Aug 23 2009
Beyond Prayer: The Power of Rationalization
When prayer fails, rationalizations succeed. This was aptly illustrated by the cartoon I posted earlier in the week, titled “The Spin Doctor.” This morning the same theme jumped up and punched me in the eye. So to speak. In pile atop my desk, I found an article from a science website (EurekAlert) spouting this nonsense:
Brandeis University research in the Journal of Religion this month shows that over the last four decades, medical studies of intercessory prayer—the prayer of strangers at a distance—actually say more about the scientists conducting the studies than about the power of prayer to heal.
Had I been drinking milk at the time it would have come shooting out my nose.
What a load of happy horse . . . rationalization. No, the studies primarily show a lack of a link between prayer and health. In the wake of the lack of a link, we discover that the meager remaining tendril of hope for the religiously-minded is the power of rationalization.
Are you sitting down? No milk in you mouth? Good. Read this quote by the Brandeis University “researcher” Wendy Cadge:
“With double blind clinical trials, scientists tried their best to study something that may be beyond their best tools,” said Cadge, “and reflects more about them and their assumptions than about whether prayer ‘works.’”
Oh lard. How infuriating. How sad. Talk about assumptions! This is a case of the cracked pot calling the titanium kettle black. If we must talk about two competing sets of assumptions (for science, working premises, really), one set, the scientific set, has been tested and refined and found effective over and over again. The other set? It is suspended by threads of true belief in minds alone. Out in the real world, that set fails. As has been shown time and time again. And that is what the science shows. The “reflects more about them and their assumptions” part is a bald case of special pleading.
[...] [15]And the LORD will confound those of knowledge amongst thou, leading them to study vanities, thereby exposing their biases. [...]
I think there’s an interesting parallel to very dated historical texts where there are religious justifications for social evils (eg. of slavery) — in that they also tell us far more about the people of the time than of anything else we might find out from reading them.