Personally, I suspect that prayer and its effects are not proper subjects for scientific investigation. I just don’t see how prayer can be “observed” – that is, made available to the scientific method. PatrickHenry pointed out some of the logistical problems, like how to construct a control group (or groups). I suppose such issues arise mainly due to the fact that one cannot subject something that is inherently immaterial to the techniques of scrutiny proper only to material, physical objects.
Neither view – “pro”- or “anti”-prayer – fails on logical grounds or is falsifiable on the basis of the scientific method; neither is internally logically inconsistent. They just happen to be mutually exclusive. And so it seems we are free to hold our “opinion” of the matter.
For what credentials does science have to be the key referee of this controversy? As an interested party, it cannot qualify as a fair judge.
Speaking of opinion, mine is that prayer and meditation are not only good for the soul, they are generally good for the world. Prayer is ever a loving approach to God in hopeful supplication that He will not fail to come to the aid of the suffering, the sick, the dying, the vulnerable; or people who could benefit from a blessing of “Godspeed” for a project or a purpose. Thus prayer is also indirectly a joining in fellowship with a wider human community. It seems to me that prayer spiritually benefits both the one who is prayed for, and the one who prays.
The fact that the prayed-for outcome may not materialize to our view does not establish that God has denied our prayer. It may be He fulfilled it in a way of which we are not aware, of which we cannot be aware.
It is for this reason that I always conclude a prayer with this expression of trust: “In all things, Lord, Thy will, not mine, be done.” I bow my head – I refer to -- the infinitely greater Divine love, wisdom, judgment, will, and purpose rather than defer to my own puny, mortal, fallible, and contingent wisdom, etc.
Prayer is an essential form of Hope, one of the three great Christian theological virtues, the other two being Faith and Charity (Love).
Under Faith and Love, Hope must express in a manner that encompasses our fellow human beings; hence, we pray out of concern for the well-being primarily of their souls, but also of the material conditions of their lives.
I just read Lance Morrow’s Evil: An Investigation (2003). It was a most provocative book. He propounds no theories – he just does what the subtitle suggests: He investigates. But he allows himself a speculation from time to time. One of them is that the opposite of Evil is not Good. The opposite of Evil is Hope. I liked that a lot.
So I imagine at the end of the day, having made such a “confession,” scientific materialists out there will have a great chuckle over my superstitious and quite ridiculous suppositions and myths.
What they may not realize is that I sometimes find myself chuckling over their superstitious and quite ridiculous suppositions and myths.
My favorite one these days is the theory of the “primaeval soup” out of which all biological life is said to have spontaneously arisen, out of the blind chemistry of inert matter, all on a random basis; and then organize itself for greater biological diversity and complexity on a random basis, under the guiding hand of the physical laws and Natural Selection.
In a nutshell, there are not a few problems with this theory, in light of recent discoveries/experiments in quantum physics, astrophysics, geology, microbiology, mathematics, probability theory, and information theory.
One big problem in another nutshell:
Haldane’s model of the “primaeval soup” and ensuing random evolution from inert matter to living organism was predicated on the assumption that the universe is eternal and infinite. If you have an infinite time for a stochastic process to work itself out, then anything and everything that does not violate the basic laws of physics will eventually happen. Including the evolution of species, presumably ever in the “progressive” direction of increasing survival fitness and genetic success.
But the Big Bang theory, almost universally accepted these days, kills this cosmology. No longer is there infinite time for a random process to work itself out, so to describe or account for the biological diversity that we see today.
As Dean Overman writes in A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization (2003):
“Haldane, Oparin and Wald wrote their papers at a time when the universe was believed to have no beginning or end and to be infinite in size. In an eternal, infinite universe, anything can happen. Data supporting the Big Bang theory from the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite and new discoveries in the geological records change the perspective of the time available for the emergence of life. The time available on earth is extremely limited. The earth began to form about 4.6 billion years ago. Radioactive decay, the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere, the production of thermal energy from the effects of gravity conversion, and crashing meteors made the surface of the earth sufficiently hot to make compounds of biological interest unstable for approximately 1.62 billion years. In other words, prior to 3.98 billion years ago, the earth was too torrid for the emergence of life. The fossil records, however, indicate that life formed on earth at least 3.85 billion years ago over a period of less than 130 million years….”
We turn now to calculations of the mathematical probability that unguided, random development accounts for the emergence of life from inert matter on earth, given the finite time limit of 130 million years in which random processes have to work.
Overman suggests how remote such probabilities have of actually reifying in nature in an apt analogy – the analogy of the Amazing Monkeys Who Type Out the Dialog from a Certain Scene in Shakespeare’s Henry VI -- who just manage to get it all right via a random process, given enough time:
“Assuming the Big Bang occurred 15 billion years ago and that one million monkeys started typing at Planck time (10^-43 of the first second) and that each monkey types one letter every second, over a million billion years would be required to produce all probable [alphabetic] combinations [to accurately type a certain passage from Macbeth, consisting of 379 letters]. To put time in terms of a power of 10, only 10^18 seconds have occurred in all of time. As with the time available for abiogenesis, the monkeys simply do not have sufficient time in 10^18 seconds to have any real chance of typing this short passage from Shakespeare [this probability has been calculated at 26^379 using combinatorial methods*]. When we turn to calculations of mathematical probabilities for the unguided, random development of life, we find odds that are even more remote, especially given the finite time limit of 130 million years.”
[*To put the probability figure cited in the paragraph immediately above into perspective, Overman notes most mathematicians view a probability of 10^50 as mathematically impossible.] Overman quotes Harold Morowitz on this issue:
“I think it is conservative to say that continuous life on Earth formed 3.8+/- 0.2 Ga (billion years) ago. This is not a precise estimate, but it places the event in the late Hadean or early Archean period, suggesting that as soon as the Earth cooled down sufficiently, life formed rapidly on a geological time scale. A less conservative estimate would be 3.9 +/- Ga ago – a very different view from the classical perspective involving random chemicals reacting for eons and finally lucking out, resulting in a living cell coming together. The thrust of narrowing the window in time is to shift the emphasis from low probability, random events to the deterministic production of living entities.”
Overman puts the question another way, noting “the simplest living cells such as bacteria are extraordinarily complex, containing many nucleic acids and enzymes and molecules, all comprised by thousands of atoms, all joined together in a precise sequence.” Fred Hoyle, an evolutionist (“though not a Darwinist”) and an atheist, noted the enormous statistical difficulty in accounting for the emergence of the simple bacterium from inorganic matter within the available time frame (i.e., 130 million years). Consider just what a staggering problem even the single-celled bacterium is for combinatorial stochastic analysis. Even assuming that “the first living cell was much simpler than today’s bacteria,” as Overman puts it, “[Hoyle’s] calculation for the likelihood of even one very simple enzyme arising at the right time in the right place was only one chance in 10^20 or 1 in 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000.”
Hoyle wrote:
“No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning… there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10^20)^2000 = 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court… the enormous information content of even the simplest living systems … cannot in our view be generated by what are often called “natural” processes…. For life to have originated on the Earth it would be necessary that quite explicit instruction should have been provided for its assembly … There is no way in which we can simply get by with a bigger and better organic soup, as we ourselves hoped might be possible a year or two ago.”
To which his close collaborator Chandra Wickramasinghe added a pungent summary statement: “The chances that life just occurred are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747.”
Now it is true that Darwinism is “only” about the “origin of species,” as the title of his magnum opus indicates. It does not claim to account for the “origin of life.”
But logically, the first bacterium was the “origin” of that species. And on the evidence it appears that the emergence of the first simple, single-celled biological organism cannot have happened by means of a random process, proceeding from inert matter to “life” (a phenomenon apparently undefined and uninvestigated by Darwin) within the available time period.
So, how does Darwinist theory explain itself/maintain itself against such objections? Certainly there appears to be a whole lot more going on in this universe than just Natural Selection….
Think about it: Logically, ‘natural selection’ requires something from which to select. That means there’s a “there” there already.
Yet the theory seems to want to explain the problem of natural evolution of species, the rise in complexity, etc., etc., while leaving the problem of the origin or basis of life in total obscurity – resting blissfully on materialist ideology, and faith in the guiding (yet invisible) hand of materialist Natural Selection (which being a concept, is hardly a “material” thing…).
I have to leave it to the reader to figure out what this all means.
Meanwhile, I think I’ll go say my prayers now… starting with prayers for my boon friends, companions, and collaborators here at FR…. :^)
Thank you so much for writing, V-A, PH, Nebullis. Good night to all!
Features of genuine evolutionary scenarios:
What they may not realize is that I sometimes find myself chuckling over their superstitious and quite ridiculous suppositions and myths.
And I agree that the disciplines of mathematics - particularly information theory and geometry - combined with physics, cosmology and molecular biology - will eventually reformulate evolution theory.
IMHO, the first pillar - random mutations - is already in jeopardy because the lack of mutability in regulatory control genes points to autonomous biological self-organizing complexity as a better explanation, i.e. evolution is not a directionless walk.
The second pillar - natural selection - has been placed in doubt (Wolfram) in that natural selection more often works against such a mechanism than for it.
And that is without even looking at the syntactic autonomy required for abiogenesis (Rocha) or the underlying physics of life v non-life (Pattee) or the information content necessary to sustain biological life (Yockey).
Finally, all of these efforts are set in the context of our understanding of the universe or multi-verse (Tegmark, Penrose, Ovrut) - which has a beginning - and the astonishingly improbable physical laws of this universe (Rees) - and moreover, the geometry or dimensionality of all that there is (Vafa).
This is a very exciting time to be a spectator, both of science and of spirit!
The patients were divided randomly, no one knew who was gettting the extra prayers and who wasn't.
I suppose such issues arise mainly due to the fact that one cannot subject something that is inherently immaterial to the techniques of scrutiny proper only to material, physical objects.
They just did, didn't they?
Neither view – “pro”- or “anti”-prayer – fails on logical grounds or is falsifiable on the basis of the scientific method; neither is internally logically inconsistent. They just happen to be mutually exclusive. And so it seems we are free to hold our “opinion” of the matter.
It was tested as best as we can, and failed. Maybe God is into something like the so-called 'shyness effect' in parapsychology (PK, remote viewing, etc, just don't seem to work in the presence of skeptics, especially those who know how to detect fraud), or maybe prayer doesn't have any effect on healing.
For what credentials does science have to be the key referee of this controversy? As an interested party, it cannot qualify as a fair judge.
Then find some one else, not scientists, to set up a double blind experiment, or some other protocol that eliminates the placebo effect. Amazing Randi, perhaps, though I don't think this is his sort of thing.
Speaking of opinion, mine is that prayer and meditation are not only good for the soul, they are generally good for the world .... Thus prayer is also indirectly a joining in fellowship with a wider human community. It seems to me that prayer spiritually benefits both the one who is prayed for, and the one who prays.
IMO, it's probably good for the person doing it, as is meditation. I doubt it has any effect whatsoever on others.
I really can't comment on theological speculations but there's some truth to "The opposite of Evil is Hope. I liked that a lot.", I think.
My favorite one these days is the theory of the “primaeval soup” out of which all biological life is said to have spontaneously arisen, out of the blind chemistry of inert matter, all on a random basis; and then organize itself for greater biological diversity and complexity on a random basis, under the guiding hand of the physical laws and Natural Selection.
This is basically the Haldane-Oparin hypothesis from 1924. A quarter century before the genetic code was discovered.
Haldane’s model of the “primaeval soup” and ensuing random evolution from inert matter to living organism was predicated on the assumption that the universe is eternal and infinite.
Cite, please. Even before Hubble, the Earth (if not the entire Universe) was thought to have a finite age, measured in the millions or billions of years. (the ancient Earth is in fact one of Darwin's correct predictions)
In a nutshell, there are not a *few* problems with this theory, in light of recent discoveries/experiments in quantum physics, astrophysics, geology, microbiology, mathematics, probability theory, and information theory.
Quantum Physics has a bearing on origin-of-life studies!? (beyond chemical effects) Cite, please.
recent discoveries in mathematics, probability theory, and information theory?! Which ones?
Astrophysics?! Again, cite please.
But the Big Bang theory, almost universally accepted these days, kills this cosmology. No longer is there infinite time for a random process to work itself out, so to describe or account for the biological diversity that we see today.
Again, please find me someone who said infinite time was necessary. Or that the Earth was infinitely old.
Assuming the Big Bang occurred 15 billion years ago and that one million monkeys started typing at Planck time (10^-43 of the first second) and that each monkey types ...[blah]... million billion years would be required ... [blah]...As with the time available for abiogenesis,
The monkey analogy is utterly irrelevent.
...the monkeys simply do not have sufficient time ... When we turn to calculations of mathematical probabilities for the unguided, random development of life, we find odds that are even more remote, especially given the finite time limit of 130 million years.”
Really? He should show his work.
Overman notes most mathematicians view a probability of 10^50 as mathematically impossible
I'd like a cite on this one, too. Of course it's a very low probabliity, but who came up wth the 50? Sounds a bit like Dembski and his non-peer-reviewed speculations.
Overman puts the question another way, noting “the simplest living cells such as bacteria are extraordinarily complex, containing many nucleic acids and enzymes and molecules, all comprised by thousands of atoms, all joined together in a precise sequence.” Fred Hoyle,...are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10^20)^2000 = 10^40,000,
Hoyle's calculation is right. Therefore it didn't happen according to the model on which it was based.
... typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747..
Is there any evidence that Hoyle and Wickramasinghe ever gave any serious thought to the origin of life? Remember, they claimed that flu viruses came from outer space, a claim that has been refuted by evidence.
And on the evidence it appears that the emergence of the first simple, single-celled biological organism cannot have happened by means of a random process
How about nonrandom processes, like natural selection acting on the prebiotic molecules?
proceeding from inert matter to “life” (a phenomenon apparently undefined and uninvestigated by Darwin)
He thought about it, but here wasn't enough known about biochameistry to get past his famous quote (paraphrasing) " a little pond with ammonia and phosphate.."
So, how does Darwinist theory explain itself/maintain itself against such objections?
In large part, by showing they're specious.
Certainly there appears to be a whole lot more going on in this universe than just Natural Selection….
Think about it: Logically, ‘natural selection’ requires something from which to select. That means there’s a “there” there already.
Like prebiotic organic replicators?
Yet the theory seems to want to explain the problem of natural evolution of species, the rise in complexity, etc., etc., while leaving the problem of the origin or basis of life in total obscurity
No, it's just a different study than evolution, more biochemical than biological. Also, we have no real knowledge of the stages mattter went throgh as it evolved into something recognizable as life. Was there an RNA world? What preceded it? There may be no evidence at all left about such things.
– resting blissfully on materialist ideology, and faith in the guiding (yet invisible) hand of materialist Natural Selection (which being a concept, is hardly a “material” thing…).
This doesn't make sense to me. What ideology? Why should a process like natural selection have any of the attributes of a material thing? More to the point, once there are imperfect replicators and some sort of competition, how can natural selection be prevented?
I have to leave it to the reader to figure out what this all means.
Amen
(Poking my head in again for a moment.)
I'd be interested in just a very quick aside on hope as the opposite of evil, if you don't mind. I'm guessing that may be said, since good is authentic and original, thus not an opposite of anything; but that hope is the energy of good that may be found by those in evil circumstances, which brings good out of evil.
"...from Him and through Him and to Him are all things!"