Wednesday, July 28, 2010

on miracles. What about miracles and answered prayers?

Personal answered prayer/miracle stories are usually the most frequently cited anecdotal evidence among many religious/spiritual people for the existence of a god or higher power. What's going on there?

1) Natural explanations exist for heightened/altered perceptions of reality. We know that we have chemicals in our bodies (like adrenaline and DMT) that are naturally produced and can be released in times of extreme duress. For example, the story of the mother that lifted a riding lawn mower off of her daughter. Apparently, humans have a strength that can occasionally be tapped into. Or for example, when someone is electrocuted from a large shock and flies back a large distance, that energy and violent force is actually coming from their own muscles which have been severely contracted by the strong electrical currents.

2) Answered prayers and miracles are used world-wide to support the existence of many different gods/faiths. Many times these different gods/faiths are mutually exclusive. There are lots of stories both historically and currently from people all over the world--mothers, construction workers, Muslims, witches, etc--who report similar stories as evidence for the existence of Allah or Shiva or whatever god's name they happened to cry out in the moment of danger. A supposed miracle event doesn't mean that one particular god exists. For every supposed miracle event in favor of God, there is one across the globe that is against him (by being in favor of a different god). An objective observer would have a tough time to choose.

3) Statistics on prayer don't show any marked increase in answered prayer. If you actually take into account all the number of times you've prayer and compare it to the number of times it's "worked," I think you'd find it to be a very small percentage. Also, in controlled studies where sick people were prayed for by Christians, the people who were not being prayed for did not exhibit any noticeable improved recovery times. (See "The Great Prayer Experiment") Humans also are known to commit what is called confirmation bias when analyzing the cause/effect relationship. We all do it in many facets of life and it is very important to be aware of. Because a religious person is already of a mindset that prayer works, they tend to ignore the times that nothing comes of it, and take the times that it seems to work as evidence for prayer working. With regard to miracle events, we often have a biased memory. Memory of an event is not instant playback. Memory is recreated and filtered through our biases that are already in place, which is one reason why the scientific enterprise is so important. There are incredibly interesting studies in this area of memory and sense perception.

4) The relatively small importance of most, if not all, supposedly answered prayers and miracles when compared to much more tragic situations. Many situations are certainly incredible like babies surviving plane crashes and such, but to me, it pales in comparison to a little girl praying every night for her daddy to stop beating her when she's drunk, and nothing ever happens. Or the other 200 people on the plane that were praying to live but didn't. Or that guy that was on the news not that long ago, who prayed for God to heal his leg that he didn't have money for a doctor to tend to. He was telling all his friends, praying every day, and wanting only to give the glory to God for his healing only to be sawed out of his recliner several months later by medics who brought him to the hospital where he later died. Or why does it seem that God hates amputees and paraplegics so much? I haven't seen any of them growing limbs or getting out of their chairs lately. On the flip side of that, why don't we arrest people on charges of murder when they publicly proclaim imprecatory prayers (a prayer for the death of someone)? Perhaps, because deep down, we don't really think that prayer ever has any effect.

5) Finally, if miracle experiences are one of the ways we are really to know that God exists, then is it really fair for God to give some people these types of miracle experiences and not others? Shouldn't we all have these types of experiences so that we can all know God exists? And what about people who are naturally more skeptical than others and really do need something big to convince them? Doesn't seem like something a very just god would do.

So, all that being said, I would say that all miracle and answered prayer experiences are explainable through natural means. Of course, I can't say with 100% certainty that no one has ever somehow magically defied physics. But given the considerations above, I would say that there is a 99.9999999% chance that no one ever has.