, simply to suggest that they are secondary or indirect. It may well be true (as suggested above) that prayer teaches dependence, or helps us to learn about God, or that it allows friendship with God, but this is not why it is answered. The matter is not a consequentialist one of adding goods, but rather a deontological one of recognizing agents. In a similar way, giving children a measure of decision-making no doubt helps them to grow, but that is not the reason why it must be done; a parent simply has not the right to decide every single thing for a child.

6. The case of petitionary prayer is in this regard usefully compared with that of free will. God does not give us free will because He calculates that the value of doing so outweighs the disvalue that stems from our misuse of it, but because it would be wrong not to; sentient beings need to be given autonomy. In the same way we might think God answers our prayers simply because it is right to give us a say in what goes on.

7. The problem here is, of course, that most famously expressed in the Euthyphro dilemma, to which the two most common solutions are divine command theory (see, for example, R. M. Adams, ‘A modified divine command theory of ethical wrongness’, in P. Helm Divine Commands and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 83–108, and Augustine's notion that God is goodness itself: ‘This thing is good and that good, but take away this and that, and regard good itself if thou canst: so wilt thou see God, not good by a good that is other than Himself, but the good of all good’; (De Trinitate, 8.3).

8. For an excellent taxonomy of different types of pantheism, see Sprigge, Timothy ‘Pantheism’, The Monist, 80 (1997), 191–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Conceptually, it is the opposite of grace, where we see first the initiation of the whole and then the response of the individual.

10. It should be noted, however, that some pantheistic systems – especially absolute idealists ones – would have no difficulty with describing the Absolute in personal terms.

11. Michael P. Levine Pantheism: A Non-Theistic Concept of Deity (London: Routledge, 1994), 313–340; Paul Harrison Elements of Pantheism, 2nd edn (Coral Springs FL: Lunina Press, 2004), 72, 74.

12. G. W. Leibniz Discourse on Metaphysics, §7. See also his Correspondence with Arnauld, H. T. Mason (ed.) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 43–44.

13. W. S. Sorley, A. S. Pringle-Pattison, and Richard Burdon Haldane would be good examples, although perhaps only the third would be happy to be described as a pantheist.

14. If human prayer is a manifestation of the will of God, how, it might be challenged, can pantheists deal with unanswered prayers? As much as it is a problem for real people as well as philosophers, the question of unanswered prayer is, of course, a problem for theists as well pantheists. If God refuses every request which does not conform with what He willed to do anyway, then prayer has no real efficacy, but if it is so efficacious that God cannot refuse our requests, then it is not prayer at all but incantation. Pantheists face this problem along with theists. What is needed is a formula to tell us which prayers will be answered and which declined. But I can no more give this than anyone, so I don't think pantheists have any special problem here. But it might be thought that unanswered prayer brings an additional problem to the pantheist. For while the theist finds himself wondering why God has not answered his prayer, the pantheist finds himself wondering why God has not answered His own prayer. In response, I would be inclined to subsume this under the problem of evil. For evil is the non-satisfaction of our desires – the mismatch between the world as it is and the world as we would like it to be – and not getting what you ask for is simply a sub-class of not getting what you want. I do accept that the problem of evil is particularly difficult for pantheists, but I think it can be solved. However, not here.

15. C. S. Lewis Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 93. The notion, of course, has biblical warrant also, for this is the meaning often giving to the Old Testament saying that ‘Deep calls to deep’; Psalm 42.7. More generally, the Bible makes clear that our ability to pray is linked to the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is actually promised as the Spirit of prayer: ‘I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication’; Zechariah 12.10. This seems also to be the meaning of St Paul when he says, ‘And in the same way the Spirit also helps our weaknesses; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God’; Romans 8.26–27.

16. Jantzen, Grace ‘Feminism and pantheism’, The Monist, 80 (1997), 266–285CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. The logic of the argument here is somewhat similar to that behind at least some conceptions of the Trinity. A solitary God, not engaged in any personal relationships, would lack a crucial element of value – He could hardly be the god of love. A trinity of Gods would solve that, yet we cannot abandon monotheism. So the three persons of the Trinity are re-located within the unitary Godhead Itself.

18 I would like to thank Charles Taliaferro, members of the Joseph Butler Society in Oxford, Peter Byrne, and two anonymous referees for Religious Studies for their helpful comments on and criticisms of earlier versions of this paper.