Are You There, God? It’s Me, the Theist: On the Viability and Virtuosity of Non-Doxastic Prayer

Abstract

In this article, I explore the possibility of what I call “non-doxastic theistic prayer”, namely prayer that proceeds without full belief in God – or in the kind of God who could be the recipient of such prayer. After developing a working definition of prayer, I proceed to discuss a few prominent forms of prayer and explore the ways in which such prayer might legitimately be performed non-doxastically. I conclude by examining the possibility that some forms of what I call “prayerful pretense” may be more epistemically and morally virtuous than their fully doxastic counterparts.