The GOD Delusion (10 page)

An
amusing, if rather pathetic, case study in miracles is the Great Prayer
Experiment: does praying for patients help them recover? Prayers are
commonly offered for sick people, both privately and in formal places
of worship. Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was the first to analyse
scientifically whether praying for people is efficacious. He noted that
every Sunday, in churches throughout Britain, entire congregations
prayed publicly for the health of the royal family. Shouldn't they,
therefore, be unusually fit, compared with the rest of us, who are
prayed for only by our nearest and dearest?* Galton looked into it, and
found no statistical difference. His intention may, in any case, have
been satirical, as also when he prayed over randomized plots of land to
see if the plants would grow any faster (they didn't).

*
When my Oxford college elected the Warden whom I quoted earlier, it
happened that the Fellows publicly drank his health on three successive
evenings. At the third of these dinners, he graciously remarked in his
speech of reply: 'I'm feeling better already.'

More
recently, the physicist Russell Stannard (one of Britain's three
well-known religious scientists, as we shall see) has thrown his
weight behind an initiative, funded by - of course - the Templeton
Foundation, to test experimentally the proposition that praying for
sick patients improves their health.
³⁶

Such
experiments, if done properly, have to be double blind, and this
standard was strictly observed. The patients were assigned, strictly at
random, to an experimental group (received prayers) or a control group
(received no prayers). Neither the patients, nor their doctors or
caregivers, nor the experimenters were allowed to know which patients
were being prayed for and which patients were controls. Those who did
the experimental praying had to know the names of the individuals for
whom they were praying -otherwise, in what sense would they be praying
for them rather than for somebody else? But care was taken to tell them
only the first name and initial letter of the surname. Apparently that
would be enough to enable God to pinpoint the right hospital bed.

The
very idea of doing such experiments is open to a generous measure of
ridicule, and the project duly received it. As far as I know, Bob
Newhart didn't do a sketch about it, but I can distinctly hear his
voice:

What's
that you say, Lord? You can't cure me because I'm a member of the
control group? . . . Oh I see, my aunt's prayers aren't enough. But
Lord, Mr Evans in the next-door bed .. . What was that, Lord? . . . Mr
Evans received a thousand prayers per day? But Lord, Mr Evans doesn't
know a thousand people . . . Oh, they just referred to him as John E.
But Lord, how did you know they didn't mean John Ellsworthy? . . . Oh
right, you used your omniscience to work out which John E they meant.
But Lord . . .

Valiantly
shouldering aside all mockery, the team of researchers soldiered on,
spending $2.4 million of Templeton money under the leadership of Dr
Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at the Mind/Body Medical Institute near
Boston. Dr Benson was earlier quoted in a Templeton press release as
'believing that evidence for the efficacy of intercessory prayer in
medicinal settings is mounting'. Reassuringly, then, the research was
in good hands, unlikely to be spoiled
by sceptical vibrations. Dr Benson and his team monitored 1,802
patients at six hospitals, all of whom received coronary bypass
surgery. The patients were divided into three groups. Group 1 received
prayers and didn't know it. Group 2 (the control group) received no
prayers and didn't know it. Group 3 received prayers and did know it.
The comparison between Groups 1 and 2 tests for the efficacy of
intercessory prayer. Group 3 tests for possible psychosomatic effects
of knowing that one is being prayed for.

Prayers
were delivered by the congregations of three churches, one in
Minnesota, one in Massachusetts and one in Missouri, all distant from
the three hospitals. The praying individuals, as explained, were given
only the first name and initial letter of the surname of each patient
for whom they were to pray. It is good experimental practice to
standardize as far as possible, and they were all, accordingly, told to
include in their prayers the phrase 'for a successful surgery with a
quick, healthy recovery and no complications'.

The
results, reported in the
American Heart Journal
of
April 2006, were clear-cut. There was no difference between those
patients who were prayed for and those who were not. What a surprise.
There was a difference between those who
knew
they
had been prayed for and those who did not know one way or the other;
but it went in the wrong direction. Those who knew they had been the
beneficiaries of prayer suffered significantly more complications than
those who did not. Was God doing a bit of smiting, to show his
disapproval of the whole barmy enterprise? It seems more probable that
those patients who knew they were being prayed for suffered additional
stress in consequence: 'performance anxiety', as the experimenters put
it. Dr Charles Bethea, one of the researchers, said, 'It may have made
them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer
team?' In today's litigious society, is it too much to hope that those
patients suffering heart complications, as a consequence of knowing
they were receiving experimental prayers, might put together a class
action lawsuit against the Templeton Foundation?

It
will be no surprise that this study was opposed by theologians, perhaps
anxious about its capacity to bring ridicule upon religion. The Oxford
theologian Richard Swinburne, writing after the study failed,
objected to it on the grounds that God answers prayers only if they are
offered up for good reasons.
³⁷
Praying for
somebody rather than somebody else, simply because of the fall of the
dice in the design of a double-blind experiment, does not constitute a
good reason. God would see through it. That, indeed, was the point of
my Bob Newhart satire, and Swinburne is right to make it too. But in
other parts of his paper Swinburne himself is beyond satire. Not for
the first time, he seeks to justify suffering in a world run by God:

My
suffering provides me with the opportunity to show courage and
patience. It provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and to
help alleviate my suffering. And it provides society with the
opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying
to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering . . .
Although a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest concern is
surely that each of us shall show patience, sympathy and generosity
and, thereby, form a holy character. Some people badly need to be ill
for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide
important choices for others. Only in that way can some people be
encouraged to make serious choices about the sort of person they are to
be. For other people, illness is not so valuable.

This
grotesque piece of reasoning, so damningly typical of the theological
mind, reminds me of an occasion when I was on a television panel with
Swinburne, and also with our Oxford colleague Professor Peter Atkins.
Swinburne at one point attempted to justify the Holocaust on the
grounds that it gave the Jews a wonderful opportunity to be courageous
and noble. Peter Atkins splendidly growled, 'May you rot in hell.'*

*
This interchange was edited out of the final broadcast version. That
Swinburne's remark is typical of his theology is indicated by his
rather similar comment about Hiroshima in
The Existence of
God
(2004), page 264: 'Suppose that one less person had been
burnt by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Then there would have been less
opportunity for courage and sympathy . . .'

Another
typical piece of theological reasoning occurs further along in
Swinburne's article. He rightly suggests that if God wanted to
demonstrate his own existence he would find better ways to do it than
slightly biasing the recovery statistics of experimental versus control
groups of heart patients. If God existed and wanted to convince us of
it, he could 'fill the world with super-miracles'. But then Swinburne
lets fall his gem: 'There is quite a lot of evidence anyway of God's
existence, and too much might not be good for us.' Too much might not
be good for us! Read it again.
Too much evidence might not be
good for us.
Richard Swinburne is the recently retired
holder of one of Britain's most prestigious professorships of theology,
and is a Fellow of the British Academy. If it's a theologian you want,
they don't come much more distinguished. Perhaps you don't want a
theologian.

Swinburne
wasn't the only theologian to disown the study after it had failed. The
Reverend Raymond J. Lawrence was granted a generous tranche of op-ed
space in the
New York Times
to explain why
responsible religious leaders 'will breathe a sigh of relief that no
evidence could be found of intercessory prayer having any effect.
³⁸
Would he have sung a different tune if the Benson study had succeeded
in demonstrating the power of prayer? Maybe not, but you can be certain
that plenty of other pastors and theologians would. The Reverend
Lawrence's piece is chiefly memorable for the following revelation:
'Recently, a colleague told me about a devout, well-educated woman who
accused a doctor of malpractice in his treatment of her husband. During
her husband's dying days, she charged, the doctor had failed to pray
for him.'

Other
theologians joined NOMA-inspired sceptics in contending that studying
prayer in this way is a waste of money because supernatural influences
are by definition beyond the reach of science. But as the Templeton
Foundation correctly recognized when it financed the study, the alleged
power of intercessory prayer is at least in principle within the reach
of science. A double-blind experiment can be done and was done. It
could have yielded a positive result. And if it had, can you imagine
that a single religious apologist would have dismissed it on the
grounds that scientific research has no bearing on religious matters?
Of course not.

Needless
to say, the negative results of the experiment will not shake
the faithful. Bob Barth, the spiritual director of the Missouri prayer
ministry which supplied some of the experimental prayers, said: 'A
person of faith would say that this study is interesting, but we've
been praying a long time and we've seen prayer work, we know it works,
and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started.'
Yeah, right: we know from our
faith
that prayer
works, so if evidence fails to show it we'll just soldier on until
finally we get the result we want.

A
possible ulterior motive for those scientists who insist on NOMA - the
invulnerability to science of the God Hypothesis - is a peculiarly
American political agenda, provoked by the threat of populist
creationism. In parts of the United States, science is under attack
from a well-organized, politically well-connected and, above all,
well-financed opposition, and the teaching of evolution is in the
front-line trench. Scientists could be forgiven for feeling threatened,
because most research money comes ultimately from government, and
elected representatives have to answer to the ignorant and prejudiced,
as well as to the well-informed, among their constituents. In response
to such threats, an evolution defence lobby has sprung up, most notably
represented by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), led by
Eugenie Scott, indefatigable activist on behalf of science who has
recently produced her own book,
Evolution vs. Creationism.
One
of NCSE's main political objectives is to court and mobilize 'sensible'
religious opinion: mainstream churchmen and women who have no problem
with evolution and may regard it as irrelevant to (or even in some
strange way supportive of) their faith. It is to this mainstream of
clergy, theologians and non-fundamentalist believers, embarrassed as
they are by creationism because it brings religion into disrepute, that
the evolution defence lobby tries to appeal. And one way to do this is
to bend over backwards in their direction by espousing NOMA
- agree that science is completely non-threatening, because it is
disconnected from religion's claims.

Another
prominent luminary of what we might call the Neville Chamberlain school
of evolutionists is the philosopher Michael Ruse. Ruse has been an
effective fighter against creationism,
³⁹
both on
paper and in court. He claims to be an atheist, but his article in
Playboy
takes the view that 

we
who love science must realize that the enemy of our enemies is our
friend. Too often evolutionists spend time insulting would-be allies.
This is especially true of secular evolutionists. Atheists spend more
time running down sympathetic Christians than they do countering
creationists. When John Paul II wrote a letter endorsing Darwinism,
Richard Dawkins's response was simply that the pope was a hypocrite,
that he could not be genuine about science and that Dawkins himself
simply preferred an honest fundamentalist.

From
a purely tactical viewpoint, I can see the superficial appeal of Ruse's
comparison with the fight against Hitler: 'Winston Churchill and
Franklin Roosevelt did not like Stalin and communism. But in fighting
Hitler they realized that they had to work with the Soviet Union.
Evolutionists of all kinds must likewise work together to fight
creationism.' But I finally come down on the side of my colleague the
Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne, who wrote that Ruse