A Thinking Reed

Surprise – God is not a vending machine

Written by

Lee M.

in

This story reports that a study sponsored by the Templeton Foundation indicated that heart surgery patients who were being prayed for didn’t show a higher rate of recovery than those who weren’t being prayed for and, in fact, had slightly more complications.

I’m always baffled that people take studies like this at all seriously. They seem to be premised on an idea of God that I would characterize as “magical.” By that I mean that they seem to imagine that the deity has to behave according to certain rules, and all humans have to do in order to get what they want is repeat the proper incantations. This “god” is more like a genie of some kind.

It’s been argued that magic and science are alike in that they share the desire for prediction and control. They both seek the right “levers” to move the universe in service to human needs and wants, and each sees the universe in terms of a causal nexus where if you do x, then y will happen as a necessary result. The difference, of course, is that science is based in reality and magic isn’t.

But, whether we’re talking about magic or science, God, at least as monotheists of the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic variety conceive of God, transcends any possible causal nexus and consequently can’t be manipulated according to any formula. God is radically free with respect to creation and is never an object that can be bent to our will. God doesn’t act according to fixed laws such that the proper input will always get you a certain output. Thus, the idea that prayer is a “power” that could have a predictable and controllable effect is foreign to the biblical idea of God.

Comments

13 responses to “Surprise – God is not a vending machine”

  1. Eric Lee

    Lee,

    This is an excellent summation about what’s really going on here. Elsewhere I said something similar (I think?), but nowhere near as articulate as this. Thank you.

    Peace,

    Eric

    Reply
  2. Gaius

    All the same, it is and has always been an integral part of the Christian and Jewish traditions to pray for healing and to “expect a miracle.”

    In the gospels, Jesus does many healing miracles, and deals with many chronically ill people who frequent sacred places, seeking healing.

    Many churches not only encourage but maintain special groups for intercessory prayer, keep chaplains in hospitals, visiting the sick to pray with them and their families for strength to face God’s will, but also for his merciful intercession.

    On the whole, most if not all conservative Christians and Jews believe God does make genuine healing miracles, often to all appearances precisely because he was asked, just as we see Jesus do so often in the gospels.

    I don’t know about Muslims, but I would guess they believe something similar.

    And if these beliefs are true it would be reasonable to expect some difference in the fate of people who prayed or for whom others prayed, contrasted properly with otherwise equal cases of people who did not pray, or for whom no one prayed.

    A difference in recovery rates, or merciful deaths, or something overt and noticeable that could be taken as God’s answer to the petitions of the faithful.

    Of course, the tendency is for liberals to disbelieve in the efficacy of prayer because they disbelieve in God, or in God’s capacity to intervene in the course of things or the affairs of men. But not all feel that way. I understand Marcus Borg believes quite literally in the healing miracles of Jesus, for instance.

    When conservatives object to intercessory prayer it is because they think it would be somehow arbitrary for God to intervene in some cases but not in others; or to intervene at all in view of the evident and general condemnation of mankind as a whole to disease, failure, and death.

    As though a God who sometimes, precisely when and because he is fervently asked, intervenes to save someone from something terrible presents a greater problem of theodicy than a God who totally ignores all our love, our hope, and even our despair.

    Until some final denouement of the history of the universe, ending in a transformation of the world of the sort envisioned by the traditional apocalyptic of the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, … and the Persians.

    Surprising how many religious traditionalists think God is only allowed to do miracles of healing if it is that miracle of healing, the one that puts an end to the world as we know it and fixes everyone and everything, forever. That is less of a problem for theodicy?

    Reply
  3. Lee

    I definitely believe in healing miracles – both in the Gospels and elsewhere.

    My problem with these kinds of studies is twofold: first, it assumes that God must act according to regular rules or patterns, but I see no particular reason to believe this. And it’s interesting to think about why. Here’s my take: general rules of behavior only make sense for finite creatures. Since we can’t treat every case uniquely, because of our limitations in knowledge, time, resources, etc., we come up with generalizations so that whenever a case falls under a particualr type we do x, and if not we do y.

    But God, being omniscient and unlimited, can treat every case according to its specific and unique features. He’s under no constraints to always do x when presented with a case of type z, or whatever.

    Secondly, it’s not as though God isn’t aware when he’s being made part of a study. God may have good reasons for declining to participate (“Thou shalt not test the Lord thy God,” etc.).

    Also, it’s worth pointing out many of the healing miracles in the Gospels are specifically oriented to revealing Jesus’ messianic identity. They have a purpose in God’s plan apart from the healing per se.

    Reply
  4. Camassia

    I like Lynn’s point here: the main problem is that there’s no control group, because everybody is being prayed for already. The study just counts prayers that they know about.

    Reply
  5. Lee

    That is a great point. I wish I’d thought of it.

    Reply
  6. Gaius

    Lack of a control group? You might have a point.

    Let’s waive that for a second. Oughtn’t we to suppose that, other things really equal, group A would do better than B, medically, if God is answering prayers to heal people in A but not in B (because no one is praying for people in B)?

    Improvements from ohther causes ought to be the same. So there should be extra improvments owing to God’s healing action. No?

    If not, why not? Sorry. Don’t get that about patterns.

    And if God did NT miracles partly to advertise himself, why not do healing miracles now partly for the same reason?

    Reply
  7. Lee

    Yes, but my point was that other things aren’t equal. Even if they appear equal to us, God is aware of specific differences in each individual case that may be relevant for reasons we can’t even imagine. For instance, healing this particular person may further God’s purposes in a way that wouldn’t be the case for any other person. My claim is that our insight in these matters is nowhere near fine-grained enough to determine if other things are equal.

    Reply
  8. Gaius

    I meant other medical circumstances need to be equal so that, at least for known medical reasons, the fates of the two groups ought to be at least roughly the same.

    Are you saying we aren’t good enough at that?

    Maybe the FDA ought to give up test drug efficacy?

    I don’t agree.

    We don’t have to see what would be relevant for God’s decisions.

    We don’t have to have the least idea why God does what He does.

    We only have to see what would be medically relevant, and see if in fact people in Group A (those who got prayed for) do better than those in Group B (those who did not).

    And if we don’t see any difference then there is not the least reason to think prayer any more efficacious for the sick than sugar pills.

    Reply
  9. Lee

    I guess that’s sort of my point. I’m not sure prayer is “efficacious” in and of itself, as though it were a power by which we can make God do something. Nothing we do can oblige God to act in a certain way.

    Even if we allow that we can distinguish between people who are being prayed for and people who aren’t (not as easy as it seems, as Camassia pointed out since everyone is routinely being prayed for – e.g. in the liturgy of my church every week we pray for those who are ill in mind, body, and spirit, which covers just about everyone!), that’s no guarantee that God isn’t at work among the “not being prayed for” group. God may well have his own reasons for healing them. I guess what I’m saying is that we can’t isolate God’s activity by tying it to prayer; God doesn’t work that way, I think.

    Reply
  10. Camassia

    It’s also worth noting that God in the NT didn’t exactly do healing miracles to “advertise himself.” In the synoptics, especially in Mark, he grumbles about how everybody wants “signs” and actually flees the crowds at some points. I wonder if God might have the same feeling about this sort of experiment — that people might turn to him as just a miracle-worker and not listen to the message. Me, I wouldn’t mind more empirical evidence, but I’m just saying that’s not entirely inconsistent with Jesus’ behavior in the NT.

    Reply
  11. Lee

    Yeah, I think that’s right about how miracles are presented in the NT.

    Interestingly, strong empirical evidence, at least of a certain kind, might not be as helpful as we might think.

    Suppose that there turned out to be a strong correlation between prayer and people recovering from illness. If the connection was regular enough wouldn’t we likely decide that there was some heretofore unknown causal mechanism at work that didn’t require invoking God at all? Maybe human beings have latent psychic powers that enable them to influence what goes on in someone else’s body, for instance. It might well end up being incorporated into our body of scientific knowledge just like other phenomena previously thought “supernatural” were. We’d say “Oh, I guess that’s just the way the world is.”

    In other words, I wonder, if we thought of miracles happening according to some regular law or pattern, would we quickly stop thinking of them as miraculous and start thinking of them as just another natural phenomenon? Would would just expand our conception of what’s “natural” to encompass the new data?

    Reply
  12. Gaius

    Yes, that’s exactly what the debunking community would say. Which doesn’t mean they would be right. Or that they would be right in a way that is inconsistent with religion.

    Some would look for a relationship between prayer and healing that does not require divine agency.

    Others might speak of a causal connection between prayer and divine agency.

    As to the latter, probably people who ask others to pass the pepper get the pepper passed to them more often than people who don’t.

    Does that establish a causal relation? Tricky philosophical question, since an act of a free agent is part of the sequence.

    But nobody who believes in human freedom thinks it derogates from that if people who are asked pass the pepper more often than people who are not asked.

    As to Camassia’s point about Jesus’s exasperation at those who need signs, she’s quite right.

    But there are also texts to support the idea that miracles are done to advertise Jesus and his ministry.

    And other texts to indicate he wants everything to be a secret.

    And texts all over the place to indicate people expect prayers to lead to divine healings, and that sometimes Jesus did in fact respond with healing, even resuscitation, to prayerful requests.

    And even said outright that he was doing the miracles precisely because somebody asked.

    As the TV preachers say, “Expect a miracle!”

    And then they quote a whole lot of NT texts to encourage the idea that if you ask just right you will surely get whatever you asked for.

    Reply
  13. Camassia

    The key word is “sometimes.” He was selective about the requests he responded to. He was selective about his own PR. I don’t have a code that would explain all his behavior, but one fairly clear theme is that he prefers people who approach him in good faith. One woman he even tells, “Your faith has healed you already.” A scientific experiment, however, approaches him with skepticism by default.

    But whatever his reasons, the point is that churches are hardly perpetuating a fraud by urging intercessory prayer. If people are really expecting healings like they happen in the NT, it means they do not expect them to happen automatically. Most Christians I know seem to be able to live with that. It does not seem to be any more overreaching than claiming that healings never happen and therefore everybody should stop praying.

    Reply

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