Eleanore Stump, herself a religious believer, carefully constructs an argument against one of her own practices petitionary prayer. She does this not because she thinks petitionary prayer is irrational she doesn’t think so but because she thinks we need to think through our beliefs and practices extremely carefully. Why? Not so that we can defend them to others, but so that we come to a deeper understanding of our own beliefs and practices, and, she thinks, we can do this by thinking through arguments against them and trying to see what is wrong with them.
