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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.religion,net.religion.christian
Subject: Talking to God (actually, on prayer)
Message-ID: <4537@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 4-Apr-85 18:00:53 EST
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.4537
Posted: Thu Apr  4 18:00:53 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 5-Apr-85 16:07:06 EST
References: <1304@shark.UUCP> <436@cybvax0.UUCP>
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Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
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In article <436@cybvax0.UUCP> mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz) writes:

[ >> Are from <1304@shark.UUCP> hutch@shark.UUCP (Stephen Hutchison) ]

To summarize the sides:

Stephen Hutchison believes that prayer corroborate religious experiences.

Mike Huybensz (how DO you pronounce this, anyway?) claims that they are
experimentally corrupt, and thus not useful.

My position is more complicated, falling somewhere in the middle (actually,
off on a different axis).  First, let us take a religious experience.
Crucial to the applicability of prayer to this experience is the notion of
personality.  Petitionary prayer (which is the variety being discussed; there
are other forms) is predicated upon the notion that the petitioner is
praying to something which is able to understand and to respond.  It makes no
sense to pray to the God of the deists, and it makes no sense to pray to "a
sense of oneness with the universe".  Total failure of petitionary prayer
does not invalidate either of these hypotheses; whether or not they are worth
believing in is besides the point.

  Now we've moved to true deities, beings which interact with the universe,
and which can "hear" a prayer.  Now we have a different problem; what if you
aren't praying for the right thing?  There's no reason to presume that every
prayer will be answered recognizably; the deity may decide to do nothing, or
to do something different.  The whole thing, then turns into a kind of
spiritual Turing test, with the appropriate religious text as the standard.
Based in this way, it's hard to see how, experimentally, you could so test,
especially when (as in christianity) an attempt to test is predicted to
fudge the results anyway.

A further problem is that (in these discussions at least) we've only tended
to talk about what I will call vertical miracles.  These are cases in which
the deity spot-changes the universe; Jesus rises from the dead, Paul has a
vision on the Damascus road, things like that.  The discussion has tended to
ignore what I will call horizontal miracles: interventions which are far
downstream of the apparent desired result, possibly throughout time.  Let us
take, for example, the Israelites crossing the Sea of Reeds.  People have at
various times suggested that a tidal wave caused by the destruction of Thera
was responsible for the analomous behavior of the sea.  So then, why did the
volcano explode?  We are led back into physical causes, which one can (in
theory anyway) follow all the way back into the Big Bang.  Whether or not it
was a coincidence, it could just as well be be God-caused.  Suddenly, almost
all physical actions could be miraculous.  Obviously, this does not help us
at all.  One could very well say that the whole thing is one big
rationalization.  And one could justly reply that that the purely material
explanation is equally rationalization.  Either way, it's quite obvious that
scientific experimentation is going to tell us nothing about answering
prayers.

It seems to me that, if you want to disallow theistic explanations of the
world, you must claim one of the following statements:

  (1) Science is the only worthwhile method for explaining the universe.

  (2) Religion is so important that only science is trustworthy enough to
      explore it.

I think the first position is without merit.  It denies the utility of the
emotions, and it begs the question of on what basis the principle is stated.
The second statement is, I think, worthy of further discussion.

Charley Wingate   umcp-cs!mangoe