Holy lies, Part 2

Any group challenged by an outsider often simply closes ranks to dismiss any criticism, which is why the following remark by an elderly woman who called herself Sister Ruth caught my eye:

He’s the only real Christian among them. The others are all liars, cheats and frauds.

She was referring to the Reverend Giles Fraser, the canon chancellor of St Paul’s, who had just resigned. According to this report by Stephen Bates (accessed 01.11.11), she stepped up and embraced and kissed him. Whatever she was, she was clearly not an unbeliever, a member of a despised out-group as far as many religious believers are concerned.

We don’t know what lies Sister Ruth was thinking of when she made her allegation, but it’s a fair bet she wasn’t talking about one of the biggest holy lies of all: prayer. The same report quoted the dean unwittingly giving the game away about this long-standing scam:

I am glad the cathedral is open again. It is no fun praying in an empty church.

Why should it matter whether the church is full or empty? If prayer achieved even one-tenth of one per cent of what is claimed, then the social circumstances in which it is conducted shouldn’t matter. Of course, it is precisely because prayer does not work that the social circumstances are so important, especially to the religious specialists who benefit from the business drummed up. (The £20,000 daily cost of running St Paul’s isn’t all spent on keeping this beautiful building in tip-top condition: a fair proportion must be needed to cover the salaries of the priests.)

There is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence that prayer doesn’t work, but then there’s anecdotal evidence that prayer (and homeopathy and psychic communication with the dead and so on) does work, so we turn to science to discover the truth of the matter. Benson et al. (2006) published the results of a multimillion-dollar study on the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer in the American Heart Journal. As Robert Trivers (2011, p. 299) puts it:

The results were unambiguous: no effect whatsoever of intercessory prayer on the outcome, no hint of a benefit.

Should we be surprised? Only a person of faith would attempt to explain away such findings. The rational part of any sane human being must agree with Trivers:

A bizarre belief widespread in many Christian circles is that of the power of intercessory prayer. That is, many people seem to believe that a group of people in a room, scrunching up their foreheads in intense concentration on behalf of someone miles away about to undergo surgery, can have a positive effect on the outcome. Were this to be true, the laws of physics would have to be violated on a daily... basis, by a deity who chooses to alter reality in response to the pleas of petitioners according to some unknown criterion.