How God Answers Prayers

Two of the names of God are The Omniscient ( الْعَلِيمُ) and The Provider ( الرَّزَّاقُ). Additionally, God informs us that He answers the prayers of his servants.

2:186 When My servants ask you about Me, I am always near. I answer their prayers when they pray to Me. The people shall respond to Me and believe in Me, in order to be guided.

وَإِذَا سَأَلَكَ عِبَادِي عَنِّي فَإِنِّي قَرِيبٌ أُجِيبُ دَعْوَةَ الدَّاعِ إِذَا دَعَانِ فَلْيَسْتَجِيبُوا لِي وَلْيُؤْمِنُوا بِي لَعَلَّهُمْ يَرْشُدُونَ

The question that typically arises is: Does God intervene in His creation to answer our prayers, or are the answers to our prayers already baked into the fabric of the cosmos before we arrived here on Earth?

The pushback some have towards God directly intervening with His creation is that they claim this would mean that God did not account for this beforehand; otherwise, He wouldn’t need to intervene. The fallacy of this logic is the assumption that intervening means God is unaware. To explain why this is an inaccurate representation, imagine you were a chef with plans to make a cake. Before you start, you map out all the steps you will need to take to complete the task. Then you will start the process relying sometimes on the laws of physics to take your creation to the next step and other times directly intervening with your creation to take it to completion. Just because the chef needed to physically intervene in the process does not mean that they were unaware of what was going to happen, but instead was all part of their plan from the start.