God: The Failed Hypothesis (13 page)

It is notable that this study was not conducted by a bunch of “closed-minded skeptical materialistic atheists” but rather physicians of religious faith who personally believe that alternatives to conventional scientific medicine are worth pursuing. There can be little doubt what, in their hearts, they wanted to see. The lead author, Mitchell Krucoff, was ecstatic when the first results started coming in. In November 2001 he told a media outlet: “We saw impressive reductions in all of the negative outcomes—the bad outcomes that were measured in the study. What we look for routinely in cardiology trials are outcomes such as death, a heart attack, or the lungs filling with water—what we call congestive heart failure—in patients who are treated in the course of these problems. In the group randomly assigned to prayer therapy, there was a 50 percent reduction in all complications and a 100 percent reduction in major complications
⁴⁸
.” But as the significance of the data improved, the situation turned out otherwise. Since he signed the paper, Krucoff is now apparently satisfied with the published conclusion that no effect of prayer has been observed.

A coauthor of the
Lancet
paper was Harold Koenig, who directs the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University in which Krucoff and other coauthors are participants.

Koenig is the author of over a dozen book books on healing and faith
⁴⁹
. There can be no doubt that Koenig, also a person of faith, would like nothing better than to announce the discovery of evidence for the supernatural healing power of prayer. But Koenig is an honest and competent scientist who is not going to make such an announcement until the data warrant it. I have communicated extensively with him and find we have little disagreement on the fact that, after extensive experimentation, any positive benefits of prayer and other religious exercises that may be currently indicated can be understood in terms of physical processes alone. He is also in agreement with Bishop’s and my refutation of the claims of efficacy for retroactive prayer.

The Step Project

Perhaps the definitive work is the mammoth
STEP
project (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer), a collaboration of six medical centers, including Harvard and the Mayo Clinic, lead by Harvard professor Herbert Benson
⁵⁰
. This study, lasting for almost a decade, involved 1,802 patients who were prayed for over a fourteen-day period starting the night before receiving coronary artery bypass graft (
CABG
) surgery.

The patients were randomly and blindly divided into three groups: 604 received intercessory prayers after being informed they might or might not receive such prayers, 597 did not receive prayers after being informed they might or might not receive such prayers, and 601 received intercessory prayers after being informed they definitely would be prayed for. None of the doctors knew who was being prayed for in the first two groups. Two Catholic groups and one Protestant group carried out the praying. It apparently did not occur to the investigators to also include a group of atheists thinking nice thoughts.

The published results showed that in the two groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52 percent (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51 percent (304/597) of those who did not. Complications occurred in 59 percent (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52 percent of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer. Major events and thirty-day mortality were similar across the three groups.

The authors concluded that intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from
CABG
, but certain knowledge of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications. The later effect somewhat surprised the investigators, who speculated that these patients may have experienced higher anxiety, perhaps thinking they were so desperately ill that they needed to be prayed for. No one suggested that God was deliberately thwarting the expectations of the researchers. Actually, I do not regard this effect as significant.

The investigators included a Catholic priest, Father Dean Marek, who was principal investigator of the Mayo Clinic portion of the study, and other believers. Primary funding of $2.5 million was provided by the John Templeton Foundation, which seeks to find connections between religion and science, so skeptics cannot be blamed for deliberately producing negative results. They were not even involved. Father Marek and other coauthors have tried to account for why prayers do not work within a theological context, but they are to be commended for accepting the data and admitting they did not work in their particular experiment.

As was the case for the special powers of the mind termed “psychic,” studies of the supernatural powers of prayer have so far produced no convincing results. If prayer were as important as it is taken to be by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, its positive effects should be obvious and measurable. They are not. It does not appear—based on the scientific evidence—that a God exists who answers prayers in any significant, observable way.

Immortality

For many if not most believers, the greatest appeal of religion is the promise of eternal life. St. Paul said, “And if Christ not be risen then is our preaching in vain, and your faith is also vain
⁵¹
.”

In his classic work
The Illusion of Immortality,
philosopher Corliss Lamont surveyed all the aspects of the subject of immortality, from theological and philosophical to scientific and social
⁵²
.

He points out that the exact nature of the immortality that is preached in Christianity, as well as in other religions, is not at all clear, with many different doctrines being presented over the ages.

Part of the problem is one that we can recognize from the earlier discussion on the brain. What is it exactly that survives death?

We have seen that neurological and medical evidence strongly indicates that our memories, emotions, thoughts, and indeed our very personalities reside in the physical particles of the brain or, more precisely, in the ways those particles interact. So this would seem to say that when our brains die, we die.

Historically, the Catholic Church has taught that the full body is resurrected. The Apostles’ Creed, adopted in the second century and still recited, states that there will be a resurrection of the flesh. The Council of Trent in the sixteenth century asserted that the “identical body” will be restored “without deformities.” St.

Augustine declared that “the substance of our bodies, however disintegrated, shall be entirely reunited
⁵³
.”

This doctrine would seem to satisfy any objection raised by recognition of the physical nature of mind. God simply reassembles us—brain and all—and the brain contains our personalities.

Presumably, in heaven we will look as we did at eighteen, but we can hardly expect the same brain that was in our bodies at that age.

Heaven forbid! I guess we get the brain we die with, so we have all our memories. But, then, what if we die with Alzheimer’s disease?

We need not go any further into these unconfirmable speculations (at least unconfirmable in this life). The scientific question is whether there is any evidence for life after death. As with
ESP
and other proposed super powers of the mind, despite numerous claims over the years, no claimed connection with a hereafter has ever been scientifically verified. And, as with those special powers, we can easily see how a connection should have been verified in controlled, scientific experiments.

Consider the case of psychics or mediums who claim they have the power to speak to the dead. Such spirits surely would have access to a deep store of information from which some observable phenomenon currently unknown to science can be extracted that could not have been in the psychic’s head all along.

For example, suppose a psychic informs his client that her dead mother told him where to find a long-lost engagement ring—behind the kitchen stove. If the ring is then found at that place, it would indeed seem to be miraculous.

However, before accepting this result as confirmation of the extraordinary hypotheses of life after death and the psychic’s power to communicate with the dead, you have to rule out all possible ordinary explanations. For example, the psychic may have visited his client at home at some earlier time, seen the ring sitting alongside the sink where it had been removed to wash dishes, and surreptitiously dropped it behind the stove (yes, psychics have been known to cheat). That, and similar possibilities, would have to be ruled out first. But, if properly designed, experiments proving immortality are in principle possible. All that has to happen is for the psychic to receive information from his contact in the other world that he has no way of knowing ahead of time-say, the exact date of the future earthquake that levels Los Angeles.

Another commonly reported phenomenon that is used to claim evidence for an afterlife is the
near-death experience
(
NDE
).

People very close to death who then survive often report seeing a tunnel with light at the end of it and someone beckoning to them in the light. Since the person was never brain-dead, she cannot be said to have come back from the dead. However, the claim is that she saw a sign of the world beyond at the end of the tunnel.

I provided an extensive critique of experiments on near-death experiences in
Has Science Found God
⁵⁴
?
There we found that none provide any evidence for an afterlife. See also the book by Susan Blackmore
⁵⁵
.

In a well-balanced assessment of the evidence of near-death experiences,
Religion, Spirituality, and the Near-Death Experience,
Mark Fox concludes: “This needs to be spelled out loudly and clearly: twenty-five years after the coining of the actual phrase ‘near-death experience,’ it remains to be established beyond doubt that during such an experience anything actually leaves the body.

To date, and claims to the contrary notwithstanding, no researcher has provided evidence for such an assertion of an acceptable standard which would put the matter beyond doubt
⁵⁶
.”

In short, after over a century of unsuccessful attempts to find convincing scientific evidence for the almost universally desired immortal and immaterial soul, it seems very unlikely that it, and a God who provides us with such a gift, exists.

Modern Theologies of Soul

Contemporary theologians are far from unaware that scientific developments in biology and neuroscience have undermined traditional beliefs about the soul and human nature. Theologian Nancey Murphy has written, “Science has provided a massive amount of evidence suggesting that we need not postulate the existence of an entity such as a soul or mind in order to account for life and consciousness
⁵⁷
.”

Murphy sees this as a serious theological problem, that Cartesian dualism is no longer tenable. She is certainly correct on that.

However, she is unwilling to concede that the only option remaining is “reductive materialism,” which she regards as incompatible with Christian teaching (not a scientific reason).

Instead she has joined other theologians in proposing what she calls
nonreductive physicalism.
In this view, “The person is a physical organism whose complex functioning, both in society and in relation to God, gives rise to ‘higher’ human capacities such as morality and spirituality
⁵⁸
.”

Computer simulations of complex systems have uncovered a property that has provided Murphy and others what they think may be a scientific alternative to reductive materialism that has theological implications. These simulations have revealed unexpected features for systems as a whole that are not present in their various parts. This property is called
emergence
and is said to tes-tify to a new holistic reality in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Psychologist Warren S. Brown suggests that the neurocognitive system has such emergent functions that cannot be reduced to “lower abilities,” although he admits it would not exist without those lower abilities. Further, he claims, without evidence, that the human cognitive system has the ability of “down-ward causative influence” on those lower abilities
⁵⁹
. Brown argues that the notion of “interpersonal interrelatedness” that emerges corresponds to the Christian experience of soul
⁶⁰
.

If what emerges may be called the soul, it is still the product of purely material processes. Nothing supernatural is taking place, and God is an unnecessary ingredient. The wetness of water is an emergent property of H20 molecules, but that doesn’t imply the existence of some immaterial thing called wetness. Human and animal mental processes look just as they can be expected to look if there is no soul or other immaterial component.

As discussed above, physical processes display no properties that cannot be simply reduced to the localized interactions of its parts by well-known laws of physics that require some new “holistic” principles. Those properties follow from the same reducible physics as do the hardness of rock and the wetness of water.

In any case, whether reductive or not, the emergent properties of the purely physical brain and body do not survive their deaths.

The nonreductive physicalist soul is not an immortal immaterial soul—not even a mortal immaterial soul. Once again it appears that a God with a traditional attribute of the monotheistic God, one who endows humans with immortal immaterial souls, does not exist
⁶¹
.

Notes

¹
Carl Zimmer,
Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain
—
and How It Changed the World
(New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 9-11.