I read this earlier this evening, and I think I agree with it entirely. In particular I agree with what Hick says will seem outrageous to secularists:
... let us return to the point at which we started, namely prayer, particularly petitionary prayer, prayer for other people. In my opinion it is an observable fact that such prayer does sometimes ‘work’. I do not however see this as a matter of our asking an omnipotent God to intervene miraculously on earth and of his then acting accordingly. I see it rather as depending upon a mental field or network, below the level of normal consciousness, within which we are all connected and through which our thoughts, and even more our emotions, are all the time affecting one another. These influences are usually largely filtered out by the mechanism that preserves our individual autonomy. But when in ‘prayer’, or what Buddhists call loving-kindness meditation, we concentrate upon some particular individual who is in a distressed state of anxiety, fear, anger, dispair, etc., concretely visualizing a better possibility for them, this can have a positive effect. Even in the case of bodily distress our thought may affect the patient’s mind and sometimes through this his or her bodily state. And I would suggest – outrageously, from the point of view of the contemporary secular mindset – that quite possibly the thou of whom we are sometimes aware in prayer is a reality, but is what the eastern religions call a deva, a god in distinction from God, or in western terms an angel.
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