How Does Prayer Work? And What Does that Say About God?

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What’s the point of prayer? Why bother praying if God already knows?

Christian apologist Greg Koukl took skeptics’ questions on the Unbelievable? podcast (audio here @13:02). Let’s evaluate his response to a question about prayer.

The question could be interpreted several different ways.

  • What I think the caller was asking: What difference could asking make when the future is fixed? It doesn’t seem fixed to us, but there are no forks in the path ahead of us since God knows every future event. To God, events unfold as if he’s watching a play that he wrote. He knows every line. So what’s the point?
  • What I want to ask: Why bother praying since God already knows what you need? You’re obviously not informing him of anything. Shouldn’t he just do the right thing for you, regardless of whether you pray or not?
  • And then the question Koukl wanted to answer: Is there a constraint on human free will if God knows everything in advance?

Christian response to the puzzle of prayer

Koukl began by imagining a boss who has already decided that if a particular person asks for a raise, he’ll grant it. But if a raise makes business sense, why not just grant it without being asked? Koukl says that the asking requirement comes from the Bible: “You do not have because you do not ask God” (James 4:2). In response to pushback from the caller, Koukl called the asking-for-a-raise example “a perfectly human illustration that matched every item exactly” and which makes perfect sense to us.

No, this is actually a poor parallel. In the first place, can Koukl possibly be saying that you don’t get things from God if you don’t ask, but you will get them if you do ask? I’d like to see a demonstration of that.

The Bible has a handful of claims about prayer’s efficacy. Some have no caveats—for example, “Ask and you will receive” from John 16:24—but this one cited by Koukl does. The next verse says, “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” But surely someone has asked with good motives. How many millions have prayed for world peace or a dramatic healing in someone?

How about this for a good motive: I will ask for a something mundane to appear (a candy bar or a glass of water) and do this demonstration repeatedly, in public, simply because this will shock millions of non-Christians to consider afresh the Christian claims.

But everyone knows that this won’t work. What does this tell us about the Bible’s claims about prayer?

Ordinary people have constraints, but God has none

A second reason this isn’t a good example is because a good boss should provide the raise if it’s the right thing to do and not put capricious obstacles (like asking) in the way of any employee getting what they deserve.

Third, money is in short supply in the typical company. It must be spent wisely. Not so with God—he can grant anything at no cost or effort.

Let’s fix these problems. Map God into the employer’s role, but now the employer adjusts everyone’s pay from his unlimited supply of money and perks to maximize productivity. If the janitor would be maximally productive with a salary of a million dollars per year, that just happens. There’s no haggling or negotiation, just happy, motivated, and hard-working employees.

Humans in a Skinner box?

Back in the real world, prayer is reinforced intermittently. Once in a great while it seems to deliver, which is that little push to convince the believer that it works (though it certainly doesn’t work in any way like “works” is normally used, like with a typical home appliance or car—y’know, reliably). We find this in pigeons who had behaviors reinforced intermittently in B. F. Skinner’s famous experiment. Prayer becomes nothing more than a slot machine.

What have we turned God into?

This is a tangent, but I think it’s an interesting one. Consider what Koukl’s god has become. God knows the future perfectly, including every request or need that he will respond to and what each response will be. If we look at God’s actions, we could reduce each one to a conditional cause-and-effect statement like this: “If person P requests R then grant it (or not), but if he doesn’t request it then grant it (or not).”

But the conditional part is unnecessary since God already knows whether P will make the request or not. So it becomes: “When person P requests R (or doesn’t), then give it (or not).” That is, God knows whether or not P will make the request, and he knows whether or not he will grant it.

But even this can be simplified to a simple timeline: “At time T1, do action A1; at time T2, do A2,” and so on. Give these instructions to a universal wish-granting machine, and that’s God. This God doesn’t react in real time to anything. Is this mindless and soulless God what Christians want? What does it say that God could be replaced with a machine? What have God’s love or worry or anger or any emotion become without the time component?

Like the poor parallel between God and the boss, God has become a poor parallel to a loving creator, father, or caregiver. And prayer becomes pointless.

More on how prayer works (or not):

Tweeted after a devastating 2013 tornado:
Beyoncé, Rihanna & Katy Perry
send prayers to #Oklahoma #PrayForOklahoma,
Tweeted in response by Ricky Gervais:
I feel like an idiot now . . .
I only sent money.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/1/16.)

Image from University of Washington Neurobotics Lab (license CC BY 2.0)

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Ray Comfort’s “The Atheist Delusion”: 64 Minutes I’ll Never Get Back

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Let me start by saying something nice about Ray Comfort’s movie, The Atheist Delusion: Why Millions Deny the Obvious (2016). It’s not that I have something nice to say, but I’ll quote praise from another makeshift evangelical, Ken Ham:

Ray shows the foolishness of the religion of atheism and helps the young people he speaks with to come to the realization that their atheism is not based on an intellectual position but a heart issue.

Who doesn’t want to hear about the foolishness of atheism and how there are no intellectual obstacles to believing Christianity?

Movie overview

The style is trademark Ray Comfort as he interviews a dozen or so atheists, mostly 20-somethings. We follow them as Ray works through his arguments, and at the end they’re all left with either a lot to think about or a commitment to follow Jesus. Throw in some nice graphics, take a few tangents, overlay some stirring music, and he’s done. Any subject who saw through Ray’s thin arguments and made him look foolish was cut from the movie to give the impression that this approach is devastating to the brittle worldview of any atheist.

The production quality was good, but one consequence of the high-quality audio caused a problem. You almost never see Ray himself, just the atheist of the moment. Often Ray would speak a seamless paragraph while we see the video cut between two or three subjects listening patiently. I see how that makes things visually more interesting, but it brings to mind old charges that in previous movies Ray had mixed and matched video segments to line up pleasing answers in response to questions, distorting what the subjects had actually said. When a subject says, “Yes,” what are they answering? Maybe it’s the “Have you changed your mind?” you hear in Ray’s voice. Or maybe it’s “Are you still an atheist?” spliced in from another part of the interview. (The Friendly Atheist pressed him on this question here in an interview about the movie.)

“Atheism destroyed with one scientific question . . .”

That got your attention, right? It’s the tag line for the movie’s trailer. Ray may be a science-denying apologist who refuses to be corrected on his childish understanding of evolution, but surely he’s not going to make a claim like that without something pretty compelling.

Or not. He gives people a book and asks, “Do you believe that book could’ve come about by accident?” That’s the scientific question. He then talks about how marvelous human DNA is and concludes that if the book had a maker, then DNA must have, too. It’s the Argument from Incredulity: “Golly, I can’t imagine a natural explanation for this, so it must be supernatural!”

Let’s revisit the “by accident” part. DNA didn’t come about by accident, it came about through mutation (random) and natural selection (not random). How many times has this guy been corrected on this? He can’t be that stupid, so I can only see willful ignorance. Telling the accurate story doesn’t suit his agenda, so he makes up an inaccurate one.

In fact, the sloppiness in DNA nicely defeats Ray’s Design Argument (more here).

“Could DNA make itself?”

Here’s another of Ray’s probing strawman questions. He lives in a simple world: DNA either made itself or God did it. But DNA didn’t make itself; chemistry made it. DNA was simply the result of unguided processes. Again, I have to wonder if this wording was clumsy or calculated.

He talked about how nicely fit we are to our environment, but of course that’s backwards. Remember Douglas Adams’ puddle that marveled how well its hole had been fit to itself.

“You’re an atheist, so you believe the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything.”

Wow. Where do you begin with this black hole of bullshit?

  • An atheist has no god belief. That’s it. Atheists can have any views on cosmology they want.
  • Cosmologists don’t say this.
  • “Scientific impossibility”? Show me. Pop philosophy is not helplful at the frontier of science.
  • What’s the problem with something coming from nothing? Isn’t that how you say God did it?
  • You’re still stuck on “created.” You imagine a cause, but there might not have been one. The Copenhagen model of physics argues that some events don’t have causes.

In an odd attack, he claims that Richard Dawkins says that nothing created everything. Analyzing the hamster wheel that drives Ray’s brain is tricky business, but here’s my theory. Richard Dawkins says it and he’s the pope of the atheists, so therefore all atheists must believe that nothing created everything. Conclusion: “You’re an atheist, so you believe the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything.”

I could begin by saying that I’m not bound by what Dawkins says, but Dawkins didn’t even say this. Ray’s evidence for his charge is a video of Dawkins speaking about physicist Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe From Nothing. Dawkins says, “Of course it’s counterintuitive that you can get something from nothing” . . . but how did we get from Comfort’s charge of “nothing created everything” to Dawkins’ defense of something possibly coming from nothing? Only in the hamster wheel are these equivalent.

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

In interviews years ago, I heard Ray explain his idiotic understanding of evolution. Say you have two lizards, and because of mutations, they give birth to a healthy monkey (cuz that’s what evolution says happens, right?). The monkey matures and looks for a mate, but since monkeys from lizards is quite rare, it can’t find a monkey of the opposite gender, so it dies without making more monkeys. Cue sad trombone sound.

In the movie, Ray goes down a similar line of “reasoning” to ask whether the chicken or the egg came first. He wonders where the rooster came from to fertilize the egg to continue the line. Then he asks whether it was the heart or the blood that evolved first. If the heart, what was it doing without blood? If the blood, how did it move with no heart? Ray’s questions are useful because they sometimes get a “Gee—I’ve never thought of that” from a layperson, not because they’re effective against a biologist, which would actually count for something.

Come to Jesus

The last third of the movie moves from “intellectual” arguments to the usual evangelism. You’re avoiding your conscience, you have selfish motives for denying what you know to be true, morals come from God, you just want to keep sinning, imagine if you died today, and more.

Several reviewers said they needed tissues. I needed a barf bag.

Then there’s Ray’s old standby, the Ten Commandments Challenge® (patent pending), in which he convicts people based on their failure to satisfy the Ten Commandments. Ray, did you forget that they don’t think the Bible is binding since they’re atheists?

(How the Ten Commandments don’t say what Ray thinks they do here.)

Ray’s project was, “Atheism destroyed with one scientific question,” but that was just clickbait. I didn’t notice a single correct scientific statement from Ray in the entire movie. The entire thing collapses into a pretentious pile of elementary emotional arguments, which, unfortunately, may be effective on people who haven’t thought much about these issues.

See also: Fat Chance: Why Pigs Will Fly Before Ray Comfort Writes an Honest Critique of Atheists

As for the contents of his skull,
they could have changed place with the contents of a pie
and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie.
— Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/29/16.)

Image credit: Living Waters

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Stupid Christian Argument #41: Polls to Resolve Scientific Issues

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Polls of the population can be interesting and informative:

  • the percent of prison population that are atheists vs. Christian,
  • the fraction of Republicans vs. Democrats who are Christian,
  • the gender mix of Christians or atheists,
  • the biggest issues troubling voters,
  • the most/least religious parts of the country or world,
  • how many Americans think the end times have arrived (41 percent, by the way),

and so on.

But public opinion polls may not be a good foundation on which to build government policy. In particular, public opinion should not dilute the scientific facts used to guide policy. Of course, elected officials must answer to their constituents, but the opinions of non-scientist constituents still count for nothing on any question of science. Politicians make policy, and scientists give us science’s best approximation to the truths of nature. “We should do nothing because acknowledging climate change is scary” is a policy option (a cowardly option, but one nonetheless), but “Climate change is a hoax that can be ignored” isn’t.

Creationism in public schools is another area where science steps on toes. Americans are embarrassingly clueless (perhaps willfully so) about evolution. 42 percent accept strict Creationism (God created humanity in the last 10,000 years), and an additional 31 percent accept guided evolution (evolution was tweaked by God). (Acceptance of evolution rises with education, which highlights the nonscientific agenda behind Creationism, but that’s an aside.)

Answers in Genesis said about this wide public acceptance of Creationism, “Although the vast majority of Americans desire both creation and evolution taught in school, the evolutionary naturalism worldview dominates, revealing a major disparity between the population and the ruling élite.” No, the disparity is between a population that to a large extent accepts the agenda of conservative and religious leaders on one hand and science on the other. Nonscientists don’t get to invent science.

The Discovery Institute tried to give a veneer of scholarship to the debate with its “Teach the controversy” campaign. They ask: if we’re talking about science, why can’t we present claims of both sides and let the students decide?

I wonder if they’ve thought this through. How would such a science class be graded? Would pastors be brought in to grade the tests of students who don’t like evolution? Would an answer, “I have a powerful feeling that the answer is . . .” automatically be correct? What about “I’d like the answer to be . . .”? And how many “controversies” do we teach—does only the biblical idea of Creation get to come in, or are we throwing the door open to humanity’s hundreds of origin myths?

In 2011, Texas governor Rick Perry put it this way, “In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools, because I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.”

Oh? And which one is right? How do you know? If you already know, why don’t we just teach that one instead of wasting class time teaching both? Or is “figure out which one is right” a personal thing so that any answer is correct?

“Teaching the controversy” isn’t what we do in science. We teach science in science class, not discarded theories like astrology, alchemy, or Creationism. And, of course, within biology, there is no controversy! This is a manufactured issue, and polls of citizens do not make science.

See also: Games Creationists Play: 7 Tricks to Watch Out For

“Who is the right god?” is like asking,
“What is the last decimal digit of pi?”
There are ten possible answers and none of them are right.
— commenter Greg G.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/27/16.)

Image from Aaron Vowels (license CC BY 2.0)
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Stupid Christian Argument #40: Interpret Difficult Passages in Light of Clear Ones

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How can Christians maintain their belief when the Bible is full of contradictions and instances of God’s barbarity? Let’s look at their secret weapon.

(This list of stupid arguments begins here.)

This argument is an attempt to wriggle away from Bible verses that make God or Christianity look bad or that contradict each other. “Interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones” is advice from Josh McDowell’s New Evidence that Demands a Verdict (page 48).

McDowell makes clear that difficult isn’t actually the issue—it’s contradictions that are the problem. They’re not difficult to understand, only to reconcile. For example, the epistle of James says that salvation is by works but Romans says that it’s by grace. The trick, McDowell tells us, is to find the interpretation that you like within the constellation of competing verses, bring that one forward, and either ignore the others or reinterpret them to be somehow subordinate to or supportive of your preferred interpretation. He doesn’t put it quite so bluntly, but that’s what he means.

The quest for the “clearer” passage has become a quest for the most pleasing (or least embarrassing) one.

The mere existence of what McDowell euphemistically calls “difficult” passages is a problem that few apologists admit to. How could verses conflict in a book inspired by a perfect god, even if some argument could be found to harmonize them? If conflicting verses exist, doesn’t that make the Bible look like nothing more than a manmade book? How could God give humanity a book that was at all unclear or ambiguous? What does it say that 45,000 Christian denominations have sprung up over varying interpretations of a single holy book?

And no, “I’ll just have to ask that of God when I see him in heaven” won’t do because the Bible must be self-contained. It has no purpose except to be clear and convincing to people here on earth.

See also:

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.
— Robert M. Pirsig

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/27/16.)

Image from Toa Heftiba (free-use license)
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Stupid Christian Argument #39: Were You There?

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The trough of stupid arguments sloppeth over once again, so let’s put on our hazmat suits and dive in. You can begin the list here. We’re well past our original goal of 25 arguments and still going.

“Were you there?” may be Creationist Ken Ham’s favorite line with which to infect students’ minds. In the Old Testament book of Job, God says, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.” Ken Ham paraphrases this into a challenge to anyone who summarizes what science knows—about evolution, about the Big Bang, or about anything that happened in the past. Ham’s challenge is, “Were you there?” In other words, shut up about events at which you weren’t present. The implied evidence-free corollary is, “Because if you weren’t there, God was!”

(Which demands the response: then why does God get pretty much every detail wrong? Biology, cosmology, archaeology, morality—on all of these, God looks less like the omniscient Creator of All and more like an Iron Age desert nomad. [h/t FB commenter Luci Walker])

Ham proudly wrote about nine-year-old Emma B. who took Ham’s advice and attacked a museum curator’s statement about the age of a moon rock with “Were you there?”

Biologist PZ Myers nicely deflated Ham’s anti-science bias with a gentle reply to Emma B. Myers pointed out that Ham’s “Were you there?” is intended to shut down discussion and is a question to which you already know the answer. Myers recommended instead, “How do you know that?” which is a question from which you can actually learn something.

“Were you there?” is a variation of the more general question, “Did you experience this with your own senses?” To Science, this question lost significance centuries ago. The days when Isaac Newton used taste as a method to understand new chemicals are long gone. Modern science uses instruments to reliably provide information about nature—from simple instruments like compasses, voltmeters, Geiger counters, and pH meters to complex ones like the Mars rovers, Hubble space telescope, LIGO gravity wave observatory, and Large Hadron Collider.

Not only is Ham’s question irrelevant, not only does it attempt to shut down discourse rather than expand it, it can be confronted directly.

Atheist: “This rock is 3.56 billion years old.”

Ken Ham: “How do you know? Were you there?”

Atheist: “I wasn’t, but the rock was, and that’s what it tells us when we use radiometric dating” (h/t commenter Jim Baerg).

And if Ham wants to play games, here’s an exchange he might enjoy:

Ken Ham: “You say there was no six-day creation? Well, Smart Guy, were you there?”

Atheist: “Why yes, as a matter of fact I was there.”

Ham: “No you weren’t!”

Atheist: “Oh? How do you know? Were you there?”

To rebut this ridiculous claim, Ham would have to use (shudder!) common sense, a tool that he doesn’t want introduced into the conversation because it is devastating to someone who wants to imagine a 6000-year-old earth, men rising from the dead, and a god who desperately wants a relationship with us but is apparently too shy to make plain his existence.

And if direct observation is so important to Ham, I wonder how he validates the Creation story—was he there?

(This ties in with Stupid Argument #6: Creationism.)

Continue: Stupid Christian Argument #40: Interpret Difficult Passages in Light of Clear Ones

Religion is just superstition
that has been around long enough
to have become respectable.
— JBR Yant

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/27/16.)

Image from Mark Timberlake (free-use license)
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12 More Puzzles

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I recently explored a specific kind of puzzle in “Counterintuitive Puzzles that Should Be Easy.” I’ve explored other puzzles to shed some light on the religion question: the Monty Hall problem and the Puzzle of the Hidden Dots. There is more to be said about the odd ways the human brain works, but let’s postpone that and simply enjoy a few more puzzles for their own sake this time.

Write your answers to the puzzles that were new to you and check them with the answers below.

Got any good puzzles that you use to stump your friends? Tell us about them in the comments.

Quick ones

Let’s start with some quick ones like those in the previous post. See if the intuitive answer is correct.

1. If fence posts are put in every 7 feet, how many posts are needed to make a fence 77 feet long?

2. If it takes a chiming clock 3 seconds to strike 6:00, how long does it take to strike midnight? Ignore the duration of the sound of each chime. (h/t commenter Richard S. Russell)

Word sense

3. An online parser can make sense out of the following sentences. Can you?

Here’s an example of a confusing sentence: “While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib.” That probably sounds odd until you mentally punctuate it like this: “While Anna dressed, the baby played in the crib.” Now try these:

  • The old man the boat.
  • While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods.
  • I convinced her children are noisy.
  • The coach smiled at the player tossed the Frisbee.
  • The cotton clothes are made up of grows in Mississippi.
  • The horse raced past the barn fell.

Easy physics puzzles

These are physics versions of the puzzles that should be easy to answer.

4. Where does the length of a year come from?

5. Why is it colder in the winter?

6. A rowboat is floating in a swimming pool. Inside the rowboat is a cannonball. Take the cannonball and drop it overboard. Does the water level on the side of the pool rise, fall, or stay the same?

Something must be wrong here

7. A friend of mine was from Iowa, and he said that there was quite a rivalry with the neighboring state of Missouri. Jokes were told in Iowa about how stupid Missourians were. They claimed that if Iowa gave those counties that bordered on Missouri to Missouri, it would raise the IQ of both states.

But wait a minute—there has to be something wrong with that. Both states can’t improve, right?

8. Proof that 1 = 2

  • Let a = b
  • Multiply both sides by a:

a2 = ab

  • Subtract b2 from each side:

a2 – b2 = ab – b2

  • Factor both sides:

(a – b)(a + b) = b(a – b)

  • Cancel (a – b) from both sides:

a + b = b

  • Substitute (remember that a = b):

a + a = a

  • Collect:

2a = a

  • Divide by a:

2 = 1 (But something has to be wrong here—what is it?)

Increasingly difficult puzzles

9. You’re in the middle of an island covered uniformly with a dense, dry forest. Lightning sets the north end of the forest on fire, and the wind is blowing to the south. The coast is cliffs all around, so you can’t jump into the water to wait out the fire. The fire will reach you in an hour, and all you have is a backpack with things typically taken on a hike. What can you do to save yourself?

10. You and I are going to meet at a cafe. The server delivers a coffee with milk on the side just as I get a text from you saying you will be 15 minutes late. Being the polite person that I am, I want to wait for you before drinking my coffee. If I want it to be as hot as possible, do I pour the milk in now or wait until you get here?

11. Suppose we have 6-sided dice that don’t have the usual numbers 1 through 6 on them. If my die has a 6 on every face and yours has a 5 on every face, we could roll our respective die and I would beat you every time. Now suppose I change to a die with faces {6, 6, 6, 6, 1, 1}. My die is still the better one, but now I would beat your all-5s die only 2/3 of the time. It’s easy to imagine die A being better than B, and B being better than C, but the puzzle is to make this loop around. That is, create dice such that A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A.

12. Does the balance tip to the right, tip to the left, or remain unchanged?

Click on the Continue below for hints and then answers.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion
but not their own facts.
— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/21/16.)

Image from stevepb (free-use license)

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