It’s almost Easter, and here are some Easter topics from previous blog posts.
Jesus: Just One More Dying and Rising Savior: Mythology has many precedents to the story of the resurrection of Jesus. Let’s look at some of these gods and see if they’re any less compelling than Jesus.
Scholarly Consensus for the Resurrection? Not Really. Gary Habermas is well known for his “minimal facts” case for the resurrection of Jesus. He says that most critical scholars agree with him, but his argument collapses with investigation.
Women at the Tomb Are Weak Evidence for the Resurrection: Apologists love to bring up the women at the tomb. Women weren’t reliable witnesses in Jewish culture at the time, so why would the gospel authors place them there … unless the story were true? But the claim unravels with a little scrutiny.
500 Eyewitnesses to the Risen Christ? 9 Reasons Why It’s Not Likely: The apostle Paul claims that 500 people saw Jesus alive after his crucifixion. This claim is popular among apologists who imagine this as convincing evidence that the crucifixion is historical. This argument crumbles under scrutiny.
The Bible Defeats Its Own Resurrection Story: A popular Christian apologetic argument backfires, and the Bible doesn’t help. This makes the Bible’s resurrection argument even weaker.
Dr. Craig replies: William Lane Craig gave a Christian response to the previous article.
And lots of contradictions associated with the crucifixion and resurrection:
Contradictions in the Resurrection Account: How many days did Jesus teach after his resurrection? Was it 40 days as Acts says or less than one as Luke says? Matthew writes about an earthquake that opened graves and sent reanimated corpses walking around Jerusalem. Why didn’t the other gospels write about this remarkable event? These and many more contradictions make us wonder if the gospel account is history or merely legend.
Jesus finds a new home for Mary. But why? Jesus makes sure that after his death, his mother will be taken care of by “the disciple he loved.” But this makes no sense.
Jesus and the zombies: Remember the dead who leave their graves and walk around Jerusalem after the resurrection? Think about what that does to the Doubting Thomas story.
Peter’s denials: Each of the gospels has Peter denying Jesus three times. But put these stories together, and they contradict.
I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark. — Stephen Hawking
William Lane Craig, a Bible scholar with two relevant doctorates, tells me that I have “a very naive understanding of the case for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus” and that I use “sophomoric refutations.” Grab some popcorn, watch the debate unfold, and see which case you think is stronger.
My point was first that Christian apologists often claim that the gospel story was told by authors who were eyewitnesses. Firsthand, eyewitness testimony would be more credible. I agree that an eyewitness source would be more credible, but the Bible makes clear that they weren’t eyewitnesses.
That’s the second point. Let’s be precise: an eyewitness to the Resurrection must (1) see Jesus alive, then (2) see him dead, then (3) see him alive again. Anyone who didn’t observe each of these might have a story to tell, but they wouldn’t be an eyewitness. Our oldest gospels say that the disciples fled before the crucifixion and death, which means they didn’t witness point (2), which means they weren’t eyewitnesses.
True, the women followers saw Jesus dead. The problem remains that the eyewitnesses weren’t the authors, and the authors weren’t eyewitnesses.
Also true, the later two gospels (Luke and John) did have the disciples witness the death. But what kind of solution is this? Now you have contradictory gospels.
Eyewitness testimony
Craig pushed back:
I don’t know of any prominent exponent of the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection who would base it upon the Gospel writers being eyewitnesses to these events.
That’s not my point. I only said that “many apologists insist that the resurrection was documented by eyewitnesses.” I’m not saying that it must be, just that eyewitness status is commonly claimed for the gospel authors. Craig himself agrees: “The dominant view is that the passion narratives are early and based on eyewitness testimony.”
Craig then said:
Bob’s statement “Only eyewitness authors could be credible” is outrageously naive and patently false.
Not my claim. I’m simply paraphrasing those apologists who insist that the gospel authors must have been eyewitnesses.
NOT eyewitness testimony: writing about the distant past
Craig defends the idea that non-eyewitnesses can write good history:
Just to give one example, Arrian and Plutarch are ancient historians who wrote The Life of Alexander the Great, and they did so hundreds of years after Alexander’s death. And yet classical scholars regard these biographies of the life of Alexander as largely credible historically accurate accounts of the life of Alexander the Great.
If you’re wondering what “largely credible” is a fig leaf for, here are a couple of examples. Arrian wrote, “Alexander was also partly urged by a desire of emulating Perseus and Heracles, from both of whom he traced his descent” (Heracles and Perseus were both gods).
Plutarch said something similar, “As for Alexander’s family, it is firmly established that he was descended from Heracles through Caranus on his father’s side and from Aeacus through Neoptolemus on his mother’s” (Aeacus was also a god).
Alexander tracing his lineage back to gods on both sides of his family may have been said at the time, but the consensus of modern historians is that this isn’t historical fact. They routinely scrub the supernatural from history. Is this really the comparison Craig wants to make? Should historians give the supernatural elements in the gospel story the same harsh treatment?
The Bible makes clear that they weren’t eyewitnesses.
Dr. Craig, are you sure you want to go there?
This is an odd argument for Craig to make. He has a complicated relationship with the growth of legends. He wants to ignore the possibility of legendary contamination in the books of the New Testament (written as much as seventy years after the crucifixion). On the other hand, he doesn’t want to be forced to accept the couple of dozen noncanonical gospels written in the second century and later. He’s drawn a convenient line at roughly the year 100 CE, arguing that New Testament writings written before that date are trustworthy, and those written afterwards are not.
But now he’s arguing that the more than 400 years separating Alexander’s death from the biographies by Arrian and Plutarch are not a big deal. Is he abandoning his previous stance to now accept the noncanonical gospels?
In what seems like an Easter miracle, perhaps we’re on the same page. If Craig is saying that a 400-year gap might be acceptable if you first purge the supernatural elements, then I agree.
Continue as we puzzle over the role of women at the tomb and wonder why the disciples were surprised by the Resurrection here.
We can see the cognitive dissonance when they try to make their excuses. They think we don’t notice, but it’s like the letter “l” in “salmon.” You may not be saying it, but when you spell it all out we can see it right there. — commenter MR
The Argument from Silence applied to the gospel says that Jesus’s miracles were so remarkable that they should have left a mark in the record of historians who were outsiders to the Jesus movement. If we find these stories only in Christian sources, that suggests they didn’t happen.
The Christian argument comes from a video by InspiringPhilosophy (IP). To start at the beginning and see the eight points of the Christian argument in more detail, go to part 1.
The points sound compelling but don’t stand up to critique. The next three points argue that we shouldn’t expect much of a historical record.
3. Poor literacy meant few authors
4. Writing materials were expensive
5. Few people had spare time to document an event
I agree with these, and I’ll add that time takes its toll. We have a tiny fraction of the documents written in the first century CE.
Naysayer argument
IP is arguing that competing arguments would be destroyed by time, but let’s pause to see what this means. This claim favors the Christian who wants to attack the Argument from Silence (AfS), but it hurts the Christian who wants to use the Naysayer hypothesis.
What is the Naysayer hypothesis? It’s a popular Christian argument that says if the gospel story were wrong, you’d have many naysayers who would’ve shut it down. “Hold on,” they’d say. “I was there, and it didn’t happen like that.” From Jesus’s miraculous cures to his triumphant entry into Jerusalem to his resurrection—people from that time would’ve spoken up to shut down the gospel claims. Christianity would’ve been stillborn.
A key part of the Naysayer argument is that the naysayers’ rebuttals would’ve been written and then copied through time so that we’d have them today. Since there are none, the initial assumption that there would’ve been naysayers poking holes in the gospel story must be false, and no naysayers means that the gospel story must therefore be true.
Returning to these three claims IP makes about poor documentation of events, I agree, but this shoots them in the foot if they want to use the Naysayer hypothesis.
Strip away the miracle claims from the gospel story, and you’re left with the story of a Jewish teacher who did little worth documenting.
6. Each author has their own agenda
IP adds: that agenda might not include the miraculous events noted by another source.
Let’s return to the reanimated dead walking the streets of Jerusalem and seen by “many people” (Matthew 27:53). The first fruits of the new Age were the resurrected Jesus plus the “many holy people” returned to life. Why wasn’t that in Luke? These two synoptic gospels (“synoptic” means seen from the same point of view) shared so much that you’d think that something this monumental would’ve also been shared, especially since this story takes just a verse and a half in Matthew.
Actually, I agree that Matthew had a different agenda from Luke. They weren’t historians or journalists, and recording history wasn’t their agenda—each had their own religious agenda. That explains both why they differed and why they’re not reliable history.
If God needed them to write accurate histories, I’m sure he could’ve arranged that.
7. An author might deliberately ignore an enemy
IP says: an author might want to snub a political or religious rival.
Outside of the circles of Christians, secular or Jewish authors would not care or like Jesus enough to mention his deeds. And if he did make a big enough mark, the clue would be to only mentioned it briefly, to not make it seem like he was very important.
But there are counterexamples like Origen’s Contra Celsum, which was a Christian response to an attack by a pagan named Celsus. The only surviving work documenting the Celsus argument is Origen’s rebuttal. Or take Marcion, a Christian heretic. No copy of Marcion’s gospel survives, but it has been largely reconstructed from quotations in the writings of early Christians such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius.
While it’s true that an author might ignore an enemy, these examples prove that the reverse is also true, that they might take pains to document an enemy.
Additionally, the actions of rabble rousers such as Jesus could easily have made it into official correspondence. Christians often cite one example of this, the letter Pliny wrote to Emperor Trajan in 112 CE. Pliny was governor of a province in Asia Minor, and he was updating the emperor on the Christian movement.
IP laments the ravages of time:
We have lost most of what would have been written in the ancient world simply because records were not made to last 2000 years. They were made to last more like 200 if you were lucky.
This is getting close to the argument that goes, “Be realistic—you can’t expect security cameras recordings!”
But of course if omnipotent God wanted his message to be complete and unambiguous throughout time, he could have effortlessly made that happen. He can’t speak the universe into existence and yet be unable to reliably communicate the most important message on one dust speck of a planet.
8. Skeptics want a no-win situation for Christians
IP characterizes the skeptics’ approach this way: if an ancient source is Christian, it must be biased. But no non-Christian would write about Jesus, so if they do, they must actually be Christian and therefore biased.
IP is talking about a non-Christian who’s really a Christian. Is this a Christian just pretending to be an atheist? We’ve actually seen a few of these here. Their arguments sound roughly like, “Well, I’m an atheist, but ya gotta hand it to the Christians for having arguments that are so danged compelling.” Their implausible atheist-Christian position flags them as bogus.
Curiously, there is a first-century example of this. I’ve already mentioned the Testimonium Flavianum. This passage was added to the work of Jewish historian Josephus to make him sound like a fan of Jesus. It stands out as fraudulent because no Jew of the time would write that.
Someone’s position is usually clear, and a first-century opponent of Jesus could have given an honest account of what they saw. Based on the examples of Celsus, Marcion, and Pliny above, people who were against Christianity argued unambiguously against Christianity. And something as nonpartisan as zombies in Jerusalem would intrigue anyone with a pen, whether a follower of Jesus or not.
Conclusion
IP wraps up:
So arguments from silence? Yeah, they don’t work. If any skeptic tries to throw this out at you, it is a pretty clear sign they have never read any ancient history. [Consider] asking them if they apply this criteria to Hannibal, Alexander the Great, or Josephus. 99% of the time, it’ll be pretty clear they do not, and it will reveal how fallacious their reasoning is.
No, let’s make sure you’re consistent. The stories of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, and other great leaders from history contain miracle claims, but historians scrub out every one. The result are the remarkable naturalistic stories of these important figures that we have in history. Jesus, by contrast, is nothing without the miracles. Strip away the miracle claims from the gospel story, and you’re left with the story of a Jewish teacher who did little worth documenting.
IP brought up Hannibal, so let’s see what ancient sources said about him. This is from historian Richard Carrier:
We have the writings of numerous historians within a century or so of Hannibal’s death, writing detailed histories using critical and rational methods, and [like other eyewitness writers] not composing mythical hagiographies….
We have nothing like this explosion of quotable histories of Jesus within 120 years of his death. In fact, we have exactly zero histories of Jesus. Only a line or two in a few historians nearly a century after the fact or more, who have no identifiable sources outside the Gospels, which in turn are mythical hagiographies anonymously composed by literary propagandists after the lifetime of any known eyewitnesses.
Exactly unlike Hannibal.
Remember that the dogmatic version of the Argument from Silence—if you don’t see the expected historical sources then it didn’t happen—is not what any thoughtful person is arguing for. The AfS simply acts as a warning, just one of hopefully several inputs to a decision.
The core question when applying the AfS is, what would we expect? IP is right that not a lot would have been documented, and not a lot of that would have survived, so our expectations must be reasonable, but there were historians. For example, Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews from about 93 CE has survived, probably because Christians copied it through the centuries. If Christians had protected it, it’s unlikely any mention of Jesus’s miracles would have been erased. It was in the right place and the right time to record Jesus’s miracles, and yet, aside from the fraudulent Testimonium Flavianum, we see nothing.
When we look at early sources, do we see the widespread documentation of Jesus as a miracle worker (the only legitimate one among countless frauds), or do we see documentation only from one religion (among countless)?
IP wants to imagine the all-powerful son of God, a person of the Trinity and a miracle worker eager for publicity, making a personal visit to our little planet. But when he gets here, his speech and actions are so uninteresting that history sees him as merely (to quote IP) “one Jewish rabbi, primarily speaking to uneducated peasants in a small backwater province of Rome.” IP can’t have it both ways.
The Argument from Silence helps decide whether we jump into the familiar arms of Legend or if the unbelievable supernatural option might just be believable. It helps the Christian reject bogus claims from history as much as it helps the skeptic.
If you’d come today You could have reached a whole nation. Israel in 4 BC Had no mass communication. — “Superstar,” from Jesus Christ Superstar
What do you do when you expect history to record something, but it doesn’t? This is the domain of the Argument from Silence, which says that such a gap in the historical record suggests that the event didn’t happen.
InspiringPhilosophy (IP) opens by mocking atheists who agree that the argument fails, unless it’s used to attack the Bible. He says, “I’m astonished by how many atheists attempt this argument and assume it actually works.”
IP defines the argument:
The New Testament documents mentioned things that are so unbelievable, so magnificent, that if they truly happened, other writers surely would have mentioned them. Therefore, because no one else actually does, it probably didn’t happen and are just legends.
That sounds surprisingly good. I’ll state my definition more generally: Suppose one category of historical sources mentions events so remarkable that you’d expect sources in a second category to include them. If you don’t find those expected mentions, that casts doubt on the historicity of the first category.
And there were historians of the time who could have plausibly heard of the stories of Jesus as news rather than anecdotes filtered through the gospels.
To return to the Argument from Silence applied to the gospel story, take as an example the dead rising from their graves and walking through Jerusalem. The first category is Matthew 27:52–3, where we read about it, and the second category is every contemporary historian plus the remaining gospels, where we don’t. Are reanimated corpses seen by “many people” in Jerusalem—a sign that the end of the Age is at hand—remarkable enough to expect some sources in that second category to document it? Or would that be a faulty use of the Argument from Silence?
Here is the pushback from IP.
Points against the Argument from Silence
This argument doesn’t even get off the ground because it’s a logical fallacy.
Consider some remarkable examples from history that are poorly documented. For example, we have just one semi-contemporary record of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. Do you want to cite the Argument from Silence to argue that this eruption never happened?
We’d expect silence because few people could read or write in the Palestine of Jesus’s day. That means few possible authors plus few possible readers.
Writing was expensive. The papyrus for a New Testament epistle might cost two days’ wages.
Few people had the luxury of free time to document an event.
An author would have a particular audience in mind and would focus on what his audience wanted and ignore the rest. If you can’t find something in a source, ask if the omission was simply off topic for the author.
An author might deliberately ignore someone on the other side of an issue as a deliberate snub—a political or religious rival, for example.
Skeptics create a no-win situation for Christians. If an ancient source is Christian, they’ll reject that for being biased. But if a non-Christian writes about Jesus, he doesn’t count because he must be a Christian. Why else would he have gone to the expense of writing?
Let’s respond to these points.
1. Argument from Silence is a fallacy
In a surprising move, InspiringPhilosophy almost immediately redefines the action taken by the Argument from Silence (AfS). We had a sensible definition (above) where the events in question “probably didn’t happen,” and I’d even tone that down. I’d prefer “might not have happened.” But that has now changed to black-and-white words and phrases like “dismiss,” “made up,” “fabricated,” or “assumed to be false.”
We now have a strawman definition that I don’t use. IP says that that dogmatic version is a fallacy, and I agree.
Christians changing definitions, even over the course of just two paragraphs as in this case, shouldn’t be new to us. For example, the definition of “faith” can vary between belief firmly grounded in evidence and belief not grounded in evidence, depending on an apologist’s audience.
Let’s proceed while keeping in mind these different definitions of the AfS.
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
This popular adage helps inform the AfS. While absence of evidence is not proof of absence, it can certainly be evidence. If I have a drawer where I keep my keys, and I’ve poked through it three times this morning and still can’t find them, that’s good evidence of absence.
That’s the motivation behind the AfS. Not finding evidence where you’d expect to isn’t proof, but it’s evidence. Returning to the gospel story, not finding miracles about Jesus in the writings of contemporary historians isn’t proof that the supernatural claims are false, but it is evidence.
2. Consider some historical examples
IP cites the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum and says that we have only one letter documenting the eruption. Should we expect more? IP gives this perspective:
This eruption would have affected far more people—wealthy and educated people as well—than the deeds of one Jewish rabbi primarily speaking to uneducated peasants in a small backwater province of Rome.
If this dramatic disaster was poorly documented, IP argues, why expect more for “one Jewish rabbi”?
But using the AfS to weigh the evidence for Jesus is no ordinary use of the argument. The ministry of Jesus was God’s solution to mankind’s biggest problem. In four instances in the gospel of John, Jesus says that his miracles are evidence of his divine mission. In other words, Jesus intended to make a public splash.
Let’s give the almighty Creator of the universe some credit for being almighty. If God wanted the works of Jesus widely known, they would’ve been. To say that God’s record of Jesus was eroded by 2000 years of time just like any other ancient record is to misunderstand what “omnipotent” means.
Remember also that Vesuvius is just a volcano. No one doubts that they erupt. In fact, this particular one has erupted many times since 79 CE and has covered the area of Pompeii repeatedly. The eruption of Vesuvius was and remains one of those “when, not if” events.
That makes the eruption of Vesuvius an unsurprising, perhaps even mundane event. The story of that “one Jewish rabbi” is supposed to be the remarkable one.
Suetonius the historian
IP wants to declare any appeal to the Argument from Silence to be flawed, so let’s consider an example outside the gospels. You’re probably familiar with the term “cross the Rubicon” to mean a major, irreversible step. This expression comes from the time of Julius Caesar, when no general was allowed to bring his army into Italy. When in 49 BCE he and his army did cross the northern border—identified by the river Rubicon—he in effect declared war.
But Caesar had some divine help. As he paused at the river’s edge before making the leap, an apparition “of wondrous stature and beauty” urged him to cross. He did, this triggered a civil war, he won the war, and he became dictator of Rome.
We know about the spirit because of one historian, Suetonius, whose work is mined by Christians for hints of Jesus. Must we conclude that this actually happened? Or perhaps we can (dare I say it?) use the AfS to say that without corroborating sources, this remarkable claim is not historical. And also throw in that a supernatural claim, such as this one, has a much bigger burden of proof.
This makes IP’s position difficult. If the AfS can be used, we can get rid of Suetonius’s apparition, but then it can be used to argue that the remarkable claims and supernatural deeds of Jesus didn’t happen. If the AfS can’t be used, we have one fewer arguments by which to argue that the apparition wasn’t historical (h/t commenter Lex Lata).
Contemporary historians who could’ve mentioned Jesus
And there were historians of the time who could have plausibly heard of the stories of Jesus as news rather than anecdotes filtered through the gospels. Ignoring mentions of Christians (but not Jesus) and additions made by others (like the Testimonium Flavianum, added to Josephus’s writings), candidate historians are Seneca, Tiberias, Philo, Pliny the Elder, Josephus, Plutarch, Tacitus, Suetonius, and more.
Does science have questions? Christianity has answers!
This is Stupid Argument #44: “Time’s up! Now answer all the fundamental questions of science.” (Don’t blame me—I’d stop listing stupid arguments if Christians would stop making them.)
The discussion of these arguments begins here—go to the appendix at that post for a list of all these arguments to date.
To illustrate this stupid argument, here are comments by Christian apologist Jim Wallace (audio interview @ 20:30). When an atheist, he says he wondered if he was justified in believing “that everything in the universe could be accounted for with nothing more than just space, time, matter, and the laws of physics and chemistry—because that’s all I would have to work with if atheism was true.” I guess he was an inquisitive guy because he had a lot on his mind:
Does that explain the universe the way we see it? Can it explain the beginning of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, can it explain the origin of life or the appearance of design in biology, can it explain consciousness or free agency or objective transcendent moral truths? Everyone has to explain evil, whether you’re a theist or a nontheist. These are the things that everyone has a burden to explain.
So what’s left? The cause of the Big Bang (if that’s a valid concept) and abiogenesis are important research areas, with consciousness and perhaps free will as additional challenges. After dismissing the tangential issues, we’re left with the observation that science has questions to answer. That’s true. And obvious. Why then the long list of questions? Because it sounds stupid to plainly state his argument, “There will always be questions within science, but ‘God did it’ explains them all; therefore, God.”
Wallace demands, “These are the things that everyone has a burden to explain,” but his sense of urgency is groundless. Yes, there are unanswered questions, but so what?
[Then I examined] the universe from the perspective of my philosophical naturalism to see if my atheism had any explanatory power.
Sure it does, just not in the field of science. While the Christian claim “God did it” has no evidence backing it and is unfalsifiable (and therefore useless as an explanation), the hypothesis “there is no god” does follow from the evidence and neatly untangles the tough problems that tie Christians in knots.
[I already accepted] several extra-natural explanations as an atheist, because if nature is just space, time, matter, and physics, well, there’s lots of things that those things won’t account for, and so I’ve got to step out of my naturalism just to explain those things and so what am I doing here?
In other words, Time’s up—I need the answers now! No, I’m sorry, “Science is working on it” will not be accepted as an answer. You must completely explain all remaining scientific questions right now.
Or at least that’s how apologists like Wallace imagine things. For some reason, we shouldn’t look for further progress from the only discipline that has taught us anything about nature and which has given us our modern technology-intensive world. No, we should rely on the discipline that weaves contradictory stories about the supernatural, that has no use for evidence, and that has never taught us anything accurate about reality.
Pressing the elevator button that says “Door Close” should close the doors. Unless there’s something in the way, the doors should immediately begin to close, but that rarely happens. Why do you still press it?
The door-close button is a placebo button. We like to feel in control, and this button supports that illusion. The illusion works because the door closes eventually.
Prayer works like this. Sometimes you pray and get what you wanted. Most of the time, though, your prayer isn’t answered. Christians are good at finding rationalizations—it was your fault for asking for something selfish or foolish, God has a better plan, God isn’t your genie, God did answer it (just not the way you wanted), and so on.
Why have a button that doesn’t work?
A few door-close buttons do work, though most don’t. In the US, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act required that elevators stay open long enough for someone with a disability to get on. In response, some door-close buttons were given a delay, and some were disabled. The button can still reliably close the doors, but that capability is only accessible by maintenance or emergency workers.
This isn’t the only placebo button in daily life. New York City has thousands of crosswalk buttons with instructions that tell you to push and wait for the crosswalk indicator, but most of these buttons are disabled. The crosswalks are now controlled by software, not you, and to remove the misleading buttons would be expensive. This is true in many cities.
Some workplace thermostats are decoys. You can change the setting on these devices, but that won’t change the temperature. Why have them inactive? Because employees fighting to change the temperature wastes energy. Why have them at all? Because employees are happier with an illusion of control.
Humans in a Skinner box
B. F. Skinner’s famous pigeon experiment illustrates how placebos like fake buttons and prayer work. Skinner placed pigeons in individual boxes where food pellets dispensed randomly. Whatever the pigeon was doing when a pellet appeared—preening, stretching, walking, or whatever—was eventually interpreted to have caused the pellet. When they were hungry, they would perform the incantation that seemed to have brought about the food in the past, over and over. More performances of the action led to more apparent instances where the action caused the food, which reinforced the behavior. Eventually, each pigeon would repeat one action, and each had their own actions. Oddly, not only were the pigeons’ initial actions not causative, they weren’t even correlated with the food (except randomly).
Other feeding schedules in the experiment—one pellet at regular intervals, for example—didn’t produce as strong an effect. It was partial reinforcement that worked best.
In humans, we’d call this a superstition. Or a religion.
Prayer “works” in a similar way. It doesn’t work like a light switch works—that is, reliably. It works intermittently, in a way that’s indistinguishable from chance. If it were reliable, there would be scientific studies confirming this.
If the door-close button didn’t work, how would you know for sure? The doors do close eventually.
If sacrificing an enemy to the Mayan god Chaac or sacrificing a child to the Aztec god Tlaloc didn’t bring rain, how would you know for sure that the ritual didn’t work? The rain does comes eventually. Maybe the god is just angry at us, and that explains the delay.
And if prayer doesn’t work, how would you know there’s no god listening? How do you know that prayer isn’t just a placebo button? That little pellet of reinforcement from heaven drops down eventually. Christians can find a dozen rationalizations to support their god belief.
