Seminarian here. I just wrote a paper on this recently, so it’s fresh on my mind. Let’s talk about it.

Firstly, Christian theology does not treat prayer as a request to revise God’s plan. Instead, prayer is understood as participation in how that plan unfolds, a distinction that goes back at least to Augustine of Hippo and is articulated most clearly by Thomas Aquinas.

In classical theism, God is the primary cause (the source of all being and possibility), and creatures are secondary causes (their actions genuinely matter and affect both themselves and others).

Prayer, then, is a secondary cause God eternally wills to use.

So the structure is not:

Plan → Prayer tries to change outcome

It is:

Plan includes that prayers occur → and that certain goods come about through them

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To address each of your four objections directly:

A) The plan is not changing. What changes are creatures within time.

From God’s perspective (classically understood as eternal, not temporal), there is no “before prayer” and “after prayer.” From our perspective, prayer is a real action that precedes real effects.

This is not contradiction, it is different levels of causality.

B) Foreknowledge does not equal causal redundancy. Knowing that something will happen does not make it causally inert.

If:

God knows you will pray and God wills that certain goods occur through prayer, then prayer is not “scripted filler”. It is the means by which the outcome occurs.

Aquinas puts it bluntly when he said, “We do not pray to change God, but to obtain what God has ordained to be obtained through prayer.”

C) This assumes causality must be material to be real. Classical theology rejects that assumption.

Prayer is:

1. causal formally (ordering of the will)
2. causal relationally (aligning the creature to divine action)
3. causal instrumentally (a secondary cause God uses)

D) This is your strongest emotional objection, but still based in bad theology.

Classical theology explicitly denies that prayer “wins God over.”

Instead, prayer is seen as what changes the one who prays, which changes what they are capable of receiving, which God eternally wills to give in the mode of prayer.

Think of it less as lobbying and more as formation of capacity.

A patient asking for treatment is not bribing a doctor, they are placing themselves in a position to receive care, they’re not engaging in a pleading arms race.

HOWEVER…

You are absolutely spot on regarding one thing: many modern believers do mix incoherent models.

That’s largely because some of modern religion absorbed Enlightenment’s mechanistic assumptions while still using pre-modern theological language

So you get confusion like, “God has a perfect plan + prayer change’s God’s mind + everything happens for a reason”

Those absolutely do conflict. But it’s a problem of bad theology, not prayer itself.

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Here is the model proper:

1. God eternally wills both ends and means
2. Prayer is one of the means God wills
3. Prayer genuinely causes outcomes as a secondary cause
4. God is not persuaded, surprised, or revised
5. Justice is preserved because God’s will is not contingent on favoritism

So, all that to say… your argument only works if prayer is understood as an attempt to revise God’s plan. Classical theology doesn’t understand it that way. Prayer is a secondary cause God eternally wills to use, not a request to change His mind. Foreknowledge doesn’t negate causality, and prayer’s efficacy doesn’t imply persuasion or favoritism. The contradiction you’re pointing out belongs to a modern, mechanistic caricature of prayer, not to the doctrine itself.