Regarding the Power of Prayer, or Did the People on the Titanic Forget to Pray?

"Oh, they built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue,
And they thought they had a ship that the water couldn't go through,
But the good Lord raised his hand, and said that ship would never land.
It was sad when the great ship went down."
                                                Children's song "Titanic"

“Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
                                                Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Prayer is an important facet of belief in God, particularly from the interventionist view of God.  Personal testimony regarding the power of prayer is quite common.  Many people deeply believe in the power of prayer, and believe that they have observed response to prayers in their own lives.  Occasionally, a post circulates on Facebook like a chain letter, urging friends to type “Amen!” if they believe in the power of prayer.  And thousands of “Amen” responses follow.  Guideposts and other religious writings are full of stories of prayers answered – a recovery from illness, a lost relative found.  A quick Google search lists stories of answered prayers: “Money Owed”, “Lost in the Mountains”, “Locked Out”, “My Broken Foot”, “Glasses in the Ocean”, “Class Ring”, and so on.  There are many stories of prayers answered, for life problems, large and small.

But what about the converse?  What about prayers that are not answered, especially in circumstances more dire than a lost pair of glasses?  Why would God choose to answer a prayer to find a pair of glasses, but neglect to save people from natural or man-made disasters?

In essence, does anyone suppose that the people on the Titanic forgot to pray?  

When Jews fleeing the destruction of Jerusalem were besieged by the Romans at Masada in 74 AD, and ended the siege with a mass suicide, does anyone think they didn’t pray? 

When Mongols attacked the religious center of Vladimir, Russia in the 1300s, about three thousand Orthodox Christians took shelter in the cathedral and were killed there, in front of the icons.  The cathedral still stands, and you can walk on the same floor where they were slaughtered. Does anyone think that they forgot to pray? 

Does anyone believe that Jews ordered into gas chambers during the Holocaust didn’t pray? 

When Nazis systematically lined up and shot 120,000 Ukrainian Jews, Roma, Russians and families of resistance fighters at the ravine called Babyn Yar in Kyiv, does anyone think they didn’t pray? 

When 150 newly elected black legislators were besieged in a Louisiana courthouse by a white militia in 1873, the courthouse was set on fire.  The legislators were massacred as they fled the building.  Does anyone think that they didn’t pray?  

When the Allies fire-bombed Dresden, killing 150,000 German civilians, does anyone believe that the victims didn’t pray? 

During the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centers, dozens of people were trapped on the roofs of the buildings, and suffered from blistering heat rising from the fires below.  There were helicopters within sight, unable or unwilling to land because of the updraft from the fires.  One by one, the people gave up hope of rescue and jumped to escape the heat, falling 1300' to their deaths.  Does anyone believe that they forgot to pray?

The endless horrors of history continue today, both of man’s making and by natural disaster.  And at no point is there systematic evidence of physical rescue beyond what we might expect from random events.

So it goes (with a nod to Kurt Vonnegut) for every disaster or massacre of religious people in history.  For certainly, among the thousands of victims, there must have been many innocent, faithful and devout followers of God, who prayed with all diligence for mercy and protection which never came.  From this, can we conclude that God will ease our suffering, cure an ailment, help us find our car keys, score a touchdown or be on time to an appointment?

Communal Prayer

Another important aspect of Christianity is common prayer.  We pray in church, and we pray at meals.  Prayer brings us together in a meditative moment, and we communicate to each other our gratitude at the good things in life and our joy in each other’s presence.  It can be a good thing.

A common practice in modern American Christian churches is to join together in prayer for members of the congregation and their loved ones who are sick, or in some life crisis, or recently deceased.  I don’t mean to disparage communal prayer.  It is a way of communicating to each other our care, to provide comfort to friends during loss and to build a sense of community.  But I find it odd as a way of communicating with God.  I especially find it odd when people solicit prayer for someone through social media, as though gathering more prayers will somehow prod God into action.   Is that how people think prayer works?  Does God tote up the number of people praying for someone, and answer those prayers ahead of someone alone, without friends, and desperately praying for themselves? 

Is prayer like “Horton Hears a Who” by Dr. Suess, where it is necessary for every Who in Whoville to plead for a response, until the smallest Who’s loud “Yop!”  is sufficient to attract the attention of God?  I don’t think that’s how prayer should work.  If God is all-knowing, all-loving, and all powerful, the smallest prayer should be equal to a million prayers.  And in any case, prayer itself should be unnecessary – God should already know.

Conclusion

It seems to me that the power of prayer is literally survivorship bias, writ large.  Those who survive speak about the power of prayer, and those who do not survive are not heard.   It seems to me that either God’s answers to prayer are incredibly capricious, without regard for devotion, merit, evil or innocence, or they do not exist.  I do not choose to believe in a capricious God.   

There is little consistent evidence for answers to prayer by a merciful, interventionist God.  

Does a Virus Have a Soul?

"You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

--  Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994)

Attungauruk

Watercolor by Inupiaq artist Ken Lisbourne, of Point Hope, Alaska.  

The scene shows the funeral of an Inupiaq chief, about 1880.  The soul of the chief rises up to heaven while his         seven wives, elderly parents, friends and Russian Orthodox priest grieve by his gravesite.

The Soul

The concept of a human soul is in many ways central to religion.  The question of whether other living things have a soul addresses the “special” status of humans as the purpose of God’s creation.  The soul is a discrete entity – it exists or it doesn’t exist.  We can’t say that a chimpanzee has 96% of a soul.  But when we look at our evolutionary history or at the range of self-awareness in the human species there is no easily defined boundary. 

Francis Crick (of DNA discovery fame) wrote a book, “The Amazing Hypothesis”.   I only read it about half-way through; I got the point quickly and was done.   In Crick’s view, there is no evidence for an essence of life beyond our physical bodies and minds, and no need for such an explanation of human life.

I’ll start with the question that I asked the teacher in my church confirmation class, when I was twelve or thirteen years old.   “Does a virus have a soul?”  

As I dimly recall, my thinking at the time was that if I had a soul, my parents also had souls.  And my grandparents, great-great-great-great grandparents, to cave-people, to proto-human apes, to early mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, etc.  Where do you draw the line between what living thing has a soul and what does not?

Does a Virus Have a Soul?

I don’t remember how my teacher answered the question, but I remember thinking that his answer wasn’t very convincing.  A virus, after all, can be crystallized in the lab like a mineral, then dissolved and continue replicating itself when allowed to infect a cell.  But humanity is in an unbroken evolutionary chain with viruses, and amoebas, starfish and oak trees, horseshoe crabs, moss and lichens.  We share a large percentage of our DNA with oak trees.  So the question, in stealth form, is whether humans have a soul, or whether each living cell has a soul. 

In a traditional view, we would presume that all humans have a soul (although I have my doubts about some of them).  But let’s consider our heredity.  Homo Sapiens interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, presumably they also had souls.   Homo Habilis made tools 1.5 million years ago; perhaps those humans have an immortal soul.  And so on, back through our lineage to our cousins the chimpanzees (98% human DNA) and fruit flies (47% human DNA), wine grapes (24% human DNA) to stromatolites and algae (7 % human DNA).   Where do we draw the line among our ancestors and cousins, between those who possess souls and those that do not?  Can we say that a grape plant has 24% of a soul?

I think this issue is why the topic of evolution is so uncomfortable to Christians.  I think Christians are generally uncomfortable with the idea of sharing heaven with flatworms. 

It is also useful to remember that we are colonial creatures, as much as a stromatolite or coral.  Each of our cells is an individual creature which lives and dies, while only the collective entity has consciousness. Does a cell have a soul?  

Subdividing further to a lower level, each cell lives in symbiosis with mitochondria, which were eaten long ago by the ancestors of our cells.  Mitochondria resisted digestion and continued life, first as a parasite and then as a partner of the larger cell.  Does a mitochondrion have a soul?  What part of a person has a soul?   Also, consider that we are not only descended from apes, but also from viruses.  Various retroviruses infected our ancestors and left segments of DNA which now reproduce with humans.  Some of that DNA is functional and contributes to who we are as humans.  Does the viral part of a human have a soul, and did the viral ancestors of humans have souls?  Did the virus ancestors of humans have part of a soul?

It seems to me that there is a conflict between the idea of the soul as the discrete, eternal entity of human self and our evolutionary history.  Our history shows we are a patchwork of biology.  We are connected in an unbroken lineage to much simpler forms of life.  It is unclear where we should draw the line between beings which have a human soul and those that do not.

The Soul as the Source of Free Will

Perhaps the soul is the unit of life that is capable of judgment, exercising free will and making decisions of right and wrong.  Very well then, but this excludes humans who are born with a birth defect, leaving only the brain stem and lower functions; life, but no possibility of thought or deliberate action.  Can some humans be born without a soul?  Do we conclude that these children of humans are excluded from heaven because they have no soul?  

I know a young woman who is mentally impaired.   The Catholic Church excludes her from communion, because they believe she cannot understand salvation.  She talks, she sometimes works at McDonalds, she calls my wife on the telephone – would anyone say she has no soul?  Although she cannot read, she is compassionate, empathetic and caring.   It is clear to me that she has more of a soul than many others in our midst.

Where is the Soul?
        Plato, in Phaedo, circa 430 BCE: 

            Simmias replied:
            "And is [death] anything but the separation of soul and body? And being
            dead is the attainment of this separation; when the soul exists in
            herself, and is parted from the body and the body is parted from the
            soul-that is death?”
            Cebes answered, “But in what relates to the soul, men are apt to be incredulous
            they fear that when she leaves the body her place may be nowhere,
            and that on the very day of death she may be destroyed and perish-immediately
            on her release from the body, issuing forth like smoke or air and
            vanishing away into nothingness?....much persuasion and many arguments are required in
            order to prove that when the man is dead the soul yet exists, and has any force of
            intelligence."

I'm astonished that our understanding of the human soul has not progressed in over 24 centuries.

The soul is inextricably tied to the idea of self.  The self includes certain essential features, without which it cannot exist: memory, will, self-awareness, thoughts and emotions.  These are the things that define us as a person.  Thanks to these aspects of consciousness, when we awake in the morning, we know we are the same person who went to bed the night before.  Modern neuroscience, using tools like functional MRI, has shown us where each of these capabilities exists in the brain.  This knowledge was also partly revealed through the study of unfortunate individuals who have lost part of the self through some kind of brain trauma.  Dr. Oliver Sacks illustrated these cases in a brilliant series of popular books.  The functional aspect of the self in living people is inextricably tied to specific functional aspects of the brain, without which the self does not exist.  

 Death's Door, William Blake, 1805.

Consider the situation of many Alzheimer’s patients.  Degradation of the brain due to age and disease reduces and eventually destroys the elements of the self.  Memory, will, self-awareness, thoughts and emotions gradually diminish and disappear.  We might look at a patient and say that the soul has departed, long before death of the body.  But at what point did the soul depart?  Can the soul disappear in tiny drops, leaving a partial soul behind?  Again, we have the fundamental discrepancy between the theoretical indivisibility of the soul, and the diminished shards we experience in real life.

When the mechanisms of the self shut down, as they must at death, what remains?  Can a soul exist without memory, without will, self-awareness, thoughts or emotions?  When the brain dies, carrying all of the attributes of the self, how can the soul persist?  If we must believe that the entirety of the self is somehow transferred at the moment of death to another, invisible vessel, where is it?  And why should we believe that?  Does this make any sense?

If there is no immortal soul, carrying the self, the good deeds and sins of the individual beyond death, then the traditional ideas of heaven, hell and of God as the final Judge are also void.

Socrates,  in Plato’s Phaedo:
            “And are we to suppose that the soul, which is invisible, in passing
            to the true Hades, which like her is invisible, and pure, and noble,
            and on her way to the good and wise God, whither, if God will, my
            soul is also soon to go-that the soul, I repeat, if this be her nature
            and origin, is blown away and perishes immediately on quitting the
            body as the many say? That can never be, dear Simmias and Cebes.”
            “That soul, I say, herself invisible, departs to the invisible world to
            the divine and immortal and rational: thither arriving, she lives
            in bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears
            and wild passions and all other human ills, and forever dwells, as
            they say of the initiated, in company with the gods. Is not this true,
            Cebes?”

I stand with Cebes in response to Socrates and Plato.  The invisible soul, the invisible, pure, noble and true Hades, the invisible, good and wise God, and the invisible divine, immortal and rational world do not exist.

Fin

The Soul Reluctantly Departing the Body, William Blake.

 Death of a Strong, Wicked Man, William Blake.

The Reunion of the Soul and the Body, William Blake

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The reproduction of the watercolor by Ken Lisbourne is used respectfully, but without permission.  I will remove the image upon request.  I hope that inclusion of the image will promote Ken's outstanding work as an artist.

Images of art by William Blake also used without permission.
Langridge, Irene, 1904, William Blake, A Study of His Life and Art Work

http://www.thalasson.com/books/irene-langridge/william-blake/