The Great Chain

The Great Chain

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

The Uselessness of Prayer

We are creatures who crave causation. We see an effect and we look for a cause. Unlike any other creature, our intelligence leads us to the inescapable conclusion that when something happens, something else must have caused it to happen. While this is one of the hallmarks of our intelligence, it often leads to erroneous conclusions, and gross misattributions especially when the effects which we are attempting to explain have multiple causes, or whose causes are not readily apparent.  Nothing illustrates our tendency to misattribute cause than the belief in the efficacy of prayer.

We crave causation because it provides us with the illusion that if we can control the cause, we can control the outcome. The idea of an interventionist deity is the ultimate expression of this primal craving for a knowable causation. Early humans had little to no understanding of the underlying mechanics of the world they inhabited. The idea that the landforms they walked were the result of complex geological and hydrological processes operating over billions of years would have been utterly unfathomable to an early human. The idea that the weather that battered or blessed their crops arose due to the complex interplay between those landforms and thermal, pressure and humidity gradients that are themselves driven by the sun's influence on atmospheric and oceanic conditions would have been incomprehensible. Early humans could see the effect of weather, could even track the budding symptoms of weather to come, but utterly lacked any knowledge of the cause.

Gods were a simple answer to an unimaginably complex set of questions. Why did the weather do what it did? Why does the sea do what it does? Because the gods are angry or benevolent or a million other human emotions. By assigning human emotions to the divine and by then assigning those emotions to some physical manifestation, that primordial craving for an underlying cause is satisfied. More importantly, if these physical manifestations can be explained by some divine emotional state, it places complex physical systems under human control, because if we could somehow alter the emotional state of the divine, placate it through prayer, meditation, sacrifice, or otherwise, we can ultimately exert control over our physical environment. And so throughout human history, men have prayed, meditated, pleaded and sacrificed in the hopes of exerting control over the physical world by appealing to the fickle emotions of a million different divinities.

When I was growing up, I was told that “God always answers prayers, its just that often the answer is 'No.' or 'Wait.'” Looking back, I cannot help but marvel at the amazing psychology behind such a sentiment.

Even the strictest and most literal adherents to religious dogma cannot avoid the manifestly obvious truth that simply praying for something to occur in no way ensures that it will. Anyone who has ever prayed for anything must admit that at some point they have earnestly even desperately prayed for something that did not come to pass. Indeed, anyone who has ever prayed will probably be willing to admit that MANY of the things they pray for do not actually come to pass.

Prayer is ultimately a totemic, talismanic invocation no different than sacrificing a chicken or a goat, blowing on dice before a throw at craps or wearing a lucky jersey to a sporting event. Obviously, blowing on dice before a toss in no way guarantees a positive outcome. Indeed, the chances of obtaining the desired result is not in any way modified by our actions. Obviously sacrificing a chicken to Asherah or Baal or Zeus is not going to alter the weather to ensure that my crops will flourish. Obviously, wearing a lucky jersey, even a jersey that you have worn to many games, in no way guarantees that the outcome of the sporting event will be desirable. Indeed, it has no impact on the game whatsoever. Yet we continue to engage in such pointless activities because it is a means of satisfying our need for control. Humans pray because it satisfies a deep seated need to exercise some degree of control over the outcome of events.

The sentiment that God always answers prayers, even if that answer is WAIT or NO is merely a clever way of accounting for the fact that ultimately prayer has absolutely nothing to do with the outcome of any given event. It is an illusion.  Many will vehemently disagree and cite anecdotal and personal stories wherein they were praying for some specific result and they obtained it. And there are, of course, studies that laud the psychological benefits of prayer. I do not doubt the veracity of such anecdotes and studies, but think that they again, fail to deal with the proper chain of causation and are ultimately a manifestation of gross causal misattribution.

Prayer is an utterly useless and meaningless activity insofar as it seeks to obtain some sort of divine intervention. However, Prayer, like meditation, is exceedingly useful in focusing the human mind. When we pray, when we focus our minds on a specific objective. We often obtain clarity of thought and clarity of action that we would otherwise lack, BECAUSE we are thinking about it, we are exerting our time and energy in a problem solving endeavor. That allows us to take more productive and effective steps towards achieving our goal and increasing our chances of attaining it. To be sure, under such circumstances, prayer is an effective tool for achieving a certain end, but make no mistake, such prayers are not effective because some invisible sky wizard has listened to your pleas and decided to intercede on your behalf. That is a fallacy of misattribution.

When prayer is effective it is effective because you have taken productive steps to better your circumstances. You have concentrated. You have focused. You have exerted the energy necessary to consider whatever problem you are facing and confront it with greater clarity or knowledge than you would have otherwise possessed. What your prayers have done is changed YOU, not facilitated the intervention of some higher being.

I will never understand the religious obsession with the power of prayer. Prayer is at best a crap shoot. It is a complete and utter failure at least as often as it allegedly succeeds. I never pray. Ever. Yet shockingly, things that I want to happen, specifically, those things that I work hard for, happen with far greater frequency than those things where I simply wish and hope for a positive outcome. The simple truth is that God, even assuming He exists, does not answer prayer.

Put yourself in God's shoes for a moment. Ask yourself if you would answer the prayers of a single bacteria on the other side of the world. Would you? Would you even be aware of its existence? Would you care about its plight? Would you care about its earnest pleas for help? Or would you ignore this utterly inconsequential creature because you have more important things to do? The simple truth is that we are even less to the Creator of the Universe than a bacteria is to us and our pleas, no matter how earnest, no matter how heartfelt, are simply beneath the notice of such a being.

Indeed, to presume that such a being would actually take the time and make the effort to deal with our utterly mundane and cosmically meaningless problems is an ideology of breathtaking arrogance and surpassing narcissism. Indeed, so petty and small are our trivial concerns that they scarcely register in the life cycle of this planet, let alone in any wider cosmic sense. To presume that such a being, who has presumably existed for tens of billions of years and will presumably exercise sovereignty for countless trillions of years beyond, would be the slightest bit concerned or the slightest bit interested in the transitory, ephemeral concerns that plague our comically brief existence is utterly laughable. To presume that such a being would actually take the time to intervene in the affairs of the world and answer the petty incantations of our trivial species borders on insanity. To believe that such a being would lower itself to act as our cosmic servant, endlessly answering our pointless, self-centered, prayers and catering to our endless, contradictory whims is insultingly silly and denigrating to such a being.

There is no one intervening on our behalf. No invisible men or women flitting through the ether and making sure that all our dreams come true. But take heart, because the fact that God doesn't answer your prayers could not be less important. God doesn't answer any prayers. He never has. He never will.

Take heart, because neither you, nor we as a species are powerless. God doesn't answer prayers, but humans do. Humans answer prayers all the time. Normally, all we need do is ask. When we need help, when we ask, and we receive some unexpected kindness or aid, or comfort, or love, it is not God answering our supplications, but our brothers and sisters. Our kin. Our kind.

13 comments:

  1. Maybe you are too concerned with the outcome of prayer to understand the meaning of it...Prayers are answered every day, every time you ask for something or will something to happen that is out of your power is prayer...If you pray to God or Satan or to some human being, you are still praying(asking or willing something to happen). I wouldn't say I'm Christian or claim any religion, but I know when you turn your mind off to certain things you will never be able to reap the benefits of them. Maybe you are just too spiritually blind and too absorbed in the material outcome of whatever you ask for, in other words you are too selfish to reap the benefits of prayer...I pray for you and your family to not turn people away from the power of something because you have not experienced it or have no patience or don't hold the capacity for belief or faith...So be it..Amen

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  2. I'd say that your understanding of God is flawed. An omniscient God is fully capable of knowing exactly what you need. Sometimes, what is best is that you take the initiative, instead of God doing everything for you. Why is that best? Because, assuming God is completely benevolent and your creator, than it follows that His gifts that He gave to you were given for you to use them. A human being is not becoming more and more itself, if it never uses its skills. What God wants, is to help you make your own decisions, not make them for you. If He is the creator and a benevolent God, than He desires you to be you, the way He created you.

    Consider prayer in light of assistance for humans to achieve what they were meant to achieve.

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  3. @ Anon 1

    Clearly you did not actually read - I don't DENY there are psychological benefits to the act, merely that the act of prayer does not CAUSE an invisible sky man to intervene and cause X or ~X to happen.

    @ Anon 2

    1. I don't actually believe there is a God. There is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of an invisible sky man who created the great all of the Universe. Even less evidence that such a being would take the slightest interest in or actively intervene in the affairs of creatures as cosmically insignificant as us.

    2. Yahweh is clearly not omniscient as evidenced by the fact that he regretted creating the world. Omniscient CANNOT regret because it means they either did not SEE it coming or were powerless to stop it.

    3. Yahweh is not benevolent as evidenced by his warlike tendencies, his rage, his demands for genocide, his express advocacy of slavery, his misogyny, his cruelty, his bloodlust, his decision to condemn sapient beings for all eternity because they insufficiently flattered his ego.

    4. God didn't create me - the combination of my parent's DNA did that without any help from above. Biology is clutch like that.

    5. If HE is the Creator and a Benevolent God, then He desires me to be me the way he Created me, which is as a skeptic who he intended from the beginning to damn to hell for all eternity because he 'cursed' me with inquisitiveness? Your Calvinism is showing. That is neither free, nor benevolent since it indicates that he created me to be me so he could throw me in Hell for countless quadrillions of years based on a few mealsy decades of skepticism? That's just stupid.

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  4. This is all you need to know about the usefulness of prayer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk6ILZAaAMI

    It sums up Jeffrey's point rather nicely. You can open your mind or spirit or whatever all you want but at the end of the day, you're just talking to a milk jug and nothing is going to change unless you change it.

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  5. I was considering this very point just the other day, but of course once again, you have summed it up better than I ever could. Thank you.

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  6. Nice post. It seems to me that prayer is ultimately counter productive. If anything prayer creates a type of cognitive blindness to relevant information (external factors as well as internal insights)in the hope for divine intervention. It's better to be mindfull and aware.

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  7. merely that the act of prayer does not CAUSE an invisible sky man to intervene and cause X or ~X to happen.

    Which is exactly the point of my stating.
    What God does is not "act like superman," such an answer would be insulting, as if giving a child the remote to an R/C toy, and then snatching it away from them.

    Omniscient CANNOT regret because it means they either did not SEE it coming or were powerless to stop it.

    It is possible to state that God does see, and that He is not powerless. But when you say "he regretted creating the world."

    It would not follow that He did not know about something that happened. Only that his emotion was one of regret at the actions of men, once again, you don't seem to grasp these concepts.

    As for His benevolence, wars and genocide and the slavery of men were not realities made by such a God, but they were by men. You still don't understand. Primarily, the way one should read these actions would be with Ex 21:24 eye for an eye as key. God in that instance established retributive parity. Why? because the world was not at parity, Men killed indiscriminately and for little reason.

    The story of those early books is about the establishment of God's law on a people. That is why they call it a "Torah." Not only is it a set of divine laws, but an anthropology of why God made them.

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  8. @ Anon,

    1. Thanks for agreeing that God doesn't answer prayer. Glad we got that cleared up.

    2. God doesn't regret the actions of men. He regrets HIS actions in creating the whole world and decides to wipe the whole damn thing out, men, birds, beasts, trees, everything because he gets in a snit. And if God is omniscient, why did he bother to create such flawed, faulty beings. By your own logic, it's his fault.

    3. God provides safe harbor laws for slavery. He demands that his people invade the lands of their neighbors, take their lands and slaughter their inhabitants. This isn't retributive parity - the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Cananites, who lived in Palestine before the Hebrews hadn't done anything to them - it's terrorism and genocide.

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  9. 1. Nowhere have I said this.

    2. He wiped out men but...Noah? Guess he missed that one? How about you consider a gardener analogy, God planted and regretted that he did because the whole was diseased, yet he found one part which was not, and decided to trim the rest for the sake of Noah and his family. Regretting the planting, knowing that men had sinned, then sending a flood in, and saving Noah are all events which do not suggest He was not aware of them. You cannot say x God regretted His action, and then state, God did not know what would happen. You cannot say that God created faulty beings, but only that they have the capacity to be faulty, because freedom of choice existed in them. If I give a statue freedom and that statue decided something, that decision was not mine, nor my fault by the strict definition of the freedom I gave to it.

    3 God provides laws regulating everything when no laws existed, do you get the point? No laws were there which could say that one action was better than another. Making laws established parity for the behavior of the people he was going to send many more prophets to. This is an example of God teaching men proper behavior piece by piece, not suggesting slavery is not objectively immoral, but that humanity had to be brought to a point where they could accept and live with the knowledge that it was so.

    As for genocide, look at the history of the region, wars were fought for all sorts of reasons, booty and slaves being the biggest. Notice in scripture wherever God says: "slay them all" (1 sam 15:3) these commands occur after the people had been used to dividing up booty before then? (Num 31:15-18) God intentionally changed the nature of War for the Israelites so that killing was not over slaves and booty. That is an example of the gradual changes to human behavior. Because God does not deal with automatons, he has to persuade and instruct and teach. God also knows that killing a person does not end their ultimate fate in eternity, so it is hard to say what has happened to those people in paradise. Presumably, those truly innocent are there already.

    Remember the prescription that we do not kill is based on the fact that we do not have a right over the life of another, God as the creator however does.

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  10. 1. Actually you did in the previous post.

    2. Omniscient beings do not plant diseased crops. They KNOW better. They have foreknowledge. If they go ahead and plant diseased crops anyway, then they're either cataclysmically stupid or incredibly malevolent.

    3. What are you talking about that no laws existed? Laws existed LONG before the Torah and the Talmud existed. I don't mean to be rude, but such a statement is patently false and reveals a deep cultural and historical ignorance. The Code of Hammurabi, Code of Ur-Nammu, Eshnunna Codes, Codes of Lipit Ishtar all predate the Mosaic Law. Indeed, reading the Mosaic Law, it is obvious that much of it was cribbed directly from the preceding legal codes.

    And rather than wasting half of the Ten Commandments on self-pleasing pap (1-4) and thought crimes (9), Yahweh could easily have just said: Do not enslave your fellow man. Simple. Elegant. Clear. Instead, Yahweh advocates slavery and allows you to beat slaves so severely that so long as they die the next day it isn't even a sin.

    This says nothing about the codes of laws from the far east which predated Mosaic Law by a few thousands of years.

    3. God demanded that an itinerant people seize the lands of their neighbors and slaughter the inhabitants. If a stateless group of individuals today decided that their God told them to make war upon their neighbors and slaughter their inhabitants, we would declare war against them. Wait, we already did. They're called al Qaeda.

    4. By the logic in your final paragraph, a mother and father have the right to kill their children because they are their Creators. That is just stupid. Creation does not grant such license over living beings which is why the 'what right hath the clay to question the potter' argument is such rubbish. It falls to pieces when it extends to living beings.

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  11. "2. He wiped out men but...Noah? Guess he missed that one? How about you consider a gardener analogy, God planted and regretted that he did because the whole was diseased, yet he found one part which was not, and decided to trim the rest for the sake of Noah and his family. Regretting the planting, knowing that men had sinned, then sending a flood in, and saving Noah are all events which do not suggest He was not aware of them. You cannot say x God regretted His action, and then state, God did not know what would happen. You cannot say that God created faulty beings, but only that they have the capacity to be faulty, because freedom of choice existed in them. If I give a statue freedom and that statue decided something, that decision was not mine, nor my fault by the strict definition of the freedom I gave to it."

    Even after commissioning Noah to build such a big boat and gathering all the animals and then flood the earth, the plan to eliminate all evil and wickedness, it didn't work, we still have evil and wickedness.

    After all that, do you still insist to believe there exists a god that stupid?

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  12. *slow clap building up to a brisk applause* Jeffrey...you are my hero! XD

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  13. Excellent post. Stumbled and tweeted.

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