Thursday, September 16, 2010

Some Thoughts on Prayer and Falsifiability

Lately, for various reasons, I've been thinking about the idea of prayer. As a Christian-turned-agnostic, prayer is of particular interest to me because part of what I'd usually consider the "evidence" for my former beliefs are instances of apparent prayer-answering. The more I've thought about this issue, however, the more I've come to seriously doubt whether prayer could ever serve to confirm/disconfirm religious belief.

My primary reason for thinking this is that prayer is unfalsifiable in a very strong sense. Religious believers all the time talk of this or that prayer being answered, but they seldom mention all the countless prayers made that have gone unanswered. The problem is an epistemic one: How could one know, in practice, the difference between an answered prayer and a happy coincidence? There are as many "unanswered" prayers as there are "answered" prayers. Religious believers will commonly try and explain away all the unanswered prayers by saying "well, God chose not to act in this instance, but he is still listening". That may be true as far as it goes, but the point is (again) an epistemic one: How could know when a prayer is answered and when some event in the world just happened to coincidie with what you prayed for?

Now, my claim is not that prayer is somehow an inherently irrational idea. It makes perfect sense within a Judeo-Christian theistic framework. My claim is strictly evidential: That instances of prayer-answering could never serve as confirmation or disconfirmation for specific or general religious claims. As an agnostic looking at various world-views from a largely neutral (if there is such a thing) perspective, no one could ever say to me "you should consider answered prayer in considering religious claims" as if it could confirm theism. The fact is that the distribution of observations meant to show "answered" and "unanswered" prayer would look exactly the same if God didn't exist. It is in this sense that the hypothesis "prayer is genuine interaction with God" or "Prayer works" appears to be, at least prima facie, unfalsifiable. And it is, all else being equal, ad hoc.

But, nonetheless, I again want to emphasize that ad hoc explanations are only explanatorily "unvirtuous" given certain epistemic backgrounds. So, to take a famous example from Kuhn, the discovery of Neptune in 1781 represented an had hoc explanation (the postulation of an extra planet in order to account for Uranus's irregularities). Yet, it was not explanatorily unvirtuous, because Newtonian theories of gravity had such great explanatory power across the board, and that was the paradigm Herschel was working within. Similarly, if there is evidence that generally supports Judeo-Christian theism, then the hypothesis of prayer finds itself ad hoc, but not in any irrational sense.

Monday, September 13, 2010

More Camus

Here's another great one: "Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe." -Albert Camus, The Rebel, pg. 22

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Camus on the Absurd

"The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe." -Albert Camus, The Rebel, pg. 6