Index > What is God? > The third day

Yes and no.

If by "God" we mean [God, after theogenic escape], then yes, God listens to prayers, but [God, after theogenic escape] can't directly help you. [God, after theogenic escape] can only help you insofar as [God, after theogenic escape] can be partially understood today--pulled back in time. (This is not mysterious, it is just an instance of the general ability we have to, in some cases, pull the result of a long computation backward in time by using mathematical analysis.)

If by "God" we mean [God, today, as we have so far apprehended and manifested], then yes, God generally can hear and answer your prayers, though God might not actually do so. Here are some examples (with normal physical mechanisms):

• Causal for yourself.
  • You hear your own prayers. Aspects of you that you don't have full access to hear your prayers.
  • Your future self can hear your prayers. You remind yourself about what you care about, what you believe, what rules you follow, what you plan to do.
  • Your understandings change by producing the prayers--you think through what you prayed about, and the stances and values that went into the prayer. Those changes further affect how you behave.
  • The attitude that you can occassionally take for yourself, which is the compassion and broad-perceiving loving care that you do know how to exhibit for a kid, comes from a place that you usually don't access, but which is there and which can hear your prayers--that is, it can somehow make use of the fact that you made your prayers (either directly through memory, or by having various of your concepts and understandings tweaked by producing and then hearing your own prayer).
• Directly causal to others. Others might directly hear you pray. They might want to respond directly to your prayer. They might also adopt your prayer for themselves. I would like people to adopt the prayer for engaging in conflict that I wrote.
• Indirectly causal to others. By praying you change your intents and expectations and understandings, which leak out even if you keep their explicit content private.
• You might (at least in theory) be very synched up with someone, to the extent that deciding to pray in a certain way is tantamount to their model of you deciding to pray in that way, so that they can hear your prayer even without a recent causal link.

You might ask:

But why are you describing this as "God listens to prayers."?? You listed a few different mechanisms, and they are fine and good and real, but what does this have to do with God?? I have no need of that hypothesis.

To which I reply: Well first of all, it's fine if you don't say God. But also, there is a Thing which is prayer. See "What is prayer?".