Does prayer change the future?

There are three ways of seeing prayer:

First Way:  God changes the future when he answers our prayer.

Second Way:  The future is set in stone but includes answered prayer.

Third Way:  Prayer is futile because the future is set in stone.

Answering Gettier

[ work in progress ] [ completed 1/15/11 ]

Plato’s justified-true-belief definition of knowledge, maintained by critical realists, besides requiring that a belief be justified by evidence and true by correspondence, says 1) whether or not a belief is true has no bearing on whether or not it is justified, and 2) a belief is true or not regardless whatever justification we are (un)able to find for it. To violate 1 is to commit David Hume’s is-ought fallacy, and to violate 2 is to commit its reverse. The skeptic’s argument from error confirms that justification does not equate to truth (ought=/=is) when it notes that sometimes what we thought was justified turns out to have been false. Edmund Gettier’s problem examples also note this, but they also confirm that truth does not equate to justification (is=/=ought) when they show that sometimes we are right for the wrong reasons (and really the skeptic’s argument from error could also be saying this). Hume thought his is-ought fallacy leads to skepticism about knowledge (originally, moral knowledge), but this is prevented by following the requirement that a belief (i.e., an ethical theory) be justified by evidence and true by correspondence. However, Gettier’s point with his problem examples, in Christopher Norris’ words, “is that people can hold beliefs which are indeed justified and true, but which for various reasons intuitively strike us as not meeting the requirements for genuine knowledge,” (p. 140). Where Gettier goes wrong is when he allows wrong reasons to pass as justification—his whole basis for challenging the justified-true-belief definition of knowledge.

Norris, Gettier, Euthyphro, Hume and Plato: Is knowledge justified true belief?

[ Section on Gettier revised 1/7/11 ]
[ Mention of Euthyphro dilemma as applied to epistemology revised 2/23/11 ]

When deciding whether knowledge is justified, true belief (Plato), a question arises: Is the truth of a belief 1) external to the knower and true whether or not the belief is recognized ‘by’ the knower as justified by the evidence (as realists would say), or is truth 2) internal to and therefore the evidence-based, best opinion of the knower (as anti-realists would say)?