“If they win, they win. If they lose, they win!”
This statement was spoken with frustration and a degree of sarcasm in Christopher Brookmyre’s recent comic novel “Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks”. In this book Brookmyre wittily explores and exposes the fraudulent activities of people involved in the world of the paranormal. One of the major themes of the novel is that whatever evidence you present people with, some of those who believe in the paranormal will just go on believing because the belief meets a need. They are like unsinkable rubber ducks. Whenever you think you have sunk them, they just bob back up again.
After I had recovered from the tears of laughter that the book did reduced me to on one occasion, and as I started to reflect on the book’s central thesis, I was reminded of a research study to investigate the effectiveness of prayer. I am not implying here that the dishonest charlatans portrayed in Christopher Brookmyre’s novel are the same as millions of sincere Christians engaged in prayer. However, although motives may be different, I was struck by the fact that the unsinkable rubber duck principle still seems to apply.
The study was funded by the Templeton Foundation, which supports research into science and religion and was carried out by Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School and other scientists. The study, which was published in the April 2006 issue of the American Heart Journal, involved about 1,800 patients at six medical centres.
Three Christian groups were asked to pray for particular patients, starting the night before their surgeries and continuing for two weeks. The congregations came from, St. Paul’s Monastery, St. Paul, The Community of Teresian Carmelites, Worcester, Massachussetts, and Silent Unity, which is a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City.
The volunteers were given a patient’s given name and last initial, and prayed for “a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.” Patients were divided into three groups:
- One set of patients was being prayed for and knew it.
- The second group was also the subject of prayers, but only knew it was a possibility.
- Patients in the third group weren’t prayed for, although they were told they might be.
The patients were then monitored for 30 days for any complications.
Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.
You would think that this large scale study with an good academic pedigree might just shoot this particular duck out of the water, or at least significantly wound it. However, it soon started to bob back up again. Two of the most common arguments giving it apparent bouyancy were: 1) you can’t expect God to be constrained by a scientific study and to operate on demand; 2) the element of faith is important in effective prayer and that wasn’t taken into account in the study.
It seems a bit churlish to suggest that all of the participants from the three religious communities involved were faithless. There must have been at least one moral person of faith amongst them, and according to the good book, the prayer of a righteous man availeth much. And perhaps God didn’t want to be constrained by the study, but it did give a good opportunity for getting more converts and more people praying.
I know that prayer is seemingly about more than asking for things, and that it is supposed to be about moving the person who prays more closer to the divine. However, although it is seemingly about more than asking for things, it is also about asking for things, and in this study the good things were asked for by faithful people and the results never came. I have written elsewhere about the part that unanswered prayers played in my own loss of faith. And as I thought about the unsinkable rubber duck syndrome, I remembered the ways I used to reason.
If I prayed for someone to get well and they did, it was a miracle. If they didn’t, it was God’s will that they didn’t - or perhaps I didn’t have enough faith, or perhaps my own sins were getting in the way, or perhaps I wasn’t being persistent enough. There was always a good reason. “If they win, they win. If they lose, they win!”
While looking at the blog responses to the original prayer study I stumbled on an article by Rastaban, which, to my mind, makes some very telling rational points about an apparent absurdity in the very notion of prayer. If God is omniscient, she/he already knows all the details of the thing or people being prayed about, and he/she already knows whether she/he is going to bend the laws of nature or not. And if this is so, then the act of prayer seems incoherent. Why do something so pointless?
I suppose part of the answer to the above question is that it does obviously meet needs. It helps remove a sense of isolation in the universe that is terrifying for some, and helps the person praying think that they have some supernatural control over sometimes seemingly uncontrollable and random events. And prayer can also be movingly intimate as we emotionally engage with someone else, whether it is just the supposed divine, or the people we are praying with.
I can understand why people do it and why I used to do it. Whether or not it is good thing to do is arguable. Certainly, my critics would say: “If it is harmless, why shouldn’t people continue?” I am beginning to doubt that it is harmless to encourage people to go on believing a fantasy, as believing fantasies is often a way of avoiding facing reality and responding appropriately to it. Perhaps one of the best arguments against clinging to fantasies comes towards the end of Christopher Brookmyre’s novel where one of the book’s characters points out that people can believe what they like, but believing in fantasies just “clogs up cognitive evolution”.
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27/10/07 Just been directed to this cartoon which sums up everything brilliantly!
05/11/07 See also the excellent article: Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?
In the reports I have read of paranormal powers being investigated scientifically, the conclusion was that they are almost never detected (apart from a few odd cases). The usual explanation for this from paranormalists is that their powers don’t work “under scientific conditions”. Why not? Scientific conditions are merely simplified examples of real-world situations, designed rule out multiple explanations of any observed effects. We therefore have to conclude either that it is observation itself that somehow interferes with paranormal effects or that these only work when cheating is possible (whether or not cheating actually takes place).
There are two sorts of prayer, I think, though the dividing line may be blurred. There is petitionary prayer where something is requested of God (or whatever intermediary is chosen) and there is prayer for the purpose of praising God and general snuggling up to him, as it were. The latter sort may make people feel good but has no other checkable results so, naturally, investigatory attention tends to fall on petitionary prayer.
If you ask practitioners of prayer why their prayers are so often not answered, they will say that God sees the larger picture and God’s plan sometimes requires individual prayers not to be answered. Well, then, if what you ask for is part of God’s plan, it will happen anyway, whereas if it is not, then no matter how much and how hard you pray, it will not be granted. So prayer seems pointless unless we assume that God wants people to pray, regardless of the outcome, that God says “I want you to pray for your sick brother to recover despite the fact that I have already decided the issue in my mind.” This seems rather silly, doesn’t it?
God’s omniscience doesn’t solve the issue one way or another. If God is omniscient, then before you are even born, God knows the events of your life and of all the lives that impinge on yours. He also knows whether or not you will pray and what the outcome will be. In other words, all events in your life are completely deterministic: you do not decide whether to pray or not; there is never any question whether your brother recovers or not; all these things are already determined in advance. In particular, if you pray, it is because it is predetermined that you pray; if you do not pray it is because it is predetermined that you do not pray. By the same token, of course, you have no control over whether you sin or not. You do whatever God knew you were going to do since before time began. You have no choice so there is no point in beating yourself up over it (though it is also predetermined that you do so). This leads to the Calvinistic belief that some people are arbitrarily destined to be saved and the rest are arbitrarily destined for Hell and that neither group can do anything about it.
Believers of course reject such reasoning. They will say that God is not constrained by reason and logic. They will find a hundred comforting little let-outs to preserve illogical belief. This has to be considered when asking whether the practice of prayer is harmful.
I don’t think you can take prayer in isolation. Prayer is part of the “package” bought by believers. The whole package is a work of fantasy, not just prayer. It is tempting to take prayer as a discrete part of religion and experiment with it but this is illusory. It is part and parcel of the whole. Trying to corral believers with logic is like herding cats: close one loophole and they slide out by another. I believe that clinging to fantasy and letting it rule your life is harmful but many would disagree. Because of the slipperiness of religious belief, they can always find comfort and consolation, whatever happens. It is said that of those Jews who experienced the terrible events of the Holocaust, some became atheists but others had their faith strengthened. The human capacity for self-delusion apparently knowns no bounds.
If Jesus makes it possible to pass through the passage of death, come out the other side a new person, and live forever in peace and harmony…What’s wrong with that! If it’s not true why is so much written to try to disprove it?
When God says no we try to convince ourselves that God doesn’t answer prayer. The fact that some are saved and others are not is known only by God; isn’t that reason enough to pray for others? God doesn’t need our prayers but we do - It’s the way he gets things done.
As Silver Tiger says: “The human capacity for self-delusion apparently knowns no bounds.” This is very true, and of course, works both ways. Spirituality is an integral aspect of all human beings, and is an area that is fully exploited by the devil…Yes, if you leave out Satan you only have half of the story.
To quote W. Still: “The devil does all his manifold work by deceit, and the difficulty is to persuade us to believe that we are being deceived. We don’t really believe that we are capable of being deceived, and it is in this state of serene gullibility that we are so deceived”.
Believers like you who set blind faith above reason and intelligence cannot be convinced by logic or rational argument. I therefore won’t bother to try.
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