Church of the Churchless

Miracles are just the law of large numbers

If enough things happen, some will be "miraculous." That's a given, if a miracle is taken to mean something way out of the ordinary.

Every time somebody wins a gigantic lottery prize, that's a miracle. What are the odds!? Hundreds of millions or more against those numbers being picked.

Yet, some set of numbers necessarily had to be chosen. So the winner feels it was utterly unlikely he or she got the prize, while it was completely predictable that eventually the money would be won by somebody.

In "Folk Numeracy and Middle Land" Michael Shermer discusses our inability to comprehend the laws of large numbers, mistaking them for other-worldly miracles.

Let us define a miracle as an event with million-to-one odds of occurring (intuitively, that seems rare enough to earn the moniker). Let us also assign a number of one bit per second to the data that flow into our senses as we go about our day and assume that we are awake for 12 hours a day. We get 43,200 bits of data a day, or 1.296 million a month. Even assuming that 99.999 percent of these bits are totally meaningless (and so we filter them out or forget them entirely), that still leaves 1.3 "miracles" a month, or 15.5 miracles a year.

Thanks to our confirmation bias, in which we look for and find confirmatory evidence for what we already believe and ignore or discount contradictory evidence, we will remember only those few astonishing coincidences and forget the vast sea of meaningless data.

So it's possible it will rain on Obama's parade tomorrow. But if that happens, it won't be prayer that made it happen. Just a meteorological anomaly.

Curse god freely. Then, laugh.

Praising god, what fun is there in that? But cursing god – or whatever higher power you don't believe in – this has a lot more entertainment value.

Over on the terrific science blog Pharyngula ("Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal"), I ran across a post about a Indian man who volunteered to be put to death by a Tantrik magician.

On live TV, no less.

The laughing fellow on the left is Sanal Edamaruku, president of Rationalist International and atheist. The cranky old man in the robes on the right is Pandit Surinder Sharma, a self-described Tantrik Magician. The scene is in a studio on Indian television, where the magician is trying to kill the atheist with sorcery. Sharma had said he could kill anyone with sympathetic magic inflicted on a doll made of dough, and that he could accomplish this in a mere three minutes … so Edamaruku confidently offered himself as a victim. The old fake went on for hours and failed.

You can watch this display of religious superstition demolished by reality on YouTube. The first attempt to kill Edamaruku is documented in two videos, here and here.

Then Sharma took a crack at plying his black magic at night, when it supposedly would be more effective. The result was the same.

A laughing Edamaruku. That's what I enjoyed the most about this show. The skeptic's laughter.

So many people are infected with a fear of god. Or of guru. Or of some other metaphysical power that they believe can raise you up or cast you down as it likes.

The best response to this nonsense is bring it on. I curse god a lot, along with the guru who initiated me thirty-seven years ago. Both have ignored me, so I figure they deserve more than a little profanity.

Try it yourself. It's liberating. Whatever religious entity, person, symbol, or such you used to have the highest regard for (or maybe still do), curse it to the limit.

Now, I suppose it could be argued that this negative attention to religiosity reflects a lingering belief. I don't go around cursing leprechauns, because I've never had any faith in them.

But I think it's healthy, and an interesting experiment in self-awareness, to see what happens when you call a previously revered divinity every obscene name in your vocabulary. If you feel any hesitation or anxiety, some belief is still mixed in with your faithlessness.

When my computer acts up, and I call it a fucking piece of shit, I don't worry that it's going to bite me back.

However, the first few times I said this to my long-dead guru, the thought came: What if this pisses him off and he really does have godlike powers?

Well, I'm still here. Just like Edamaruku.

I figure that if the supposed divinities I curse (sometimes I cast obscenities at Jesus, God, and Allah also) don't like how I'm talking to them, they can damn well make an appearance in my consciousness and tell me off in person.

So far nobody's showed up. Guess they're either pansies or non-existent.

I enjoyed the comments on the Pharyngula post. Here's some of my favorites (#15, #21, #27, #41).

If a thousand magicians tried this a thousand times each, and in a single demonstration the target suffered a sudden heart attack, this would become the event many declare to be proof that the magic works. Much like prayer really.

Wow - apparently I have this amazingly strong force called "atheism" protecting me, and I don't even have to worship it. All I have to do is NOT believe in any god at all. I feel powerful! The tide is turning...

This is true, you know - Sanal was protected by something, even though it isn't really a god and Sanal doesn't really worship it. I call it "reality".

We can all do the same, and I have a number of times. When a believer is assaulting my ear hole with the supposed power of god to bring down lightning bolts from the heavens on unbelievers, or some other load of bull, I've called on their god to do exactly that, right now, within that specific minute. And I stand there waiting smiling. Amazingly, they step back like they actually expect something to happen. Of course, nothing happens. I remind them that dying 20 years from now of a natural death does not count. Since it's demonstrated their god has no actual power when nothing happens, all they can do is bleat "blasphemy".

Magicians, gurus, and magical thinking

Magic is so, well, magical. We see, but we can't believe our eyes. A rabbit comes out of a hat. But I saw the hat was empty! And nothing could have been put into it!

Yet there's the rabbit, coming out of the hat. Go figure.

Which most of us can't, because magic tricks usually are closely guarded secrets – from non-magicians, at least.

Adam Gopnik wrote a fascinating piece for The New Yorker, "The Real Work," about the practice and philosophy of magic (the full story doesn't appear to be available online, just an abstract).

About all an outsider may say is that the surprising thing about most magical methods is not how ingeniously complex they are but how extremely stupid they are – stupid, that is, in the sense of being completely obvious once you grasp them.

…We will ourselves both to overlook the obvious chicanery and to overrate the apparent obstacles. Or we imagine that an elaborate bit of trickery couldn't be achieved by stupidly obvious means. People participate in their own illusions.

That is why a magician's technique must be invisible; if it became visible, we would be insulted by its obviousness. Magic is possible because magicians are smart. And what they're smart about is mainly how dumb we are, how limited in vision, how narrow in imagination, how resourceless in conjecture, how routinized in our theories of the world, how deadened to possibility.

Now, this may sound like the definition of a guru, someone who opens us up to a broader conception of reality, breaking down the barriers between mundane materiality and magical mystery.

However, few people (if any) believe that a magician is doing something truly magical. They know there's a trick involved. The magic lies in the invisibility of the magician's craft, much of which is founded on imperfection.

…the Too Perfect theory says, basically, that any trick that simply astounds will give itself away…What makes a trick work is not the inherent astoundingness of its effect but the magician's ability to suggest any number of possible explanations, none of them perfect, and none of them quite obvious.

…At the heart of the Too Perfect theory is the insight that magic works best when the illusions it creates are open-ended enough to invite the viewer into a credibly imperfect world. Magic is the dramatization of explanation more than it is the engineering of effects.

In every art, the Too Perfect theory helps explain why people are more convinced by an imperfect, "distressed" illusion than by a perfectly realized one…The magician teaches us that romance lies in an unstable contest of minds that leaves us knowing it's a trick but not which one it is, and being impressed by the other person's ability to let the trickery go on.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

When you talk to people who have deep faith in a guru, which described me at one time, they won't admit that the guru is a magician. Rather, he or she is considered to be a miracle worker – someone who genuinely possesses supernatural powers.

Yet these powers are never displayed. At least, not in a fashion that would allow them to be scientifically assessed.

So the magician and the guru end up sharing the ambiguity spoken of above that keeps the onlooker enthralled. Illusion or reality? Fake or true? What's really going on here?

Disciples usually don't consciously think this way, of course. They're enthralled with the show, which, depending on how you look at it, consists either of spiritual sleight of hand or a display of genuine mystic realization.

I've been to India twice, in 1977 and 1998. Each time I saw an impressive presentation of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru. You have to see it to believe it. That's also the nature of magic.

During my first visit, I attended a bhandara (spiritual gathering) of maybe a hundred thousand people – I have no idea how many. (Some details are in my "God's here, but I've got to go" post.)

There's nothing like this in the West. A papal appearance doesn't come close to the fervent devotional atmosphere. Most Indians look upon the guru as god. Imagine Jesus giving a sermon in person to a gigantic throng of Christian believers, and you've got some idea of what a bhandara is like.

The energy is electric. The mystic magic palpable.

Yet here's the thing: with a skilled magician of the usual sort, the audience is led to believe that no trick is being performed, because the actions of the magician are so natural. Gopnik writes about a card trick:

The story, as usually told, emphasizes Vernon's search for "naturalness," for methods of card manipulation that would look entirely real, even under scrutiny. The deeper meaning of the myth, though, is that the magician is one of the few true artists left on earth, for whom the mastery of technique means more than anything that might be gained by it. He center-deals but makes no money – doesn't even win prestige points – because nobody knows he's doing it.

…We could watch Horowitz's fingers on the keyboard as we listened to the music; if we could admire Vernon's fingers on the deck as he did the trick, he wouldn't be doing it right.

But with a guru, the audience is being treated to a form of anti-magic. Onlookers are led to believe that a spiritual trick is being performed even though none is in evidence.

It's like an old joke that I remember from my high school days.

"Want to see a trick?"
"Sure."
"OK." (pause) "Want to see it again?"
"You didn't do anything!"
"So you think…want to see the trick again?"

On the school bus this got a laugh (the first couple of dozen times we told the joke to each other, at least). When people unreservedly embrace a guru's anti-magic, though, it isn't so funny, because the consequences of excessive guru worship can be serious.

Another blogger shared "Top Ten Myths About Gurus." Most involve magical thinking.

There's nothing wrong with magic. We just need to recognize what it is, and what it isn't; when we should look upon it as real, and when we shouldn't.

Where have all the miracles gone?

Before class started yesterday, a Tai Chi friend (Eric) and I were talking about miracles. Christian miracles, specifically, but a miracle is a miracle.

Well, more accurately: no miracles are no miracles. Because we mused about the fact that they sure are in short supply these days.

Where's the walking on water, the resurrection of the dead, the mysterious manifestation of bread loaves?

Conveniently, with the arrival of modern science – including video cameras, medical monitors, and other hard to fool objective instrumentation – miracles have taken a leave of absence. Religious types would say, "On God's command."

I say, "Bullshit. People can't get away with miraculous claims anymore in this appropriately skeptical secular world, so they rarely try."

And it's not just Christianity that lacks miracles. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, every religion on Earth is suffering through a down market in the miraculous commodity market.

I mentioned to Eric that Sai Baba, a modern Indian holy man, is notorious for faking the production of supposedly sacred ash. Sai Baba is a con artist, but he still has lots of followers.

What's surprising, I said, is that people are content with such a picayune miracle. Why doesn't Sai Baba manifest piles of flawless diamonds, rather than worthless ash?

Because he's a sleight of hand artist (and not a very good one), rather than a miracle worker.

My once-chosen faith, the Radha Soami Satsang Beas branch of Sant Mat, has an interesting way of explaining away the absence of miracles.

Which should be much in evidence, because the RSSB guru is considered to be God in human form, like Jesus. And everyone knows that God can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants.

Not the guru, though, because "Kal" (a secondary god who rules the lower regions of the cosmos) got the Big Guy God to grant him some favors – as I recall the dogma, by standing on one leg (who knew that gods had legs) for millions of years.

One of the favors was that saintly gurus couldn't perform miracles. If they could, this would depopulate Kal's realm, because everybody would be attracted to these holy men (sorry ladies, saints are almost universally male), learn how to gain God's favor, and never be reborn again in the material world.

So supposedly this is why gurus, though godly, don't reveal any miraculous powers. They aren't permitted to by this agreement between God and Kal (a.k.a. the "negative power").

Another convenient agreement is between disciples and the guru. Initiates aren't supposed to reveal their inner experiences, miraculous or otherwise. This means that it's impossible to know if someone has experienced an inward "miracle," because the recipient of such is duty bound to say, "Can't say."

The end result is that RSSB miracles (1) can't be performed, and (2) even if they could be, they can't be revealed.

Fortunately for Jesus, the authors of the Gospels, and Christianity, these rules weren't in effect in the Holy Land a couple of thousand years ago. God only instituted them recently.

Again, just when science made it possible to rigorously test miraculous events. To repeat:

How convenient.

Million dollars says there’s no evidence of the supernatural

Almost every time I write something like “There’s no proof of anything beyond the physical” I get challenged by believers in ESP, astral projection, life after death, or other supernatural phenomena.

That’s fine. I love challenges. If I wanted to have everything that I say accepted without question, I wouldn’t be a blogger. Nor would I have been married for thirty-five years.

But here’s the thing: when I say “proof” I mean proof. The real deal. Scientific confirmation. Controlled studies. Replicated studies worthy of being published in a major journal. Proof that makes skeptics into believers.

The James Randi Educational Foundation has a One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. Yes, a million bucks awaits anyone “who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.”

So if you know someone who can demonstrate a paranormal ability, or if you can do this yourself, check out the application procedure. And remember me if you win the prize. Sending 5% my way would be a nice thank-you for cluing you in to the Challenge.

I promise that I’ll put a personalized plate on the convertible Mini that I’ll buy with my share: ESPTRU, or whatever you want.

Now, I realize there are lots of supposed scientific studies that claim evidence of the supernatural. A Church of the Churchless comment led me to the “Science is a method, not a position” blog, where I dutifully clicked away on links that purport to shed light on the blind spots of reductionist materialism.

I wanted to find the proof that I’m looking for. After all, I’m made of matter. And I’m not wild about the prospect of being reduced to nothing when I die. So any evidence to the contrary is going to grab my attention.

Unfortunately, I came away empty-handed, my skepticism still intact. I read about the dog who seems to know when his owner is coming home. I’d seen this feat demonstrated on a TV special and it certainly raises questions. But answers? No.

Ditto with this study of telephone telepathy, also by Rupert Sheldrake. There was a 1 in 20 chance that the results were a statistical fluke. Without replication by independent researchers, telepathy remains highly questionable.

One of Randi’s FAQs is “Scientific papers have been written supporting paranormal events and talents. Therefore, how can you deny them?” His answer:

Scientists can be wrong — sometimes, very wrong. The history of science is replete with serious errors of judgment, bad research, faked results, and simple mistakes, made by scientists in every field. The beauty of science is that it corrects itself by its own nature and design. By this means, science provides us with increasingly clearer views of how the world works. Unfortunately, though science itself is self-correcting, sometimes the scientists involved do not correct themselves. And there is not a single example of a scientific discovery in the field of parapsychology that has been independently replicated. That makes parapsychology absolutely unique in the world of science.

Some say that scientists aren’t willing to even consider evidence for paranormal phenomena. That doesn’t make sense. Scientists are driven by a desire for fame and fortune just like other people. To make a discovery that turns the world upside down—as would solid proof of the supernatural—that’s the dream of most scientists.

Carl Sagan said that one of the most important functions in science is to reward those who disprove our most closely held beliefs. Randi is taking this function literally. A million dollars literally.

There’s no excuse for not taking the Randi Challenge. Claus Larsen has come up with an answer to the most common excuses, such as “I don’t do this for personal gain.” Like he says, you can always give away the million dollars to a worthy cause.

May I suggest my Mini-Cooper Convertible Fund?

Atheists in foxholes do exist

Recently a couple of people have asked me, “What’s wrong with believing?” after listening to one of my rants about the power and glory of Faithlessness. It’s a question that is akin to the more basic query: “What’s wrong with feeling good?”

Because religious belief does make many people feel better. Yesterday on a cable news channel I saw an interview with a female doctor about the power of prayer. She said that she had a patient who now was almost totally paralyzed.

He told her that prayer and a belief in God’s goodness—that there was a divine reason or plan for what had happened to him—was sustaining him. Seemingly you can’t argue with that. Whatever works. The interviewer said, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

Except, there are. No doubt about it. Here’s an example of a man who refused to pray even when he had to wait helplessly outside the operating room where his wife had to undergo a C-section after complications arose.

It’s a good story. He ends with this:

As for all those religious folks out there sitting in their own foxholes, they would do well to reconsider their prayerful ways. After all, if their nightly prayers to God were really effective, they would never have ended up sitting in foxholes in the first place.

I’m not an atheist. I identify more with the terms “agnostic,” “uncertain,” “open minded.” I discussed my attitude toward religious belief in “What’s wrong with faith?” But basically I’m in accord with the non-prayerful atheist, who says:

Searching desperately for comfort, I tried to think of what other people would do to calm themselves down. It occurred to me that most people in my situation would pray. Could it work for me? Was my stubborn atheism placing my wife and child at risk? What did I have to lose?

At this point, I wasn't above trying anything that had a reasonable chance of working. Nonetheless, after considering the possibility of prayer for a few minutes, I realized that praying wouldn't help anything.

What would have happened if I had decided to believe in God just so that I could have someone to pray to? I would have placed myself in the position of praising an entity which has the power to help everyone in need but only gives such help when it is promised loyalty and obedience in return.

Even then I wouldn't have any guarantees because, as even the most fanatical Christians believe, sometimes the answer to a prayer is "no." I wasn't about to place the lives of my wife and son under the power of an all-powerful deity who is nonetheless inconsistent and stingy.

Besides, I still didn't believe in God. If I was sure that God didn't exist, then prayer would be nothing but talking to myself, asking an imaginary entity to influence events in a way that just isn't possible. I knew that the natural laws of the universe work without regard to the personal problems of individual humans. Praying really hard couldn't change the course of the cesarean section any more than it could keep the sun from rising.

Psychologically, I realized that dependence upon prayer would lead down the path to insanity. If I believed that reality could be changed just by my wishes for it to change, then the concept of reality would cease to have any real meaning to me. A reality which follows the whims of my imagination would become nothing but a hallucination. What I needed was to exert control over my anxious imagination, not to surrender to it.

Right on, brother. Religious belief or faith is almost always individualistic. That’s a paradox, considering that humility and loss of ego usually is considered to be a religious virtue. It’s self-centered to believe that a God, guru, angel, Buddha, or whoever is going to bestow upon us the blessing of a miracle that isn’t available to all.

We are special. Divinity cares more about us than others. These beliefs underlie every intercessionary prayer. For if we merely wanted God to give us what is natural, normal, lawful, and regular, we’d merely say “thy will be done” (which, in my opinion, is the best prayer—if you feel the need to pray at all).

It’s better to let reality trump belief. Focus on what is happening, not in what you hope will happen. Focus on what you can change about reality, not on what you hope a higher being will change.

Even in a foxhole. Especially in a foxhole.

A personal relationship with God, good or bad?

I continue to think about whether I even want a personal relationship with “God” (leaving that term suitably vague and undefined, per my churchless bent).

As I observed recently, the idea that God is right by my side, watching everything that I do, is creepy and voyeuristic, similar to fears about what the Department of Homeland Security might become, except a lot more omnipresent and omniscient.

Omnipotent too. Because most conceptions of a personal God presume that He/She/It can intervene in the affairs of the person with whom God has a personal relationship.

This makes sense. How can you have a relationship without relating? Give and take, back and forth, talking and listening, doing and being done to. You can have a pseudo-relationship with a pet rock, but all the relating is on one side. The rock just sits there, passive and inert.

Most people aren’t attracted to the idea of a stone-cold God. They like the feeling that God is walking by their side, supporting them through good times and bad times, stepping in to offer a helping hand when the situation (or prayer) demands.

On the face of it, that sounds good. And some Eastern and most Western theologies affirm that it is true. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are, by and large, entirely comfortable with the notion of a God who inserts himself into human affairs on both an individual and societal level.

And so are certain Eastern mystical faiths, such as Sant Mat, as I observed in my previous post. Much like Christianity, these faiths usually posit that a transcendental divine being exists (the “father”) who becomes embodied in a human form (the “son”). The embodiment of God, such as Jesus or a guru, has many of the powers of God—including the ability to jump into people’s lives/minds and change things around.

However, there is a competing conception of how divinity interfaces with the world that also has had, and continues to have, many adherents in both the East and West. This is a universal and impersonal metaphysics. Or, perhaps stating the case more accurately, a not-particular and not-personal metaphysics.

Not this, not that. Such is the manner of speaking of the via negativa, the way of approaching “God” that leaves divinity mysterious, ineffable, beyond purely human understanding. Since there remains a gap between what God really is, and what we can know about God with our intellect and senses, the idea of divinity coming down to our level doesn’t mesh with what we might call the way of mystery.

This way teaches that the universe is governed by universal forces that appear impersonal. Karma, in Eastern thought. Providence, in Western (Greek) thought. The cosmos is connected. Unity prevails. Life is fair. Destiny is deserved. What goes around comes around. All this happens naturally, without any need for God or a guru to step in and make wrong things right.

I don’t know which way of looking at the world is correct. But clearly the second “God is universal” hypothesis is much more in tune with modern science than the first “God is personal” hypothesis. For the laws of nature have been found to be remarkably, well, lawful. You don’t find gravity deciding, “I think I’ll take a break and let that car soar into space.”

Yet many people believe that God does just that: deciding to intervene in their lives and make something happen that otherwise wouldn’t. On cable news today I heard President Bush intoning something like, “And we pray that our troops in Iraq will be kept safe.”

A nice thought, on the face of it. Who could object to God keeping American troops safe? However, what this means, when you delve beneath the prayerful platitude, is that Bush wants God to assure that American soldiers will be successful in killing Iraqi insurgents without being killed in return.

The insurgents, of course, are praying to God for the same thing in reverse: for them to be successful in killing Americans while they remain safe. If there is a personal God who answers prayers of this sort, one or the other side in the Iraqi conflict is going to incur excess deaths because of a divine decree.

That doesn’t sound very Godly to me. For sure, this isn’t a God that I feel like worshipping—a God who plays favorites in choosing who will live and who will die. And even if this sort of God is just a fiction in the minds of true believers, belief in such a being leads to a destructive and divisive “God is on my side” mentality.

Which leads, in turn, to such atrocious behaviors as sky pointing. After the 2004 World Series ended I felt drawn to pray “Please, God, no more sky pointing.”

I’ve watched a lot of sports on TV since then and I can tell you, God isn’t answering my prayer.

Pray for me, I need a Mini Cooper

Happy National Day of Prayer. In honor of this day I invite everyone to pray for a worthy cause: me. To make things easy for you I’ve written out the prayer, complete with annotations:

“Almighty _______ [fill in name of your chosen higher power], I beseech you to grant the unselfish desire of Brian Hines, who lives on Lake Drive in Salem, Oregon [this is needed to direct the prayer away from the other undeserving Brian Hines’ in the world, and also to make sure my desire is delivered to the right place].

“Please place a supercharged Mini Cooper, racing green with the sunroof, in his driveway as he has been beseeching you for so long [well, just a bit over two years, but the prayer has more pathos with ‘for so long’].

“Brian’s desire is unselfish because this car will bring him so much joy, it [joy, if the higher power asks what this admittedly grammatically imprecise pronoun refers to] will flow out behind his speeding wheels everywhere he journeys, raising the spirits of all who glimpse the Mini Cooper blur. I thank you in advance for your grace and remain your humble servant,_______ [fill in your name if you want to be sure the higher power knows who is praying].”

Given my evident self-interest in the question, “Does prayer really work?,” I’m hoping that the answer is a hardy “Yes!” However, it appears the evidence is mixed, at best. Hector Avalos has written a thoughtful article, “Can Science Prove That Prayer Works?,” which makes me skeptical that the Mini Cooper is going to show up.

The tone at what purports to be “the annual National Day of Prayer official website” is, not surprisingly, a lot more upbeat. I browsed around for some reassurance that the Almighty answers prayers for supercharged Mini Coopers, but couldn’t find any. Disturbingly, the suggested areas for prayer today have nothing to do with my primary prayerful interests. Namely, my own happiness (in general) and the car that will make me happy (in particular).

Instead, people are asked to (1) Pray for the President, (2) Pray for journalists to be fair and balanced in their reporting, (3) Pray for students as they get ready for summer vacations, (4) Pray for churches and their support of their communities, and (5) Pray for families seeking to raise their children well.

At first glance this is a rather strange conglomeration of things to pray for, but a closer reading of the suggested prayers page reveals a unifying dogmatic Christian right philosophy. For example, in the Education area, it isn’t really a nice summer vacation that is the goal of prayer.

Rather, the problem is that “Many of our schools and universities are minimizing traditional subjects such as history and math, and are instead promoting a radical social agenda. Condom distribution, the promotion of homosexuality and a refusal to acknowledge God have become commonplace in our institutions of learning today.”

OK. This is a free country (for now, at least). Pray away for whatever you want to (though remember that a Mini Cooper for Brian Hines is the highest and greatest object of prayer). The big question, though, is who or what is on the other end of the prayer line.

Assuming such a connection even exists. I’ve got an open mind, since evidence for what physicists term “non-locality” is indisputable on the quantum level. Somehow the universe is one while also being many. Though no one knows the mechanism by which prayer might have an effect on objects or people, there may be a universal power underlying thoughts that awaits discovery by science.

Harold Koenig, a physician who, like Larry Dossey. studies the effects of spirituality on health and well-being, says that “the question is whether human intentions, within or outside meditation, have any effect on another person. Do good or bad intentions have non-local effects?” (see two interesting essays about prayer experiments by he and Dossey here).

Koenig goes on to say:

So, I think it would be a lot clearer—from both scientific and theological point—if we simply call such studies experiments of human intention, and not confuse things by calling them “intercessory” prayer. Intercessory prayer suggests that you are interceding before someone else on behalf of another person, and the Western concept of God (on which interceding before a personal God has meaning) does not hold up well under such controlled experiments. Thus, to keep things clean, I think we ought to focus on whether human intention or Eastern meditative prayer has any non-local effects, and just leave a personal God out of it.

Good advice. It’s interesting that, by and large, Eastern thought considers that human intention or desire is the problem, not the solution. For karma is the result of action, and actions flow from intentions. Karma is what keeps us bound to illusion, a lower domain of physical existence.

Who knows? Western prayer researchers may end up finding that their experiments confirm the reality of the law of karma, not a personal Judeo-Christian God who responds to prayers. Intentions expressed in prayers might have the same non-local effect as any other sort of thoughts or actions: a karmic connection. Whereas the thoughts of a single individual may have minimal effects indiscernible via a controlled experiment, perhaps the prayers of many people can affect the course of events—health-wise or otherwise.

I’m much more inclined to entertain the hypothesis that a universal karmic law is operating in the cosmos than is the whim of a personal divine being. If such is the case, then intercessionary prayer will turn out to be one of the countless means by which we members of Homo sapiens are kept ignorant of ultimate reality. For so long as we egotistically act as if we’re the center of the universe around which all else revolves, we won’t be such in humble reality.

That said, it won’t hurt you to add a little bit more karma to the massive pile of intentions you’ve already produced. So go ahead and recite the Mini Cooper prayer at the beginning of this post. Recite it frequently and passionately. Recite it with the force of all your heart and mind as if my happiness depends on it, for so it does.

I’ll be watching my driveway.

O Miracles, where art thou?

For many people this time of year is a time to celebrate miracles. For Christians, Jesus’ virgin birth and resurrection. For Jews, a one day supply of temple lamp oil that burns for eight days. Christians seem to have the edge in the miracle department—birth and death being more dramatic than a burning lamp—but I never fail to wonder, “Where have all the miracles gone?”

Never, ever, not even once, has there been a thoroughly documented miracle worthy of a National Academy of Sciences stamp of approval. Most miracles worthy of their name are reputed to have occurred hundreds of years ago, conveniently before the age of modern science and the methods that now could assess the miraculousness of an event that seems to defy the known laws of nature.

The James Randi Educational Foundation has a long-standing offer of a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event. No one, the foundation web site says, has ever passed the preliminary tests for this prize.

Now, it can be argued that only God performs miracles, not humans. So this explains why no man or woman has ever been able to demonstrate a divine power. But many religions and spiritual paths do indeed claim that saints, gurus, mystics, yogis, and the like have the ability to perform miracles. The big question is: Why is there no evidence of this?

The simplest explanation for why documented miracles are non-existent is that they don’t exist. And this includes miracles of yore as well as miracles of today. Which, of course, pretty much demolishes the foundations of Christianity and Judaism. Islam too, for that matter, since Muhammad is held to have miraculously received the message of the Koran directly from God in a trance state.

Myself, I hold to the view that the greatest miracle is that there aren’t any miracles. The cosmos is wonderfully guided by the intelligence of universal laws that are so seamless, there is no capacity for untoward events to happen. This, at least, is a perspective that fits both with the findings of modern science and the teachings of the most enlightened mystic philosophers such as Plotinus.

In my book about Plotinus I say: Isn’t it interesting that miracles are, by nature, so rare and miraculous? Well-documented miracles are few and far between (skeptics would say non-existent). Even purported miracles are so much an exception to the general run of worldly predictability that they receive widespread and avid attention in both holy books and impious tabloids.

If great souls have lived on Earth, and I believe they have, then why hasn’t a miracle been performed that is so grand, so out-of-the-ordinary, so impossible to disregard, that believers and unbelievers alike are left awestruck at this display of other-worldly power?

For example, adding another full-sized moon to the night sky would be the sort of thing that would grab everyone’s attention. Emblazoning a message on the newly-created celestial body—“Believe!”—would be a nice additional touch.

Recently I got an email from my wife’s sister, Dee Pagac, who shares my skepticism about miracles. I liked what she said and will share it below. Yes, unlikely events like the one she describes do happen. But if a “miracle” is a one in a million event, and there are almost three hundred million people in the United States, each of whom experiences many events each day, then daily chance alone guarantees that there will be hundreds of seeming miracles in this country.

Anatole France said, “Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.” Well, you could also say, “God is perhaps the pseudonym of chance when believers want to forge a miracle.”

Here are Dee’s thoughts on the subject:

“The thing I think is goofy is the belief that there is a god that we can pray to and he can make differences down here on earth. That ‘God’ gets all the credit for the good stuff and none of the blame for the bad stuff.

There was just a front page story last week in the Indianapolis News about a woman who while driving on a main street, felt compelled to turn her car into a trailer court and park behind a white van that turned out to be the one that had killed her son. Her 26 year old son had been killed in a hit and run while bike riding, I think a couple weeks before this.

People had reported seeing a white van or SUV. She said she just felt compelled to drive there and once there called her sister and told her about being there and not knowing why. Her sister came and they looked at the van and saw front damage, called police and it turned out to be the vehicle. The story ended with her saying this was proof there was a god cause it had to be god who led her there. Nice story.

What it made me wonder about, though, was why, if god could make her turn the wheel all the way on to another road and stop in a certain place just so she could get justice for her son, why couldn't he have made the killer turn the wheel just a little to miss the son on the bike or make the son turn the bike just a little to be missed by the van? That sure would have been a lot nicer of him.

If he has the power to save and cure people how does he decide when to do it? If he can talk to televangelists why doesn't he talk to atheists like me who need convincing or even regular religious people who are not becoming millionaires bilking old ladies like the televangelists.

If I were a queen and told people I had control over the life and death of my subjects and I was going to let some die by violent means - would my subjects still like me just because I said I would let them know who did the killing? If I could cure sick or injured people but only would if enough of the others prayed to me a lot - would they love me for that?

Anyway, that is my main question, why do people believe in a ‘God’ like that. To me it just doesn't make any sense.”

To me neither, Dee. Thanks for sharing your ideas.