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Thursday, April 06, 2006

The Power of Prayer?

I'm sure you all heard this story in some form or another last week. I myself didn't know what to make of it -- a large-scale study designed to prove that prayer produces results for the sick showed instead that it had no effect, or even perhaps that it hurt those prayed for.

Today, one of my very favorite journalists, William Saletan, many of whose articles I have previously cited, came up with an interesting list of possibilities for what the results of this study might mean, based on what various people and organizations have said in response to it.

I would be interested to hear from the loyal readers of this blog what your take on this study is. I guess I'm sort of one of those "science and religion are two separate things and never the twain shall meet" types, so it seems foolhardy to me to try to quantify and make scientific something that is by its very nature more ephemeral than that (if that's the right word). What do others think?

13 Comments:

Blogger Al Sturgeon said...

I'm boring cuz I just agree with Sandi & Whitney.

At least I'm in good company.

12:51 PM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

Maybe I'm the one person who hadn't heard about this study. I'd have to know more about how it was conducted before I'd form any judgments about its validity, but I'm not going to dismiss it because the realms of science and of faith are mutually exclusive.

I don't think they are. Over the centuries, science has explained many, many things that previously belonged to the realm of religion -- sometimes to the delight of the religious (e.g., Isaac Newton), somtimes to their dismay. Daniel Dennett, a high-profile philosopher of cognition, has just published a very thought-provoking (and provocative) book in which he hypothesizes ways that science might account for the existence of religion itself.

All that said, I'm having a hard time thinking of a way a study could prove prayer was actually harmful to patients, unless the prayer was their own and they were exhausting themselves from the mental effort, or something.

4:14 PM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

We can't understand faith with scientific measures, but some scientists just wont give up on the idea that practically anything can be studied objectively.

I don't know anything about the study, but I got the impression from Sandi's post that the study wasn't a case of irreligious scientists butting into the world of faith. The study was intended to prove prayer did help the patients. I would assume the motives and the relevant parties were religious.

Or do I have that wrong? Somebody help me out, here.

4:22 PM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

That's an interesting, transactional view of the process of "coming to God," Cap'n.

12:22 PM  
Blogger Sandi said...

Yes, Juvenal, I think the study was conducted in order to prove that prayer helped. The people being prayed for were having surgery, and the way they measured outcomes was from the existence and severity of post-surgery complications. The reason I said harmed was that one of the groups that was prayed for ended up with more complications than the group not prayed for to a statistically significant degree.

I have heard of the Dennett book. As a heathen, I think it's true that science accounts for the existence of religion. Others have made this argument, i.e. Michael Shermer in "How We Believe". But if some study one day proves that prayer benefits people in whatever way, that is never going to satisfy me that it is supernatural intervention, rather than a placebo effect or stress-lowering mechanism that is ultimately physical. That's why I think these studies are silly. But that's just me.

Karen Armstrong explained very well in her book "The Battle for God" about the two ways of knowing, mythos and logos, and how in our post-enlightenment world we have lost "mythos." The idea is that religion can reveal deep truths through story without those stories necessarily needing to be taken literally. And that fundamentalism has arisen because of the loss of mythos, which represents a more spiritual way of understanding things that people really need. I thought that was an interesting and compelling way of viewing the issue.

12:44 PM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

Karen Armstrong explained very well in her book "The Battle for God" about the two ways of knowing, mythos and logos, and how in our post-enlightenment world we have lost "mythos."

She does much the same in her A Short History of Myth. It's an interesting and powerful way of looking at the role of story in how we perceive reality, and at, ultimately, how the human mind functions.

Pulled together with the arguments in the Boyer/Shermer/Dennett line of thought, the upshot seems to be that mythos/religion is a neurological side-effect or by-product of self-consciousness, or maybe of just plain consciousness. Mother Nature played a dirty trick on us, giving us the first hit (consciousness) of a drug (advanced mental faculties) that's instantly addictive (as soon as we have it, we begin thinking about the next hit -- a yet higher level of consciousness, one that extends beyond our own death).

It makes for interesting reading. I guess, under their theory, it turns out Shakespeare was even more insightful in Hamlet than we'd previously thought.

Cap'n -- I see your point.

3:15 PM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

I didn't mean all that much by it, Cap'n. It just occurred to me as I was typing the message. Hamlet, the character, has sometimes been diagnosed as having too much consciousness, too much awareness of humanity's fate and what might or might not lie beyond it.

Most scientific studies like this begin with the assumption that religious claims are only based on myths and that those who hold them are deluded.

I think there's a lot of loaded language in that statement, that adds up to an unfair protrait of who scientists are, what they do, and why they do it.

I also think you've misunderstood what Armstrong and others mean when they talk about myth. When they call a story a "myth," they don't mean it's a ridiculous fantasy story, believed in only by the deluded. They mean it's a story that's true, regardless of whether all the events retold in it actually happened or not.

They aren't exactly buying into religion, necessarily, but they aren't making fun of it (or of the religious), either; quite the opposite, they're taking it very seriously, valuing it, and treating it with tremendous respect.

As I've suggested in comments to other recent posts, I think we're too quick to perceive ourselves as under attack.

4:56 PM  
Blogger Duane said...

Could someone just list out the books with author and title? I'd be interested in them. The only book I have right now on epistemology is:

Epistemology: Becoming Intellectually Virtuous, by W. Jay Wood.

This is an interesting subject, though it can take you so far down a hole that it takes some time to try and climb your way out.

Juvenal, do you have a brief summary of how Dennett says that science accounts for religion? I'd be curious to know what all that is about. It seems to me that religion predates science (at least as we know it) by many thousands of years and I wonder how he gets around that or speaks of that.

Here's a question for thought as I have been mulling over what people have said: If there were a being that was immensely more powerful than us and he/she did not want us to be able to prove his/her existence, do you think we'd be able to prove it? If so, then how?

I also look at this prayer study and see that what its researchers are trying to prove is that God is like Santa Claus. You ask him for what you want and you get it. That's not the God in whom I believe.

And finally, I have many anecdotes from my time in Iraq in which I know (read: believe very strongly), that God was working through prayer, and many times without any prayer being said. For instance, I had a soldier come into the Emergency Room who had an eye injury. The eye surgeon (I'm sure there's a more technical name for it) examined him and said that there was about a 50/50 chance he'd lose the use of that one eye. The soldier immediately asked for the chaplain, i.e. me, and I came, talked with him and prayed with him. Now the eye doc is a good friend and believer as well, I might add. Well, after surgery, I caught up with the eye doc and he was able to save the eye. After the soldier woke up and got the good news he immediately asked for the chaplain again so that we could pray a prayer of thanks.

I mention this true situation (I was there), to say that I believe God helped this work out the way it did. One who doubts this would suggest that the surgeon was just good at what he does and was solely responsible for saving the soldier's eye. That is where people of faith part company with unbelievers. I can't prove what God did and no one can prove that God did not do anything. I believe in a God that works in the world, whether that is by giving the doctor clarity of vision, helping him discover the fragment in the eye, or even beyond that, so that even when the fragment was removed, the doctor had no further control over whether the eye would function or not. Can I put a finger on what God did? No. But I believe he did something.

To finish this really long comment, I have many other stories, some with great results and some with tragic ones. I don't expect those without faith to believe that God is working. People of science (who are not believers) should not expect people of faith to believe that science can explain everything, including the existence of religion itself. They are two mutually-exclusive faith systems. There are many things that science cannot explain, yet people would say that we just don't have the right technology, don't have all the information, etc. The idea is that science would be able to explain it or someday might be able to do it, but cannot right now. That is faith.

9:05 AM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

Here are the books that I've mentioned, I think:

Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

Armstrong's book is, as advertised, very short, and also very readable. Dennett's book is not short, and probably somewhere in the middle on the readability scale. Boyer's book is neither short nor particularly readable; it's not aimed at scholars, per se, but it's the most technical/scholarly of the three. (Dennett relies on it, in part.)

Sandi mentioned Michael Shermer's, How We Believe, which I'm not familiar with, and Armstrong's The Battle for God.

As for a summary of the Dennett book, Duane, a Google search will no doubt turn up better ones than I can provide. Put very briefly, though, his hypothesis (and he's very clear that it's no more than a hypothesis, or really just one possible hypothesis) is that religion originated as a cultural artifact of our innate neurological mechanism (whose biological function was avoiding predators) that always looks for an agent behind any empirical phenomenon. (This is the mechanism that makes us flinch and look around when we hear a loud noise behind us.) Religion became an adaptive mechanism, helping us generate explanations for our experiences of reality, both internal and external. The human mind and religion had a symbiotic relationship, each aiding the other. At some point, however, religion got away from us, becoming its own independent, culturally transmitted entity (a meme), with its own interests and goals, often not consistent with our own good (a selfish meme).

His stated goal in the book is not so much to get people to abandon religion, as to get religious people to reconsider the content of their religion, to see which parts of it really work to their (and humanity's) benefit, and which are doing them harm.

As I said before, it's an interesting, provocative book.

1:33 PM  
Blogger Duane said...

Juvenal,

Thanks for the list. It seems from your comments on Dennett's book, is that the one you'd recommend as first on this list? It sounds very intriguing, and looking at the review has me interested.

4:23 PM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

I dunno. Maybe. They're all interesting. Dennett's style probably has more wit and flair than the other two.

9:50 PM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

For clarification: the Armstrong book is on a completely different subject from the Dennett and Boyer books. It has nothing to do with science.

2:06 PM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

And as a follow-up: Armstrong has a new book out that apparently expands on some of what she says in one chapter of A Short History.... The name of the new book is The Great Transformation.

2:09 PM  

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