An atheist, a scientist, and a God who answers prayer

Is there a God who answers prayer? A number of my vocal critics find this an implausible, absurd and perhaps even offensive supposition. The reasons why are more than one blog post can cover, but we can at least make a start here.

One problem is that the claim "there is a God who answers prayer" seems to be falsified by the data. How so? Because if there were a God who answers prayer then we would expect prayer to be answered in a statistically detectable way. Here we might borrow Austin Dacey's example. Dacey gives the case of a person whose roommate informs her that she will bake her a cake. But when she returns to the apartment she does not find the things she would expect were the cake baked: the smell of the cake, cracked egg shells in the garbage, and an empty box of cake mix. And she finds things she would not expect, including eggs still in the fridge and the cake mix box unopened on the counter. So her conclusion: the cake was not baked.

Similarly, if we claim there is a God who answers prayer, we should expect to find some things and not others. What would we expect to find? As best I can surmise from some of my critics' comments, we would expect to find prayers being answered in a scientifically detectable and statistically significant way. But instead we find that prayers are not answered. Or, if some seem to be, others do not. This inconsistency suggests that there is no God who is moved to act by prayer, and the best evidence we have suggests that at best prayer has merely a placebo effect.

There are a few important issues here, but the one I want to focus on for the moment is the assumption that if God is to answer prayer it will be in a scientifically detectable and statistically significant way. Is this so obvious?

It seems to me that to demand at the outset that God must operate in a scientifically detectable and statistically significant way sounds like a contentious apriorism which is inimical to the spirit of science. After all, science should always accommodate itself to its subject matter. You don't expect biologists to have the same level of precision as physicists, and you certainly don't expect psychologists to have the same level of precision as biologists. The higher you travel up the ladder of complexity, the more difficult prediction becomes. The error of reductionism arises when we attempt to explain everything at an inappropriately low level, a method which turns scientific investigation into a procrustean bed lopping off whatever does not fit.

If God, the most perfect being, exists, then he is infinite in knowledge and power. And this means that he can juggle a whole lot more balls (literally and figuratively) than even the most dexterous humans. Is it possible that God is actually answering many more prayers than we would expect but due to our limitations we cannot know this?

Here's an example. Bill stubs his toe and ends up limping. Fred prays that Bill would be healed, expecting that an answer to the prayer will be manifest in Bill's toe being healed and his limp ceasing. But let's say that God responds to Fred's prayer by changing Bill's character so that he learns patience to deal with his limp. As a result, he slows down, leaves his job as a corporate lawyer, and instead becomes a civil rights activist. Fred's prayer was answered, though it was in an undetectable way. It is easy enough to think of innumerable other possible scenarios where all sorts of prayers are being met in unexpected ways. (A nod to Hilary Putnam's internal realist view of language should be made at this point for those readers subtle enough to detect it.) 

Let's say that a mere 10% of petitionary prayer is answered in a scientifically detectable way. It might be that a full 60% is answered in a non-scientifically detectable way as with Fred's prayer for Bill. And perhaps the remaining 30% is not answered at all for a variety of reasons, some of which are touched on in Garth Brooks' song "Unanswered Prayers".

It seems to me that we simply cannot know this is not possible (apologies for the double negative).

Certainly such humility is commended elsewhere. A person might be committed to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, but he should at least be open in principle to Bohm's interpretation winning the golden palm. At least he cannot forclose this possibility a priori.  

The real issue may be this: if we cannot detect the effect of prayer scientifically then the prayer hypothesis is of no more intrinsic interest than the hypothesis that everything in the universe just doubled in size. So what of that complaint?

This brings me back to my own account of a miracle. It may be that prayer is not susceptible to the kind of evidential support sought by scientific testing, but then many types of evidence do not admit to that kind of testing (e.g. evidence for the respect of one's peers or, as I have noted elsewhere, for the existence of the external world or moral absolutes). Again, we shouldn't think one size fits all epistemically speaking.

Finally, in my last post I noted the person-relative nature of answers to prayer. A perceived answer for my prayer may provide evidence for me relative to my plausibility framework even if it does not provide evidence for you relative to yours.