“Faith” has two meanings. It can be permission to believe without a good reason, or it can be belief well grounded in evidence. Changing the definition as necessary is a game that many Christians play.

We find a similar have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach with Greg Koukl, a popular Christian apologist from Stand to Reason who responded in contradictory ways to two similar tragedies.

Case 1: critical injury to a staff member

In a podcast just before Christmas a few years ago, Koukl talked about the health of Melinda, a staff member who was in critical condition after a recent head injury. His appeal for prayer was what you’d expect.

I don’t know what God’s thinking about things, but I know what Christians are doing and I hope you’re doing with us—you’re praying like crazy. And that’s what we want you to keep doing—praying Melinda out of this….

Lots of people have come out of [medical situations like this without supernatural assistance], but with God’s help, of course, that gives us a massive leg up and that’s why your prayers for Melinda and for the Stand to Reason team are the most important thing right now….

God is holding us up. He’s keeping us on our feet, which I attribute to his grace and to your prayers, so keep it up.

Koukl isn’t downplaying expectations with tepid claims for prayer that it’s meditative or therapeutic for the person praying. No, he’s making the familiar Christian claim that prayer is useful. It causes positive, big change. It delivers in the here and now.

Case 2: Texas church shooting

Six weeks earlier, Koukl responded to another tragedy within the Christian community. A shooter had killed 25 and wounded 20 in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas on November 5, 2017.

Presumably, people in a church in fear for their lives were doing a lot of praying. That obviously didn’t stop the injuries and deaths. Koukl illustrated this with a couple of comments from atheists: “The murdered victims were in a church! If prayers did anything, they’d still be alive” and, “It seems your direct line to God is not working.”

Christian response: be careful critiquing worldviews

Koukl responded that it’s a mistake to critique another worldview from inside your own. He illustrated his point with an exchange during a Christopher Hitchens debate with Jay Richards. Hitchens said, “Do you believe in the resurrection?” When Richards assented, Hitchens responded, “I rest my case.”

Here’s an example of mine that I think illustrates Koukl’s point. Suppose Hitchens was making lasagna and Richards was making barbeque pork. Now imagine Hitchens criticizes Richards by saying, “You can’t use barbeque sauce in Italian cuisine.” That may be true, but the rules of Italian cuisine don’t apply to barbeque recipes. Similarly, “Resurrections are ridiculous” is true within atheism but not Christianity.

The first problem with Koukl’s point is that atheism isn’t a worldview. It’s just one answer (“No”) to one question (“Do you have a god belief?”). What he wants to respond to instead is a naturalistic worldview, the belief that only natural, not supernatural, forces operate in the universe.

The second problem is that Richards already does pretty much accept that worldview—that evidence is important, that hypotheses should be tested, and so on. I’m sure he uses evidence to cross a street, learn a language, or select medical treatment. (Of course, Richards would reject any claim that only natural forces are in effect.) When followers of Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba claim that he could be in two places at once or when Uri Geller claimed to be using the supernatural rather than performing stage magic, I’m sure Richards is as skeptical as the typical atheist.

It’s not like there are two worldviews, Christianity and naturalism, and they’re equally plausible. Naturalism is the default. We all accept that science informs us so well because it takes a naturalistic approach. Christians live in a house of naturalism, but they go into their Christian room from time to time.

The value of prayer

Despite what he would soon say about prayer’s value in Melinda’s situation, Koukl said,

People from the outside think for some reason (and maybe Christians have given them reason to think this) but that if God really does exist and we pray to him, then we get what we want from God, which includes physical protection.

Koukl may not think it works this way, but Jesus did:

I tell you the truth, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete (John 16:23–4).

The story eliminates any second-guessing about caveats when we read a few verses later,

Then Jesus’s disciples said, “Now you are speaking clearly and without figures of speech” (John 16:29).

See also: National Day of Prayer Wasting Time

Koukl continues:

It strikes me as such an absurd thought, why anybody who has even a modest understanding of Christianity and the history of what Christians have endured for thousands of years . . . [would] think that this [shooting] is somehow inconsistent with Christianity.

Uh, because Jesus promised that prayers are answered? Or is this a trick question?

Jesus promised persecution

Koukl next claims that we shouldn’t expect protection from murderers. To underscore this, we get a little persecution porn as Koukl ticks off verses where Jesus promised that Christians will be persecuted.

Do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. (1 Peter 4:12–13)

[Jesus said:] “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:10)

Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you. (1 John 3:13)

Koukl tells us that prayer works and that we should pray for Melinda, and the Bible agrees (“Ask and you will receive”). But he laughs at the foolish atheists who think that God would answer prayers for protection against a murder.

Koukl again:

There is … no rationale, no line of thinking that if God does exist that only good things happen to people, particularly people who believe in God, especially Christians.

Nope. The Bible promises exactly that in both the Old Testament and the New:

The LORD will keep you from all harm—he will watch over your life (Psalm 121:7; see also 34:17).

No harm overtakes the righteous, but the wicked have their fill of trouble (Proverbs 12:21).

We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the One who was born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them (1 John 5:18).

Let’s return to the issue as Koukl himself raised it. The original atheist objection was: “The murdered victims were in a church! If prayers did anything, they’d still be alive.” And those objections were correct.

Koukl juggles two Bible claims, that Christians will have hardships and that Jesus promised that prayers are answered. He takes the typical Christian route of encouraging prayer when it suits him, but when slapped with inconvenient evidence that prayer does nothing, he reminds us that Christians will have hardships.

This does nothing to fill the awkward silence when Christians pray for something and only chance replies.

Prayer is an act of doubt, not faith.
If you really thought your god was watching over everything
and you genuinely trusted in his “plan,”
you wouldn’t be praying in the first place.
— seen on the internet

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.

See also: The most powerful argument against Christianity

Give a man a fish,
and you’ll feed him for a day;
give him a religion,
and he’ll starve to death while praying for a fish.
— Anonymous

In early 2012, Washington state declared an epidemic for pertussis (whooping cough). Pertussis hadn’t been this bad for decades. The 2500 cases during the outbreak was more than ten times higher than the previous year.

Before routine child vaccination in the 1940s, pertussis caused thousands of fatalities annually in the U.S.

You might imagine that this is a story about anti-vaxers, afraid of a perceived vaccine-autism link, who refused to vaccinate their children and helped create this epidemic. Not this time. The anti-vaccine movement seems not to have been a factor.

Instead, the interesting angle on this story is not disease prevented by vaccine but disease prevented by prayer. Kingdom League International, an online ministry based in western Washington, said in a brief article titled “Whooping Cough Epidemic Halted in Jefferson County”:

Churches in Jefferson County [one of those hardest hit by the statewide epidemic] used our strategy to mobilize prayer and establish councils to connect in 7 spheres of society [the Dominionists’ Seven Spheres of Influence]. On Mar 27 they met and a County Commissioner asked them to pray about the whooping cough epidemic. … As of April 13 there has not been one case reported. From epidemic proportions to zero.

A bold claim, but the question is whether we can find natural explanations besides prayer to explain the facts. We can. Epidemics peak and then diminish, particularly when there’s an effective health system in place that can administer vaccines. There were 21 confirmed cases for this county in 2012, with no new cases since mid-April. Is this remarkable? Is this unexplained by the efforts of the public health system? This looks to me like an epidemic that’s simply run its course.

I jumped into a discussion with the author in the comment section. Aside from being quickly asked my faith status (though I’m not sure how this affects one’s ability to evaluate evidence), I got the expected tsunami of miracle claims—a bad knee healed, a barren woman now pregnant, lung cancer cured, demons cast out, blindness healed, a stroke patient recovering, a rainstorm to break a heat wave, a cracked rib healed, and so on.

(For comparison, consider the pinnacle of medical cure sites, Lourdes. After 150 years as a pilgrimage site and with six million visitors per year, the Catholic Church has recognized just 67 miraculous cures.)

I pointed out to my Kingdom League correspondent that natural explanations hadn’t been ruled out. Surprisingly, he had no interest in doing so.

I tried to portray this as a missed opportunity. If any of the many healing claims were more than just anecdotal, this group should create a dossier of x-rays, test results, photographs, or other evidence, both before and after the miracle. Add the report of the doctor who witnessed the change and then show this to the Centers for Disease Control or an epidemiologist or some other qualified authority. Why hide your light under a basket? Jesus had no problem using miracles to prove his divinity.

There seems to be no shortage of these miracles (at least in their minds), so if one miracle claim isn’t convincing, then pray for some more and try again to convince the skeptics.

That this group has no interest in going beyond feel-good anecdotes makes me think that they understand that their claims wouldn’t withstand scrutiny, not because skeptics wouldn’t play fair, but because honestly evaluating the claims would show them to be little more than wishful thinking. Their purpose in celebrating these “answers to prayer” isn’t in convincing others but convincing themselves.

Pray v. To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled
on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/31/12.)

Photo credit: AJC1