Speculations on the phenomenon of prayer
Praying for Japan
Damage from Tsunami near Sendai, Japan. In this article, we'll examine whether prayer or labor can help; more importantly, we'll discuss whether prayer contributes to or detracts from the amount of assistance provided.3
As the situation continued to worsen in Japan a little over a week ago, many of witnessed Wall posts and tweets and blogs and so forth where people sent their thoughts and prayers to the Japanese. We listened to our friends and our parents and grandparents — and perhaps, for some, ourselves — pray for the victims and ask God to look on them with mercy and compassion and healing.
And many of us laughed at those who thought it would do any good to pray.
Neurological Benefits of Prayer and Meditation
But prayer is a complex phenomenon, and I had a lengthy discussion with my friend, physicist, and Christian Kemper Talley about what prayer is and how it affects us as humans.
Prayer has likely been around as long as religion has been… perhaps longer, even. We have written records of prayer rituals that are at least 5,000 years old. 1 But, rationally, what does prayer do to us? Why do we feel the way we do after prayer? Intense prayer, usually by those who are serious practitioners (like nuns and monks), activates the frontal lobes and shuts off the parietal lobes, which are traditionally thought to process sensory input and create subjective reality for the owner of that particular brain. 2 It turns out meditation — even secular meditation — has the same neurological effect.
So prayer does affect the pray-er, in a way that most would consider positive and clarifying. But does prayer have an immediate external effect? Does it help enact magical action at a distance? If enough people pray together, can the power of that prayer somehow be channeled for good?
I must resoundingly say “no”, and many rational Christians I know would agree with me. Even if prayer affected the “will of God”, God could only affect the world by urging people to do good things (impossible by Judeo-Christian doctrine, as that denies someone’s free will) or by enacting a physical miracle. Even those who believe that miracles exist typically agree that they’re rare. So what’s the point in praying?
Positive Prayer
My friend argues — validly, I think — that the internal clarification provided by prayer or meditation mediates positive work by the believer. Sure, one might argue, the prayer itself may not work magic: but the now-motivated servant of God now has impetus and will power to get up and go affect real physical change. This could be done my any means, from donating money to the Red Cross to helping coordinate relief efforts online to flying straight to Japan and picking up a shovel. I won’t deny that this is a valid argument in favor of prayer — or, at least, meditation (which I’ll consider a superset of prayer).
But I know of many people who don’t pray — and even many people who are atheists — who do the same things. They go out and help. They donate. They contribute. So prayer isn’t the exclusive course to motivating oneself to enact change. In a perfect world, a secular rationalist who loves humanity first might even help more than a faithful believer who loves God first.
But all of this is pretty obvious, so here’s what I really want to talk about: what are the negative effects of prayer, and are they outweighed by the positive effects?
Negative Prayer
Here’s a problem that I perceive with prayer (in this context): those who believe that prayer truly does work, that prayer has a material, action-at-a-distance, miracle like capacity to affect change may feel that prayer is a substitute for real service. I know people, especially adults in their 30s – 50s, who pray every night for Japan’s recovery but have never donated a cent (let alone flown to Japan to do service, but that’s more understandable). Whether prayer here is a facade of caring these people hide behind or a genuine impression that they’re doing good things by praying, it remains that they’re relieved either the social pressure or the divine edict to contribute to the community by replacing it with prayer. (I’d be interested to find a study on this, but don’t feel like doing too much research: someone send me an article if you can find work investigating this question! In the meantime, read this article from the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion for a somewhat related and interesting study.)
Is there a balance?
I’ve occasionally been accused, upon revealing myself as an atheist, to necessarily be a self-centered nihilist. But this certainly doesn’t follow. I love humanity; in fact, I think I love it more than many religious believers do. More than anything I want to see us keep maturing as a species. I want to reach for the stars, to disassemble the quantum, to live in a state where resources aren’t a problem and menial tasks are provided for us by our artificial intelligences, by our critical thinking and our advances in science. I feel that devoting ourselves to various sky-wizards (as my friend Mark calls God and kin) holds us back, and takes up the precious time we do have in our lives to enjoy the people we love, work on fulfilling projects for the pursuit of truth and happiness, and enjoy the spectrum of experience available to our sensory apparatuses.
There are many who think likewise.
So is prayer worth it? My fundamental question is one of an inequality; does it hold that:
good[prayer] > bad[prayer] ?
More precisely, does
good[prayer] – bad[prayer] ≥ good[non-prayer] – bad[non-prayer] ?
I’m not sure that it does. In fact, I’m personally pretty sure that it doesn’t. This is a question for anyone to think about, but I ask that, if you do, you do it objectively: take an unbiased look at those around you, note who prays, note who volunteers, note who donates. Note who the atheists are, who the lazy Christians are, who the serious religious believers are.
And ask yourself if it’s worth it.
[1] – Stephens, Ferris J. (1950). Ancient Near Eastern Texts. Princeton. pp. 391–2. (via https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Prayer#Forms_of_prayer)
[2] – Prayer may reshape your brain… and your reality. NPR News, 2009. This is a layman’s overview of a particular journalist’s experience, but there are many studies using functional MRI’s to map brain activity during prayer or meditation that are easy to find on the web.
[3] – By Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon (NASA Earth Observatory), via Wikimedia Commons [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/wiki/File:2011_Earthquake_and_Tsunami_near_Sendai,_Japan.jpg]. This image is in the public domain because it was created by NASA.
I’m inclined to believe in the power of prayer and the good that comes out of religion, though admittedly it’s not something I’ve ever given much thought to. So to me, it seems like a good start pairing prayer with meditation.
I’m not a believer (any more) but I’ve thought that the idea of a prayer that works at a distance, effecting material/miraculous change belongs only to the naive or gullible believers. Like the childhood Santa Claus or tooth fairy. (At worst, harmless.) People with a bit more experience or maturity know that life takes work and work is hard, but they keep praying, and the reason I think they do it is it maintain their spirits or spirituality – so it is a kind of meditation. It also still makes sense for them to pray for other people, because though they might not be able to change the circumstances, committing their thought to these others’ well-being helps to decide what it is they can do. But your friend already expounded on this argument.
I want to add that prayer does not have to be a means to an end in the process to help others – a pray-er does not use prayer explicitly to find a more material way to help those in need, or may believe the prayer itself may be as good as anything else that might be done. However, where the individual is concerned, the power of prayer stops there. Prayer gives peace of mind to the pray-er. That’s all. But in mass, the power of many people praying, to me is like the opposite of prejudice. (In mass, some are sure to be trite or superficial, perhaps like those 30-50 year olds who lift nothing but their voices in prayer. But I think it still adds up) Prayer is like a concentrated form of thinking generously of others, where prejudice is like the passive dismissal of others for little or no reason. Then if prejudice is definitely a bad thing, prayer is definitely good. So I think prayer does great sociological good – it raises awareness, and focuses intent on helping others.
At the other end of the line, I think that it definitely also helps to know that people, knowing that you are in hardship, are wishing all the best for you.
Barbara Bai
Barbara Bai
July 14, 2011 at 2:30 am
Hi Barbara!
When I think about it, I like the idea of knowing that my friends want the best for me, but it really would mean nothing to me whether they mentally vocalize that wish or not. If it means something to you, then I’m glad you can get something out of it! I just don’t understand why that would make you feel particularly better, though.
I’d say that one big problem with prayer that I didn’t really mention in this article is lack of proper attribution for things that happen. When a team thanks God for winning a baseball game (instead of recognizing their own hard work), thanks God for healing them in the hospital (instead of the highly trained physician and decades of hard-won medical research), or concedes that particular disaster may have been the will of God (instead of trying to understand why it happened and not being scared about whatever heresy might have been committed), I think damage is done socially.
The thing is: you say that people with a bit more experience or maturity know that life takes work and work is hard. I agree. But those people are either atheists or agnostics, even if they don’t know it. To be a Christian demands that you believe in the real power of prayer; to think otherwise would directly contradict some pretty central tenets of Christian dogma. Maybe it’s because we’re in different demographic regions of the US, but around here a *lot* of people believe in the literal power of prayer.
Last year I showed up early for a friendly debate between a Christian group and the Secular Student Association on campus. Not knowing exactly where the room was, I sat in the hallway (I was with the friend I mentioned in the article) with a bunch of totally normal seeming college students. And, though I may not go to a first-tier university, these kids weren’t stupid. They’re clearly educated to some degree and have their heads on straight in terms of what they want to do with their lives.
But a little after we sat down, it became a prayer circle (they didn’t know I was an atheist; they probably assumed I wasn’t, since I was with Kemper who they knew to be Christian). Everyone joined hands in a circle, closed their eyes, and bowed their heads. And for ten minutes (I kid you not; I know this because I was fifteen minutes early for the meeting), they went around in a circle asking God in unmistakably sincere voices to give them the power to show the atheists in this meeting the Light. They said aloud that they were too weak to do this on their own, but with God’s help — with his guiding light — they could reveal his mysteries to the atheists and bring them into his flock. I was actually quite scared: not because I felt threatened, but because I worried for the mental stability of people who were literally appealing to this higher power for literal strength and ability. And the hand holding, and the head bowing, and the harmonious agreements whenever anyone finished talking… it was very ritualistic.
Anyway, that’s my fun story. My point, though, is that these were not uneducated people. They were experienced and mature. But they really, honest-to-God (pun intended) believed that they’d receive a blessing of strength from their prayer.
So I’m not sure I can agree with you that the idea of miraculous blessings are only in the minds of the naive and gullible. It’s nice not seeing many people like that when you’re around mathematicians and physicists all day, but the unfortunate truth is that most people despise math and science. Most people. It’s almost hard to imagine because it sucks, but if you’re raised with these things as absolute truths then it’s not hard to see why people are like that.
I do agree with you that prayer gives peace of mind to the prayer. So does meditation; in fact, meditation seems to me to accomplish most of the positives you listed about prayer. So I certainly do advocate it. But I think it’s detrimental to augment a profitable exercise with fictional mythologies that only confuse the pray-ers about reality.
There are plenty of arguments about why religion in general is necessary as a social mechanism for people (as coping devices, etc), but most of the ones I’ve seen sound more like non-confrontational apologetics.
As a more general question: do you think religion, overall, is good for humanity?
Respectfully,
Matthew.
:)
Matthew Daniels
August 19, 2011 at 5:39 am