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WC: But what does that position leave for petitionary prayer? Isn't it true that the determinist model leaves no real expectation of an answer to petitionary prayer for others?
SJ: No, that is not true, there is expectation that leads to praise when God's will is carried out.
WC: What purpose is served in asking for anything (particularly for others) in sincere prayer to God? What possible purpose is served?

SJ: It gives God the glory due to Him.

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Now I have only been a lawyer for 36 years now, so I've still got room to learn, but what in Heaven's name does "...expectation that leads to praise ..." mean, if anything at all? And why does praying petitionary prayers for others to a (determinist-presupposed) impassive and unchanging God "...give[] God the glory due to Him?"

Let's make this make this concrete. A friend's 10-year-old son has inoperable brain tumors. They (father and mother) are not Christians in a Biblical sense; they were raised in the RCC. But they are, as you might expect frantic. [The mother took the little boy to some RCC holy man in the jungles of the Amazon, who examined his "auras."] I am frantic too. This man, a physician, was particularly kind to my wife when she was dying. I know the little boy.

Now, I am not the greatest prayer warrior, but I have prayed repeatedly for this boy. I know one thing. If he is to be healed, only God can do it. He is literally dying before our eyes. And it will get pretty bad before it ends, if it is to end in death.

Now, please explain in words simple enough for me to understand, what does it mean to say that when I pray to God for this little boy,"...there is expectation that leads to praise" from a determinist perspective? The only "expectation" I have is that Scripture tells me that, even if God has heretofore decided that this little boy should die, He might change His mind and heal him in response to prayer (from me and others). If I thought for one minute that whatever God had decided was fixed and that He was incapable of changing it, I am still rational enough (even at my advancing age) that I would know better than to pray for something beyond His power.

If my desk is either mahogany or pine (but I don't know which), I am rational enough not to pray that God will make it one or the other now.

Neither God's will nor this little boy are like my inanimate, impassive desk. So I pray. And I cry. And I pray some more.

Now the standard determinist response (assuming God is as wooden as my desk) is that, since I don't know whether my desk is mahogany or pine, I should pray that it is mahogany, with the 'expectation' that it might be and then when its composition is later disclosed, maybe I thank (the determinist) God that I guessed the right answer in my prayer (if it turns out to have been mahogany). But one thing is for sure, the determinist God didn't change the desk; I just guessed right. How this is supposed to "...give[] God the glory due to Him" is beyond me. If He made my inanimate desk out of pine, where's the 'glory' in that? If He made it out of mahogany, no more 'glory' there.

The real 'glory' and the real 'expectation of praise' is that the God of Scripture (determinist presuppostions to the contrary notwithstanding), not only listens to our prayers, He sometimes acts on them. He is not impassive and wooden, like my desk.

Now what about the straw man you throw up about Mr. M. ["What if you were petitioning for "Mr. M" and I was petitioning just the opposite for "Mr. M" in my prayers, in your model does God flip a coin?"] The implication is that, if God were to have the power to change His Mind, then God must somehow be bound to answer my prayer (or yours) in the manner we respectively suggest. That is not true; it does not follow. Just because He can and sometimes does change the previously intended result, does not mean that He must do so. [And, BTW, God never, ever, ever acts arbitrarily (such as in flipping a coin) that's why the occupants of Heaven and Hell were not determined arbitrarily by some 'secret counsel' or some 'divine paradox' before the foundation of the world.]

But, just as much to Jonah's chagrin, when the pagan people of Niniveh prayed sincerely to God, He did in fact changed His mind. I know that -- no speculation on my part -- because the Bible tells me so.