Handicapping of Skepticism (part 2)

Human beings have an innate tendency to search for patterns and simple explanations in order to make sense of the world. Such a practice results in an incorporation of elements that fit into an understandable answer and a neglect of elements that do not.

Psychologists often use this phenomenon to explain the reason people believe in clairvoyance, horoscopes, prayer, and other such foolishness. In a sense, we remember when these methods “work” and forget when they do not. With respect to religion, people will often remember “answered” prayers but forget or rationalize the unanswered ones. Have you ever noticed how people will trumpet abundances of miracles when there are a few survivors of an accident or natural disaster yet say nothing about the many people who died? It’s the same principle. Dawkins alludes to this:

[Pope John Paul II’s] polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: “A maternal hand guided the bullet.” One cannot help wondering why she didn’t guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of the credit; but perhaps their hands, too, were maternally guided.

It is very easy to claim that prayer healed a person dying of a terrible disease, but quite another to prove it. Study after study demonstrates that prayer has no effect on patients when they are unaware that they are being prayed for. On the other hand, when subjects do realize that they are being prayed for, two results tend to reoccur:

1) Patients typically improve from holistic methods, such as laying of hands, meditation, compassionate care, etc. This is nothing new. Medical researchers have well established that the mind can work wonders and inexplicably heal the body. The problem with crediting God for the healing, other than the fact that it only works in concert with the patient’s knowledge of being prayed for, is that the results appear across the religious and irreligious spectrum.

2) Patients sometimes take a turn for the worst due to what some believe is a form of performance anxiety. They may stress over the need to get better in order to not let the people who are praying for them down. Perhaps they might also start dwelling on the severity of their conditions because the physicians are using drastic, unorthodoxed measures like prayer to assist them. People use prayer as their way of appealing to God and use God’s will as an explanation for why certain things happen. Since we can easily discredit the idea of prayer serving as a simple pattern for the complex natural events of the world, its usefulness should be self-evidently ridiculous.

[Source: STEP from American Heart Journal April 2006, MANTRA from Lancet volume 366, and the 2001 Mayo Clinic coronary care unit trial are perhaps the three most definitive investigations on the topic.]

Suppose we really wanted to test the power of prayer and see to it that no confounding variables from the temporal realm would be present. To begin the study, we gather a group of fifty atheists and a group of fifty Christians who volunteer to have an extremely lethal dose of bacteria injected intravenously. Following the injection, we provide the fifty atheists with a regimen of broad-spectrum antibiotics to counteract the infection. We then isolate the atheists in a secret location and tell no one that they are involved in the experiment. Essentially, they do not exist to the rest of the world. Likewise, we isolate the Christians in a secret location but refuse them the antibiotic regimen. News of the fifty Christians injected with the lethal bacteria will then be broadcast over the entire Christian world. The report will ask everyone to pray to God for their facilitated recovery from the infection so that deductive reasoning will force the world to acknowledge the one true religion because of the unquestionable and verifiable power of God and prayer. Because no one knows about the atheists in isolation, no one is specifically praying for them. All they have are antibiotics, while the Christians have the power of prayer from hundreds of millions of certain volunteers and the omnipotence of God. After two months, we will end the experiment and see which group has the most survivors.

Whether or not Christians are willing to admit it, I think everyone knows which group would fare better in this study. No semi-rational Christian would ever sign up for this deadly experiment even with the added promise of a great monetary compensation for the survivors. They know that God isn’t really going to answer the divinely directed requests of hundreds of millions of Christians because God only seems to answer prayers in some mystical and unobservable fashion. Deep down, these Christians may even realize that they cannot consider prayer dependable. Some Christians reading the results of this hypothetical experiment would simply appeal to authorities who assert that there have been studies demonstrating just the opposite. Other Christians would manufacture reasons such as “God doesn’t like being tested” or “People didn’t have enough faith.” They will avoid the rational conclusion that prayers are only “answered” by placebo effect. They will avoid admitting that tragic events or unbelievable coincidences are the result of complex natural factors. They will avoid admitting that prayers have answers just as often as problems have solutions.