Can prayer change God's perfect plan?

[Pat Mustard]

You must have lived a very sheltered life to now, seeing as you've not encountered the problem of evil before. It's been worried over by theists since before christianity and not one has come up with a satisfactory answer.

In fact the only good answer came from Epicurus:

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If god has a perfect, unchanging plan, then you don't have free will because your thoughts and actions were determined for you long before you even existed and you have no choice in the matter.

Freedom can't be absolute (which is I think what Sam Harris is recognizing in his writings), but it's free at the point where one identifies with the predetermined causation of choices.  Freedom is a first person experience.  

But if free will exists your "perfect" god cannot, because free will limits that god's ability to act thus causing sn imperfection.

Either free will exists, or your god exists, or neither.