Theists often pray to God and think that God is listening. Sometimes they even attribute events, such as their child’s recovery from an illness, to prayer, and this confirms their assumption that there is a God. Theists are eager to point out that intercessory prayer (asking God to do something) is only one form of prayer. Still, it’s the only form of prayer we can test for its effectiveness.

In studies of intercessory prayer, sick people are divided into groups and the names of one group given to church activists who are asked to pray for them. Some studies with lax controls have found a positive effect of prayer, and theists often claim that the effectiveness of intercessory prayer has been demonstrated scientifically. But now major studies conducted with more rigor have found no effect. Most recently, STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer) was funded by the Templeton Foundation, which generally propagandizes for theism and presumably hoped to get experimental evidence that prayer works. Instead, the study clearly indicated that intercessory prayer does not work.

STEP was directed by Herbert Benson at Harvard, under rigorous conditions. 1,802 patients recovering from bypass surgery were divided into three groups, two of which “received prayer” (an expression meaning that active Christians had been given their names and were praying for them; to be strictly factual, they received nothing) and one of which was not prayed for. No effect of prayer on recovery could be found, though there was one rather odd outcome. Because researchers wanted to test for a possible effect on health of patients believing that they were being prayed for, members of one of the groups were prayed for and were informed that they were being prayed for. This group suffered more complications than the other two groups.³⁹ This shows that if you believe you’re being prayed for, your health will worsen, so take care.

The usual theist account of intercessory prayer is that God listens to people praying and responds by intervening miraculously in the physical world, for instance by making a cancerous tumor disappear. Just how we should imagine the omniscient and omnipotent God, Creator of the Universe, reacting to being fed some names rather than others as part of a medical study is not entirely clear; I suspect that such a being would be incapable of humor and would therefore not be amused.

Some people who believe in the efficacy of prayer believe that it works directly, not by way of God (or by way of saints who then go and intercede with God). In other words, some unknown kind of force emanates from the mind of the praying person and affects the wellbeing of the person prayed for. Since the evidence we have to date indicates that intercessory prayer doesn’t work at all, this theory is no better than the God theory. But it does illustrate that even if prayer did work, this would not necessarily show there was a God. The hypothesis of such a mental force is extravagant, but the God hypothesis is way more extravagant.

Arguments from Faith

Theists often appeal to ‘faith’. But what is faith? Paul called it “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). All Christians agree that faith plays a big part in their religion, but when it comes to specifying what faith is, they are all over the map.

1. Belief in God (or in some particular type of theistic doctrine) does not come easily. You have to work at it.

2. Belief in God is meritorious. Disbelief in God is less meritorious, or even blameworthy.

3. Belief in God cannot be attained by the same type of approach we use to settle the truth, or the likely truth, of other hypotheses (that there are kangaroos in Australia or that O.J. Simpson slew his ex-wife). A special approach, involving a willful act of commitment, or ‘leap of faith’ is required.

Isn’t this all a bit suspicious? There are various contentious opinions I have arrived at after a great deal of investigation and argument, among them that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, that Lee Oswald and no one else shot John Kennedy, that there is no such thing as a Freudian repressed memory, and that currently fashionable alarms about global warming are hugely overblown. I have spent hundreds of hours arguing with opponents about each of these. I have never dreamt of suggesting that it is sinful to entertain a doubt about my opinion, or that some extraordinary leap of faith is necessary, and I have never met anyone taking the opposing view who has argued like that.

If the God hypothesis is a promising one, then we don’t need to appeal to faith. If the God hypothesis doesn’t sit well with the evidence we have, then we should reject it and it would be wrong to seek to cling to it by giving it some privileged exemption from criticism. Faith is always at war with truth, because if we try to make ourselves arrive at a predetermined conclusion, we run the risk of not dealing honestly with the evidence.

Some theists minimize the difference between faith in God and belief in other factual claims. Theists of this type maintain that we often resort to faith, and that what we’re doing when we have faith in God is not at all unfamiliar or unreasonable. A favorite example of John Henry Newman’s was the belief that Britain is an island.⁴⁰ Newman’s primary audience was people residing in Britain. In Newman’s day there were no satellite photographs showing Britain completely surrounded by water.

What Newman’s example illustrates is that much of what an individual knows is not the outcome of personal observation by that individual but is picked up by that individual from the culture transmitted by other individuals. If personal observation is considered the most persuasive kind of evidence, then the view that Britain is an island can be made to sound quite suspicious. But, as Perry Mason never tired of pointing out (in the eighty-three original stories by Erle Stanley Gardner), circumstantial evidence is the best evidence we have, and eye-witness evidence is the worst.

If Britain is not an island, then it is joined to some continent, presumably Europe, by land. We don’t have any reports that anyone has walked from Paris to London without crossing a major stretch of water. If such a report came our way, we could investigate it. We know that some people, such as William the Bastard and the Emperor Napoléon, had a strong incentive to find such a land passage. We do have many reports from people who have sailed along Britain’s east coast and seen a lot of salt water to the east.

It would be unfair to give the impression that Newman jumps straight from this example to faith in God. However, my point is that believing Britain to be an island is most definitely not a case of believing something ‘on insufficient evidence’. Nothing even remotely analogous to faith is involved here. The theory that Britain is an island is a good theory, and was a good theory in the nineteenth century, and nothing ever beats a good theory except a better theory.

I may cling to a theory in the teeth of some seemingly contradictory evidence, and I may be right to do so. On hearing that a friend of mine has been accused of a dastardly crime, I may take the view that I know him sufficiently well to be sure that he’s innocent. I might express this by saying that I have faith in his innocence. If that were all that were meant by faith, I would have no objection, except to say that introducing the word ‘faith’ here can be misleading (given that theists have often employed it to signify something different). In this example, one category of evidence outweighs, in my judgment, another category of evidence. And in making such a judgment I could be mistaken. The evidence for my friend’s guilt may pile up to the point where I have to abandon my belief in his innocence. There would be no merit in my saying: ‘no matter what the evidence, I will always cling to the hypothesis of my friend’s innocence.’ That would not be meritorious; it would be foolish.

One possible source of confusion is that ‘faith’ may be applied to cases where the theory we adopt is not justified by the evidence—even by all the evidence, taken as a whole. If the theory’s not being justified by the evidence means that the evidence does not render the theory certain—does not logically imply the theory—then that’s frequently the case. But it may still be true that the theory is justified by the evidence in a different sense: that the theory beats all rival theories (that we can think of) in accounting for the evidence. Therefore the fact that a theory we feel we ought to accept outruns the evidence, in the sense that it goes further than can be deduced from the evidence, is never grounds for suggesting that the theory must be accepted on faith. All good theories outrun the evidence in that sense (as do most bad theories).

At the other extreme, there are theists who emphasize the unreasonableness of faith. They candidly proclaim that faith in God is utterly different from the approach we take to any other factual question. However, this view is much rarer than is generally supposed. It’s often attributed to the fourth-century Christian Tertullian, who is notorious for having said ‘I believe because it is absurd’ or ‘I believe because it’s impossible’. In fact, these quotations are torn out of context, and Tertullian took almost exactly the opposite view. Tertullian very definitely defended the claim that Christianity is reasonable and not at all absurd.

Better candidates for people who might have held that we should have faith in God against all reason would be the seventeenth-century Catholic Blaise Pascal and the nineteenth-century Protestant Søren Kierkegaard. But even these would be controversial attributions. Let’s just imagine some Christian admitting that Christianity defies all rational standards and should be accepted because of its very absurdity. One problem with this approach is that we have no way of choosing between two rival belief-systems both demanding to be ‘accepted on faith’, unless, perhaps, we are to choose the more absurd of the two. Christianity is indeed pretty absurd, but we could probably come up with something even more absurd if we put our minds to it.

Another problem with such an approach is that it tends to assume that belief can be a matter of choice. Yet we cannot believe whatever we choose to believe. Belief is involuntary. If you doubt this, try making yourself believe—even just for a few seconds—that there are no kangaroos in Australia. As you can see, it’s quite impossible. Although we can never believe just what we choose to believe, we can choose to take actions which may have the unexpected effect of changing our beliefs. A person can refuse to read Atheism Explained because she feels that this might ‘undermine her faith’. She might be right, but even making that choice shows a certain awareness that her faith is liable to be undermined by being exposed to critical arguments, and thus her belief cannot be so very solid to begin with. Someone who refuses to listen to counter-arguments because afraid that they would cause her to change her views already believes that her views are shaky. In what sense, then, are they really her views? Such a person may have quietly crossed the borderline between believing something and pretending to believe it.

Blaise’s Bad Bet

Blaise Pascal’s famous Wager is cast in terms of belief in God’s existence, ⁴¹ but this must be a slip due to the unfinished form of Pascal’s notes. Pascal is well aware that merely believing in God is no better than being a Jew, a Muslim, or a Protestant: you’ll still get the eternal damnation you deserve. Only full adherence to the Catholic Church’s creeds will save you: that involves believing much, much more than the mere existence of God. In the course of his discussion, Pascal does show he’s assuming that commitment to all the rigmarole of Catholicism, not simple belief in God, is the subject of his Wager.

If the Roman sect of Christianity turns out to be right, adhering to it will get you infinite and eternal happiness, as opposed to infinite and eternal torment, whereas if Catholicism turns out to be false, you will have lost nothing, especially as following Catholicism (Pascal claims) will net you certain benefits in this life. This, says Pascal, makes believing in Catholicism a very good bet. There are various other arguments implied by Pascal. For instance, he assumes that you really want to believe, and that diligently following Catholicism will have the effect of causing you to come to believe. But let’s leave these aside and just look at the Wager itself.

I’ve pointed out that this won’t do as an argument for God’s existence, but only as an argument for the whole Catholic package. Apart from that, the Wager fails to consider a number of possibilities. Perhaps there’s a God, but it’s not the Christian God. Perhaps God is especially incensed at being insulted by the blasphemy that is Christianity, and will send all Christians, and only Christians, to everlasting torment. Or perhaps God rewards people with Hell or Heaven according to how well they have used the intellectual gifts he gave them. Thus, people who do a good job of arriving at the truth go to Heaven, while those who accept theories on inadequate evidence go to Hell, with the worst torments of Hell reserved for those who swallow patent absurdities like the Trinity or the Real Presence.

Or maybe people are sent to different gradations of Hell or Heaven, according to their behavior in relation to the other conscious beings they encounter. Or perhaps there’s a God, but no afterlife. Or perhaps there’s a God and an afterlife, yet God does not reward or punish people in the afterlife for what they do or don’t do in this life.

None of the boys in Vegas would take a second look.

Is Belief in God Self-Evident?

Theists have often claimed that the existence of God is self-evident, but usually this is just a hyperbolic reference to the Design or Cosmological Arguments. However John O’Leary-Hawthorne seriously maintains that the existence of God is self-evident, just as 2 + 2 = 4 is self-evident. He contends that knowledge of God is ‘a priori knowledge’.⁴²

O’Leary-Hawthorne points out that some people reject the self-evident truth of 2 + 2 = 4 and likens these people to atheists. Someone who can’t see that it’s obvious that God exists is like someone who can’t see that 2 + 2 = 4, or that a red bus is a bus. O’Leary-Hawthorne likens the Christian, confronted by an atheist, with an atheist, confronted by some alien creature which professed itself unable to see that some of the things the atheist takes as self-evident are true. This alien creature would lack some essential cognitive ability, and the atheist too lacks an essential cognitive ability, given to some humans and not to others, which O’Leary-Hawthorne calls “the gift of faith.”

O’Lear y-Hawthorne acknowledges that most Christian philosophers do not accept that the existence of God is self-evident, which means that those Christians have not received the gift of faith. So, by his own account, many believers in theism, perhaps most, suffer from the same cognitive deficiency as all atheists.

O’Leary-Hawthorne identifies being self-evident with being obvious. He uses the term ‘primitively compelling’ to equate these two (p. 127). He leaves the impression that some people just know that 2 + 2 = 4 and some other people just can’t see it. Confronted by someone who can’t see that 2 + 2 = 4 or that God exists, O’Leary-Hawthorne can say nothing to help them.

Although we may sometimes use the word ‘self-evident’ to mean ‘obvious’, what O’Leary-Hawthorne really wants is a stronger sense of ‘self-evident’, tantamount to ‘necessarily true’. What appears obvious often turns out to be wrong. The sense of self-evidence O’Leary-Hawthorne wants for God is the sense that survives mature reflection. But awareness of this kind of self-evidence is learned; it is the result of intellectual training. It’s not something that just pops into some people’s minds and not other people’s.

A child may learn that 2 + 2 = 4 and may soon come to regard it as obvious. But still, the child has not learned that 2 + 2 = 4 is self-evident in the strong sense referred to by O’Leary-Hawthorne. The child may suppose, for example, that we know 2 + 2 = 4 is true because we have found by experience that whenever we put two objects with two objects, we generally then have four objects.

An arithmetic teacher may be confronted by a pupil who believes it is obvious that you can divide by zero. The teacher has to get the pupil to accept that you cannot divide by zero. If the pupil becomes familiar enough with this fact, he will eventually consider it obvious. But still, he has more to learn if he is understand that it is self-evident (that it is an ‘a priori truth’). To most people it is not obvious that there is no highest prime number, but to someone with a smattering of mathematical knowledge, this is exactly as obvious as 2 + 2 = 4. But this is still not self-evident. However, to a mathematician specializing in primes and therefore conversant with the proof that there is no highest prime, the nonexistence of a highest prime is indeed seen as self-evident.

O’Leary-Hawthorne has confused the issue in precisely this way. He envisions “a race of skeptics who cannot bring themselves to believe in arithmetic or the laws of logic.” However, any intelligent beings can be satisfied that arithmetic and the laws of logic are useful methods of computation. They don’t have to believe these disciplines contain a priori truths in order to “believe in” them.

By identifying self-evidence with obviousness, and both with the primitively compelling, O’Leary-Hawthorne gives the impression that self-evidence is something naive, unaccountable, and untreatable. In fact, if someone fails to see that something is self-evident, there is always something we can do about it. We can help them to see its self-evidence (or at least, why we judge it to be self-evident) by characterizing it in a certain way. If O’Leary-Hawthorne wants to claim that the existence of God is self-evident, then he should be able to explain why.