Comments Elsewhere

Noumena, I think you’ve got me mixed up with Mike. I don’t think that (4) is meaningless; I think it’s false. Actually, Mike thinks it’s false rather than meaningless, too; what he suggests that if God does not exist, then nothing you can do counts as praying to God. I think that’s either untrue (if you’re using “X prayed to Y” the same way that we often use “X wrote a letter to Santa Claus”), or uninteresting (since if you’re using “X prayed to Y” in a way that presupposes that Y exists, we can always come up with a new proposition, e.g. “I say my prayers”, that doesn’t).

All that I’ve said about (4) is that, when read using material implication, it is only as plausible as the denial of premise (1) (as opposed to the original English sentence, which was intuitively plausible independently of whether I pray or not).

I agree with you that your (4’) is plausibly true — as I’d suggested already above. But it’s not an accurate translation of what the original sentence means, either; it’s actually logically a stronger claim than the original. (The original merely denied that there’s a connection between saying prayers and those prayers being answered if God doesn’t exist. 4’ actually asserts that prayers won’t be answered if you make them and God doesn’t exist. (That’s a claim you can justify apriori, but it’s a different one from the original.)