Response to Prayer comments

Comment by: TXatheist

I wrote a paper on Frederick Douglass, a famous slave. He said “for 20 years I prayed with my lips. It wasn’t until I prayed with my legs that I was freed”. I think that sums up prayer,imo.

Comment by: Bill

I’m sorry I’m getting into this so late in the day, but this is my first chance to sit down and respond. I’m the pastor who led the prayer meeting at Moody Church last night. First, Hemant, I’m glad you joined us last night. I wish we would have gotten a chance to talk afterwards. I would be very interested to take you out to lunch sometime to do that. I appreciate your comments (some of which I agree with), though I’m sorry you walked away relieved to be an atheist. That certainly wasn’t my goal!

A lot of earlier posts made some of the points I would have, but I thought I would respond to a couple of other things.

First, you wrote:

The pastor did try to answer the main question in my mind (How do you know the prayers are answered?), because he told the congregation how he knew the prayers were working— He may not have been able to see them working… but he believed in them. So there. I don’t know if they consider the idea that the “prayers are working” might just be in their heads. I’d be curious to know if the thought ever comes to mind.

Actually, I made reference to a passage in the book of James, “you do not have, because you do not ask.” My point was that I believe God answers prayer (and not always with a “yes”) because he says he does. I would add that I have actually seen answers to pray; it’s not “blind faith” as some call it. Your comment above (prayer working only in their heads) is actually similar to a misunderstanding about prayer I was trying to address. I have heard some people (even Christians) say that prayer only changes their hearts and that God doesn’t act in response to prayer. I think the passage from James argues otherwise.

Second, you wrote:

Case in point: The pastor told a story about a friend whose business was struggling. To make his friend feel better, the pastor said to him: What if God wanted it to be this way? The friend immediately felt better. Again, maybe his business is struggling for a variety of reasons. I don’t know why. But attributing all things good and bad to God is not helping anyone learn anything. I think it’s just taking away the notion of being responsible for your own actions.

Actually, I never said my friend felt better — I don’t think he did! I completely agree about the need to take personal responsibility for things. My point was that he was mistaken to believe that the only way God could help him would be by saving his business. I believe that God has our eternal best interest in mind which sometimes means saying no to things that we ask for. As a parent I see this on a regular basis—my kids asking for things (sometimes even good things) that I cannot say yes to if that means saying no to something better for them.

I hope this is clearer than I was last night. In my defense, we were just blessed with a new baby two weeks ago and we’re not getting a lot of sleep at night! :-)

Comment by: Hemant

Bill– Thanks for posting. And your responses shed some light on things I did not consider.

You said you agreed with some of the things I wrote– I would like to know what those were.
I’d also like to know what answers you have seen to let you know that prayer works (you said that had seen the answers to prayers). Not to argue the semantics, but to know what it is that gives you the knowledge that the prayer works.

And to clarify, I understand that God not answering prayers could potentially be for a reason. But I was referring to people who simply accept that as God’s will. I’m hoping your friend did everything he could to save his business. From what you’re saying, he did. That’s good.

I also could sense the sincerity of you and the others there. And I imagine that everyone walked away from the meeting in higher spirits. I hope nothing I said took away from that. My comments were primarily in reference to why people were praying for certain things.

Ir– With one exception, I haven’t announced that I’m going somewhere or made it known afterwards. So I don’t think the people know. Perhaps another question for Bill: Did he know I was coming?

Comment by: TXatheist

Don’t honestly know. I wrote my original paper on Abe Lincoln and spent countless hours on it. Turned it in, got an F and my professor then tells me he was a black history minor in college. My next paper was on Mr. Douglass and the underground railroad. Didn’t get into the religious aspects of him.

Comment by: Jim Henderson

Hemant

I asked “What meaningful proof does an atheist have that could disuade someone from praying.”

The fact that atheists think praying doesn’t work has not stopped the majority of people in the world from continuing this activity - I realize that neither you nor I can prove this and since that is the case - How would you go about disuading them from this activity. religious people are able to convince people everyday to pray and in fact many people I have personally talked with who are not believers tell me they pray regularly - why?

Comment by: Ir

Bill, thank you for taking time to post and for being so respectful in your response to Hemant.

Even if you had disagreed with everything Hemant said, that you responded at all and in the way you did says “You’re worth responding to and you’re worth responding to with respect”. Which is one of the messages I always believed was at the very heart of Jesus’ ministry.

So - thank you for doing what (I believe) Jesus would have done.

And congratulations on the new addition to your family! I hope you and your wife will be able to catch up on sleep soon. :) (It also speaks well of you that you’re losing sleep as well as your wife - you must be helping with the baby. I’m sure she appreciates that!)

Comment by: Justin

“What meaningful proof does an atheist have that could disuade someone from praying.”

If I were an atheist, I would refer to scientific research into the effects of prayer. There was an article in the medical journal Lancet last year examining the effects of prayer (Krucoff et al., 2005, 366, pp. 211-217).

They used almost 800 people who were undergoing heart surgery: half received prayer and half didn’t. None of the participants involved even knew they were in a study (therefore, no placebo effects). Prayer was provided by Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist congregations. The study found no differences, in terms of health outcomes, between people who were prayed for and people who were not.

This study didn’t address any personal benefits for people doing the praying, only the “long-range” benefits for people who don’t know they’re being prayed for.

Though, if I were a Christian, I might respond by saying that 75% of the prayers were non-Christian prayers, and those might not be as effective ;)

I’m not trying to be debate-y, just saying that there are rational studies of the effects of prayer that atheists can use. Though, if one is a Christian who believes that God’s wisdom transcends our own, and God cannot be put in a scientific box, then this study may be moot.

Cheers…

Comment by: TXatheist

Ron,
Would you define inconclusive. Inconclusive that the results confirm god exists? If so, the burden of proof still remains on the one saying god answers prayer, if that’s true it’s unfounded to say god answers prayers at all if that’s what inconclusive means.

Comment by: TXatheist

Define inconclusive.

Comment by: TXatheist

So anyone who claim god exists is doing it with absolutely nothing conclusive or definite but they believe anyway. Therefore there claim is unfounded and not definite.

Comment by: TXatheist

Only problem is you say god exists and you just acknowledged it’s nothing but an unfounded claim without conclusive knowledge. Illogical.

Comment by: TXatheist

I don’t see that a 70 year old woman that says the tooth fairy left a quarter under her pillow.

Comment by: Ron

TX,

The other day I gave you a great compliment that ended up offending Jayson and I had to retrace my footsteps a little but the heart I gave the compliment in was very genuine. Is that really how you feel about my intelligence? I was kind of under the impression that you might respect me a bit too. Help me out a bit if you may because I personally don’t recall ever treating your belief as a child’s fantasy.

Comment by: Jayson B.

I am certainly no expert yet but I have always understood studies to be scientific tests. It makes sense to me that all studies on God would prove inconclusive based on Jesus in Luke 4:12 quoting Deuteronomy 6:16 “It is said, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

it isn’t putting god to the test, it is putting god’s actions to the test. People talk about prayer being something that god answers. If god answers prayer enough to convince people that it works, that means that its effectiveness is predictable.

and if its predictable, that means it’s testable. That’s how science works. Science looks at a claim, becomes curious if it is predictable, and then tests that predictability.

Most doctors are frustrated by prayer healing. Many, many diseases go into some sort of remission, especially cancer. What’s the #1 disease that people quote for the success of prayer? Cancer! People use remission as evidence of healing, touting the effectiveness of prayer. However, doctors routinely become aggravated because people will stop seeking medical attention, convinced of being healed……..and then will die suddenly later on. People say it was their time to die, and don’t bother to question their belief in prayer healing.

I had a friend in high school who was wiccan. She put a spell on herself so she wouldn’t get pregnant. 2 months later, she was pregnant. Instead of saying that spells don’t work, she made the excuse of “I must have done it wrong.”

Which eerily sounds a lot like, “well, god decided not to answer that prayer.”

Comment by: Eliza

Ir -
I bet we could show in a scientific study that the efficacy of such a prayer depends on what time of month (what time in her cycle) the prayer is made ;)

Comment by: Ir

My imp typed a reply but I had to delete it, I’m afraid ;)

Comment by: Ron

Jayson,

Yesterday you told Nutrideath that you would prefer him stay in the context of scripture. I am going to do my best to do that.

it isn’t putting god to the test, it is putting god’s actions to the test.

The context of the scripture I used was the temptation of Christ. Jesus was responding to Satan who was wanting to test the actions of God, Luke 4:9-12.

If god answers prayer enough to convince people that it works, that means that its effectiveness is predictable. and if its predictable, that means it’s testable.

It is absolutely testable but not disernable. I could be wrong on this but I think of it as a person that is being analyzed by a psychologist and knows they are being analyzed. The results are skewed. On a psycholoy test they will have some questions that are false negatives to try and overcome this. With God knowing everything including the hearts and thoughts of men, a false negative is impossible to use.

Now, I’m sure that you are thinking that there are some things that just don’t make sense logically. As far as human logic is concerned I would agree with you. It was Nutrideath that was trying to argue with you that the way of God is logical to us. I don’t believe for one minute that the ways of God are what we would think are logical. Given all the information that God has though, I think we would readily change our mind as to what we perceived as logical. Your thoughts?

Comment by: Ron

TX,

I am going to give you an example so remember it is just that.

Lets pretend I live in Austraila and go out one morning and find a fierce snake [very venomous]in my woodshed. Now given the information, the logical thing to do would be either kill it or relocate it a long way off. But [now mind you this is just an example] lets say that there is also a diseased rat that is going to be comming to my woodshed at night carrying a plague and the fierce snake is going to find kill and eat the rat before it comes to my woodshed saving me and my family.

More information changes the logical out come. Now granted if we were given all of the information, we could get rid of the snake and set traps for the rat and fix all of the problems. But God chooses to operate behind the scenes.

Had this been a real example. God might have had me somehow miss seeing the snake because I was distracted by a butterfly instead and then at night had the snake eat the rat to then crawl off and die somewhere thus saving me and my family and at the same time keeping us oblivious to the whole thing all because I said a prayer asking for His protection on us for the night.

Now if you want, you can disect my example all day and come up with why it won’t work, but then you would be missing the point. The fact I could have had my life saved 40,000 times by God and never known about it.

Comment by: Hifi

It helps, in all this, to look at why and how people can manage fool themselves about pretty much anything. Knowing about our propensity for this, in the modern world, we demand that every claim be grounded in replicable scientific results. All except for religious ones. Why should that be?

An article on the Journal of Evolution and Technology site presents a list of common of errors people are prone to in judgement leading to incorrect conclusions. (I’ve copied below.)

It also makes another important point related to this topic. Say that prayer does work. There is no necessary reason to assign the mechanism to the interventions of a mythological entity. No more than why the sun appears to move in the sky — no gods on chariots there.

In fact, my biggest peeve with religion is how it obstructs us from using the tools of modern science to look more deeply into “spiritual” questions, which religion has somehow managed to reserve for itself, alone. Does prayer work, if so how? What is the neurophysiology of spiritual experiences: epiphanies, ecstatic trances, or transcendence states? What is the psychology of a believer vs. a skeptic? How does religion hijack the pan-human facility for spiritual experience in order to impose various interpretations of approved norms for behavior and authority on societies?

In reference to various interpretations, there is a tendency to forget that there have been thousands of religions. Most at the tribal level. My B.A. degree was in the Anthropology of Religion: the practical side of religion. How does myth and ritual actually function in a culture? How is the structure (not the content) of the mythology replicated in the institutions and infrastructure of the culture — economy, kinship, housing,, clan affiliation, humor, taboos, socialization of children, etc. In comparing religions, functionally, what is common to them that can tell us more about what we are as humans beneath the trappings?

Common Mechanisms of Errors in Judgement
* Consensus Effect: People tend to adjust their impression of a scene to how others describe it; for instance, they may perceive a facial expression as one of anger, but if various people around them see it as one of disgust, they too will say that they perceive it as expressing that emotion.
* Confirmation Bias: Once people entertain a particular hypothesis, they tend to detect and recall positive instances that seem to confirm it, but they are often less good at detecting possible refutation. Positive instances remind one of the hypothesis and are counted as evidence; negative instances do not remind one of the hypothesis and therefore do not count at all.
* Cognitive Dissonance Reduction: People tend to readjust memories of previous beliefs and impressions in light of new experience. If some information leads them to form a particular impression of some people, they will tend to think that they had that impression all along, even if their previous judgment was in fact the opposite.
* False Consensus Effect: This is the converse effect, whereby people tend wrongly to judge that their own impressions are shared by others - for instance, that other people’s emotional reaction to a scene is substantially similar to theirs.
* Generation Effect: Memory for information an individual generates by himself/herself is often superior to memory for perceived items. In a particular scene you imagined, the details you volunteered will be recalled better than those suggested by others.
* Memory Illusions: It is easy for experimental psychologists to create false memories, whereby people are intuitively certain they did hear or see some item that was in fact imagined. Also, imagining that you perform a particular action, if that is repeated often enough, may create the illusion that you actually performed it.
* Source Monitoring Defects: People in some circumstances tend to get confused about the source of particular information. (Was it their own inference of someone else’s judgment? Did they hear it, or see it, or read about it?) This makes it difficult to assess the reliability of that information.

Comment by: Jayson B.

Ron,

You still had to get rid of the snake. The logic of getting rid of the deadly snake didn’t change when the rat came into play. You simply added another scenario, but it didn’t change the original’s outcome.

Also, you’re saying god chose to have your family live. So, by own admittance, god ALSO choose to have infested rats come into the lives of countless families across the globe, many who are christians who pray the same thing. god lets people die of cancer. god lets women get raped.

god can’t be in control of everything and at the same time not have control of everything. that’s absurd.

Comment by: Jayson B.

What happens when I get evidence even when I am not looking for it?

you miss the point entirely. Science isn’t about going looking for evidence. science is about gathering the evidence available and *then* making a conclusion. This is what people miss about evolution also.

It doesn’t matter if you weren’t looking for it. It’s still evidence.

You got A.) and B.) but forgot C.)…influences us. God acting might be that Huh, or huntch that you got telling you that you left the stove on. How is that testable?

maybe because we already know what hunches are? One thing we do know is that the nudges in your head aren’t god, they’re your head.

Talk about illogical, why does having alterior motives have to mean what you stated?

Just because you can’t make the connection doesn’t mean it’s not true. You stated that the very act of us trying to observe and test god would make god alter what he “tells” us to skew the results. God, clearly then, is mis-leading us about himself. That’s the very definition of an alterior motive.

Jayson, you mention a lot of either this, or that, as if there are no other options. By your logic, anything other than a true/false test in college couldn’t have existed. I don’t know about you, but I had some multiple choice in there and sometimes the answer was all of the above and sometimes the answer was none of the above.

Here’s the beauty of logic and dealing with a supposedly perfect being. The whole POINT is to boil arguments down to what it is, and what it isn’t.

the nice thing about a perfect, all knowing, all powerful being is that if *one* thing isn’t right, you throw the whole thing out. He either is perfect, or he isn’t. there’s no gray area with god.

Comment by: Jayson B.

And ron, there are plenty of other options…….that aren’t yours. For instance, I can’t argue with agnostics that much. Some intelligence created the universe, and left it alone.

But you’re not arguing for agnostics. you’re arguing for christianity, which is a whole different ballgame.

Comment by: TXatheist

No,
I am asking you to start any drug you can find and then it will make sense. I’m playing, I don’t understand crack. I’ve heard it’s a drug but gotta say I’m naive to what it is, does.

Comment by: Hifi

If I were an atheist, I would refer to scientific research into the effects of prayer.

I am an atheist and I did.
Study: Praying Won’t Affect Heart Patients
“In the largest scientific test of its kind, heart surgery patients showed no benefit when strangers prayed for their recovery.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.”

All I can say to that is, “Please, never pray for me.”

Comment by: Arrianna

I know someone whos (wiccan) aunt was put in an insane asylum for praying to Gods and Goddesses. I just think that’s wrong. Christians do the same thing every day, but they only pray to one god, but how is that actually better. It’s really horrible in my view.