The Debate Begins

At the moment I work thirty hours a week in my dad's office, and as such I go to lunch with him quite often. This has now become the setting for what may turn out to be a long series of informal debates on God and Christianity. The first one was today, and although my dad was quite determined—he actually took a note card with him—the tone was friendly enough. We went through a whole flurry of topics ranging from prophecy to cosmology, so I have a feeling we'll be retreading the same ground in more detail later on.

The first thing we did was go back over the definitions of atheism and agnosticism. It's admittedly a somewhat difficult concept to grasp at first, as is the difference between "I believe there is no God" and "I lack belief in God." The distinction ultimately lies in the idea of burden of proof: it's the theist who's making a claim that something exists, and the atheist who's holding out for sufficient evidence of that claim. Eventually I explained it using a very simple analogy: Imagine a thermometer with a notch two-thirds of the way up labeled "God exists." For the atheist, the fluid in the thermometer (the evidence for the claim) has not reached that notch (the threshold for rational belief). That seemed to work well, so I'll probably be using that comparison in the future.

We also talked at length about miracles. He described an event a few decades ago in which, when driving at night, he changed lanes on a whim—just in time to avoid a parked car that he hadn't seen. He suggested (while not putting too much stock in it himself) that this could have been divine intervention. I pointed out that we tend to disproportionately remember extraordinary events, and introduced him to Littlewood's law—the idea that given the sheer number of small events that take place in our lives, we should expect "miracles" at a rate of roughly once a month. I didn't go into the general unreliability of memory; I'll save that for another time.

He also asked about spontaneous remission of cancer following prayer, to which I pointed out that such remission occasionally takes place whether or not people are praying. He'd heard about some crying Catholic statues as well. In response I brought up the Hindu milk miracle: In 1995, hundreds of believers in India and abroad witnessed statues of Ganesha "drink" milk that was fed to them with a spoon. Neither of us believe in a miracle that took place in modern times, with countless verifiable eyewitnesses and even video evidence, so it's only natural not to believe in lesser miracles either.

Another back-and-forth:

You may not be able to prove God, but you can't prove love exists, either, even if you can measure the chemicals.

—Love is by definition a feeling, so the very experience of love shows that it exists.

But couldn't the same be said of God?

—No, because God is supposed to be an autonomous agent who acts independently of our subjective experience.

There were a grab bag of other subjects. He asked about Old Testament prophecies predicting details of Jesus' life. I responded that some details were probably invented by the gospel writers after the fact, and some of the "prophecies" weren't even meant to be prophecies in the first place. He was under the impression that the eye couldn't have evolved, when in fact we have a detailed understanding of how it could have come about. He also found it absurd that matter could have created itself. I haven't studied the details, I said, but we don't really know what happened before the big bang. It may be that matter has always existed, or that it's not even useful to talk about a "before" in the traditional sense (like asking what's north of the North Pole).

The whole discussion was quite genial, and although I don't know that my dad got any nearer to my position, I think it was a success. He even said that in a strange way, these discussions brought us closer together, and that's more than I ever could have hoped for.

How to Destroy Naturalism in 4 Easy Steps

This little shop in Boston
could change the world.

Are you a healer, a psychic, a medium, an exorcist, or someone who's witnessed a supernatural event? Are you looking to become world famous as the individual who caused humanity to completely overhaul its understanding of the universe—and make a bit of extra cash as a bonus? You're in luck, because now you can! All you have to do is provide sufficient evidence that your supernatural phenomenon of choice actually occurs. I'll show you how in just four easy steps.

1. Have multiple, reliable witnesses.
If you tell me you saw an exorcist stick a Bible in a demon-possessed man's face, causing such an adverse reaction that his head spun around, all you have is a spooky story. There's absolutely no reason for me to believe you, because it's far more likely that you're either lying or mistaken. It's far better if you have other people to corroborate your story, but the character of those people is also important. If they have a history of drug use or mental illness, or have been known to lie, or have some conflict of interest, or have been primed to expect certain things out of exorcisms as a result of a highly religious upbringing, they're not going to be very convincing. You'll want skeptical, upstanding citizens as witnesses to your supernatural event, and the more the better.

2. Write down what happened.
Memories are delicate things, prone to being erased, altered and rewritten—especially in high-stress situations. Maybe you think you saw the head spin around... but you really only saw it jerk violently to the side, you turned away in horror, and your brain filled in the rest. The best thing for you and your witnesses to do is to write down, as soon as possible and in meticulous detail, exactly what occurred during this event. Don't discuss what happened beforehand, lest you influence each other's interpretation of events. Later, if it turns out that one of you saw the head turn clockwise and another counterclockwise, consider the possibility that you both just got caught up in the excitement of the moment.

3. Get it all on tape.
Witnesses are helpful, but ultimately people can say anything they like. Audiovisual recording devices trump them any day of the week. If you show me crisp video footage of a man's head doing a 360, I won't believe you right there on the spot, but I will sit up and take notice. Can this sort of thing be faked? Absolutely. There are prosthetics makers and computer animators who create effects like these for a living. But that's okay: weeding out the particularly crafty charlatans is what the final step is for.

Sorry, an artist's depiction ain't gonna cut it.

4. Replicate your results.
Got your reliable witnesses, consistent testimonies and recorded evidence? Great! Now you're ready for the big leagues. In fact, this final step is the only one that really counts, but supernatural phenomena fail it so reliably that it's only worth unleashing it on the serious contenders.

You will be asked to repeat your supernatural event of choice in a controlled setting. That's it. Simple, right? Just have your exorcist use his Bible to spin another person's head like a corkscrew, and you've made history. We'll be watching, of course. There will be cameras and scientists watching closely to make sure there's no funny business. But I'm sure that won't be a problem. Oh, and once you do shock the world by offering proof of the supernatural, there's just one more thing we'll need to do...

Tinker like there's no tomorrow.
You didn't think it was going to end there, did you? That we'd just destroy naturalism and call it a day? I certainly hope not.

By doing the apparently impossible, you've piqued the curiosity of every scientist on the planet. A kinesiologist will ensure these people can't somehow turn their heads that far all on their own, and do x-rays to understand the mechanics of that twisting motion. A linguist will analyze the demon's vocabulary and speech patterns. A psychologist will conduct extensive interviews to get the demon's complete mental profile. An anthropologist will try to glean information about past cultures that the demon presumably lived through. A neuroscientist will do fMRI scans to compare brain activity before and after exorcism. We'll also want to find out the mechanism of the "Bible corkscrew" effect. Does it work with a different book disguised as a Bible? How about half a Bible, or one that's written in Wingdings? What if the possessed person is blindfolded or on the other side of the room? Now that we've opened up this can of worms, we'll need to know all this and a whole lot more.

Okay, let's face it.
We're probably never going to get to this point. If the supernatural is real, destroying naturalism ought to be easy, but the fact is that anyone who actually tries to replicate their results in a tightly controlled setting fails miserably. No one ever makes it past step four, and that doesn't bode well for the existence of spirits, magic and psychic phenomena.

But even if naturalism were to die, science would enter a new era of exciting opportunity. Why? Because we will have proven that the supernatural interacts with the natural world—and if we can interact with it, we can measure, test, explain and understand it. The religious often see the supernatural as unknowable, but they couldn't be more wrong. If it's an observable part of our world, it's just one more realm for science to conquer.

Deflating the Supernatural

Let's take a few steps back from the theological debate. For just a moment, we'll ignore the questions like whether Christianity is true and even whether God exists. Instead, let's focus on an even more fundamental issue: Is there such a thing as a supernatural or spiritual realm?

Amazingly, even people who aren't particularly religious sometimes believe in ghosts, demons, souls, magic and psychic phenomena. They may casually mention that they went to a séance or used a Ouija board. They take the spiritual for granted, as though it's as mundane and natural as a trip to the grocery store. This puzzles me. They don't seem to realize that to say that the spiritual exists is to make an earth-shatteringly extraordinary claim: that there is a separate, parallel reality that overlays and interacts with the physical world.

The supernatural is inconsistent with our background knowledge. Even most of its supporters concede that spirits don't appear very often—and when we do get reports of weird phenomena, they never quite manage to show up again upon closer investigation. In addition, all of the entities in everyday life are composed of particles and obey the fundamental laws of the universe—yet even here the supernatural stands defiant. The supernatural is also unparsimonious: it violates Occam's razor by proposing elaborate explanations where simpler ones would suffice. For example, given what we already know, it's far easier to explain the movement of a Ouija board marker as a result of the ideomotor effect than as a spirit taking control of someone's body.

Ooh, unconscious motor behavior. Spooky.

If the unparalleled boldness of supernatural claims still isn't clear, imagine what would happen if science were to conclusively detect the existence of ghosts or demons. It would be the single greatest discovery in all of human history. It would be the lead story of every news outlet on earth for months. There would be a flurry of research to create better methods to detect and study them. Entire fields of study and billions in research dollars would be dedicated to gaining knowledge of something that's fundamentally opposed to our understanding of how the world works.

So we've established that supernaturalism makes an extraordinary claim. Where, then, is its extraordinary evidence?

There is none.

Out of everything we've ever subjected to scientific scrutiny, nothing has conclusively evaded a purely natural explanation. Lightning, spoon bending, epilepsy, fairy photos, rainbows, the diversity of life on earth—the list goes on. And if something has yet to be explained naturalistically, that most certainly does not imply that the supernatural explanation is correct. Given that over the past several thousand years we've been steadily finding ordinary explanations for seemingly extraordinary phenomena, we have every reason to expect this trend to continue. To paraphrase Richard Carrier, would you rather bet on the horse that's won a million races, or on the horse that's never won at all?

Parsimony, Explained Like You're Five

Reddit.com has a great new community called r/ExplainLikeImFive, where you can ask questions and get informative yet simple answers. This is useful not only for people who want to learn tough concepts without fear of judgment, but also for the explainers themselves: nothing tests the depth of your understanding on a topic like having to break it down so thoroughly that a 5-year-old gets it.

Recently someone asked for an explanation of Occam's razor. Below is my answer (and if it's not obvious how it pertains to this blog, just replace "monsters" with any instance of the supernatural).

*      *      *

You know those bumps you hear sometimes when you go to sleep at night? Let's try out a few ways of explaining them.

Maybe your parents are making those noises when they close a door or bump into a wall. Or maybe those noises are from the house settling. When the air gets cooler at night, the wooden beams in the ceiling contract, which causes them to make little bumping sounds.

Or maybe there are monsters lurking in your closet, rapping on the walls, letting you know they're waiting for the right time to strike.

Bump. Bump. Bump.

Sorry, didn't mean to scare you.

Anyway, the point is that the "parents" and "wooden beams" explanations are better than the "monsters" explanation because they're more parsimonious, which you can think of as a fancy word for simple. Really, though, it's more than that: parsimonious explanations need less assumptions, less complicated extra stuff added on to have everything make sense.

True, the wooden beam explanation is more "complicated" in the normal sense, and it's "simpler" in the normal sense to just say "monsters did it" and leave it at that. But it turns out the opposite is true when you really look closely.

You can do experiments to find out that wood really does expand when it gets colder. But what about those monsters? Your parents checked the closet for you before they turned out the lights, so how exactly did they get in there, anyway? Hmm. Maybe they're invisible, and your parents just didn't see them. But then the next night you can have them feel around in there, too. Well, maybe the monsters can make themselves solid or unsolid at will. Now you've finally made everything in your explanation fit. But look at what you've had to do: you've had to assume not just monsters, but two pretty unlikely things about those monsters. It turns out that this explanation was more complicated after all.

Occam's razor says that all else being equal—that is, if all the other conditions (e.g. whether your parents are home) stay the same, and if the explanations are equally good in all other ways—more parsimonious explanations are more likely to be right. And this makes perfect sense: every bit you add onto your explanation can only make the odds of it being true go down, not up—just like the odds of rolling three 6s in a row on a die is lower than the odds of rolling two 6s in a row.

This idea is useful in pretty much any case where you need to choose between explanations: science, history, and even everyday life. It's a cornerstone of rational thinking. You've probably used it many times without even realizing it, but now that you understand it, you can apply it even more often and more carefully, and get results that are more likely to lead you to the right answer.

Why Believers Think Prayer Works

Christians believe that their pleas to God have a tangible effect on the real world. Why do they believe this if it isn't true (aside from the obvious answer of "their religion says so")? Even Christians themselves should be curious about the underlying reasons for belief in prayer—after all, people of other faiths think prayers to their gods are effective as well. In fact, there are quite a few reasons, all of which are quite fascinating.

1. Placebo effect: Say that a believer wants to do well on a test or run their fastest time in the 100-meter dash. If they pray for that outcome, or know that others are praying similarly, they're likely to do better than they would have otherwise, simply because they believe prayer will work. Even in cases that are beyond conscious control, such as quick recovery from an illness, the mere belief that one will recover quickly—whether due to prayer or a sugar pill—is enough to increase one's immune function and spur a faster recovery. The placebo effect may sound incredible, but it's actually one of the most powerful and well-documented psychological phenomena in existence.

2. Regression fallacy: Everyone knows that life has its ups and downs, but when are believers are most likely to pray? Naturally, they will tend to pray more when things are bad, and to pray the most when things hit rock bottom. And since this point is rock bottom, their situation can only get better from there by definition. But because the believer has just been praying so much, they will often attribute the improvement to prayer, even though things would have gotten better anyway. This idea is so simple that it's easily overlooked, but it explains a great deal.

3. Bandwagon effect: People tend to believe things because other people around them believe those things. Believers often belong to a church and are surrounded by people who believe that prayer works. Thus, they are more likely to believe the same. Even if they begin to have doubts about the efficacy of prayer, seeing the strong belief that others have in it will strengthen their own belief. Note that this self-reinforcing effect allows the belief of the entire group to be sustained, even if the belief of every individual within that group occasionally falters.

4. Wishful thinking: This is another simple yet powerful concept: people are more likely to believe things that they want to be true. The idea that a supreme being can not only hear you anywhere at any time, but can also respond to you and act upon the physical world on your behalf, is incredibly appealing. Conversely, the idea that you are often alone and powerless in the world is highly unpleasant.

5. Confirmation bias: People tend to favor information that supports their existing beliefs. This is a massive factor in understanding believers' perceptions of prayer, and it comes into play in two ways. The first is known as "selective recall." In this case, it means that believers will generally remember answered prayers and forget about unanswered ones. The more unlikely the answered prayer, the more likely it will be to stick in their minds. In this way, instances of allegedly answered prayer seem to occur more often than they really do.

The second point follows from the first: believers will tend to tell other people about answered prayers (and tend not to tell them about unanswered ones). Again, the more improbable the answered prayer, the more likely they are to tell others. Those people then tell other people, who tell others, and so on (and remember, selective recall rears its head at every step). The overall effect is that even though extraordinary examples of "answered" prayer occur only very rarely, they will tend to be heavily reported, so that such examples appear to happen relatively often.

6. Sampling bias: Believers are biased in selecting what they will pray for: they usually pray for things that are likely to happen anyway. They might pray for it not to rain during the few hours that an outdoor party or sporting event takes place. If it doesn't rain, they will interpret this as an answered prayer—even if rain was unlikely during that particular interval. On the other hand, if a family member's legs are amputated following an accident, even fervent believers probably wouldn't pray for those limbs to miraculously grow back. By limiting their prayers in this way, believers tend to get what they expect by purely ordinary means.

7. Postdiction: Among other things, this refers to reinterpreting a prediction after the fact to make it fit with the events that occurred. It's more often associated with alleged prophecies, but it applies to prayer as well. Say a believer goes on a date and prays that they will meet the love of their life, and eventually they end up being very good friends, but nothing more. Although the believer was praying about meeting their future spouse, they may consider their prayer answered—after all, they did end up "loving" this person, but in a different way. Because the criteria that believers use to judge whether they got what they "wanted" are actually much broader than they seem, prayers are more likely to be "answered" purely by chance.

8. The last resort: "God answers all prayers, but sometimes he answers 'no'." This is the one explanation that will never, ever fail. It's completely unfalsifiable—that is, as long as believers put stock in this answer, they will never even consider the possibility that there might not be anyone listening.

The idea is that God only answers prayers that align with his will. There are multiple problems with this. First, it seems to contradict certain verses in the Bible. Matthew 7:7 says, "Ask and it will be given to you." John 14:14 says, "You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it." There are no qualifications for these statements, and the context doesn't seem to change the meaning. Believers may argue that Jesus meant to say "I will do it if it's God's will," but that's certainly not what he actually says.

Second, there is the problem of evil issue. Famine, disease, and horrible disasters occur regularly, in spite of prayer and for no apparent reason. Innocent children are forced to become soldiers and sex slaves, again in spite of prayer. Why wouldn't it align with God's will to answer these prayers? In such cases believers can only appeal to omniscience, assuming without evidence that God has some unknown reason for allowing these things to happen.

Finally, If Christian believers still think this last-resort explanation is a good one, I must point out that Muslims, Hindus, and other believers undoubtedly think the same way. Do Christians think these people are justified in thinking that their gods answer prayer in this way, even though this reasoning will probably cause them to continue believing in their false gods? If Christians are justified and other believers aren't, why the double standard? The knee-jerk response is "because we're right," but this is mere assertion—and one that those of other faiths could again use just as easily.

Conclusion

Given the many cognitive biases I have covered here, it's not surprising that believers think prayer is effective. The placebo effect, the regression fallacy, the bandwagon effect, wishful thinking, confirmation bias, selection bias, postdiction, and the ever-lurking last resort explanation all work in concert to form the potent illusion of a supernatural phenomenon. We have many excellent explanations for why prayers may appear to be answered. The onus is on believers to show that they truly are.

Note: It's worth mentioning that we actually have scientific evidence that prayer doesn't work. In the most rigorous experiments on the subject, sick individuals who don't know they are being prayed for (to rule out the placebo effect) fare no better than those who aren't being prayed for at all. Faced with this information, believers now have an even greater hill to climb if they are to show that prayer really is somehow effective.

Wrong Rite Reviews

My local newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, recently started adding movie reviews by regular people to supplement its professional reviews. Last Friday, two of them reviewed a horror movie called The Rite. It's been panned by critics (currently 17% on RottenTomatoes) and it got one star in the U-T. But remarkably, both "citizen reviewers" not only liked the film, but treated it practically as though it were a documentary.

First up is a 63-year-old guy who says the movie is "based on real experiences ... and presents what I believe is a theologically accurate picture of the battle between the forces of good and evil." The movie does claim to be based on true events, but it's absurd to take such extravagant assertions at face value, especially when the parties involved have a monetary interest in selling the story.

The second reviewer is a 14-year-old girl, who's even worse. "I enjoyed learning a lot about exorcism because I never knew anything about it before. I got the chills when I imaged what 'the possessed' must go through," she says. "I would recommend this movie ... if you like learning about the world of devils, demons and exorcism." She seems to be accepting the views presented by a fictional movie as if they were facts taught in a classroom.

It genuinely saddens me to see that the thinking of so many people is apparently stuck in the Dark Ages. We have a pretty good idea of why claims of demon possession exist: they result from a potent combination of mental illness or drugs, communal reinforcement, and the placebo effect. Stories of such events can also be exaggerated due to faulty memory (very common in high-stress situations) or transmission from person to person, and fabricated to gain attention or strengthen faith.

Demon possession is already an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, but since we can already explain why people think it happens, that need for evidence is compounded. So what should the believers do? Get the James Randi Educational Foundation or a team of impartial psychologists to observe an exorcism. Get video footage of people's heads spinning around and furniture flying through the room that couldn't have been plausibly faked. Or preferably, do both at once. But don't pretend that anecdotes from heavily biased religious sources are even remotely convincing.