Why, prayer almost certainly has psychological benefits, like being less gloomy and more hopeful about the thing you pray for, such as healing. Placebo effect etc.
So I am not sure what exactly this quote demonstrate? That widespread beliefs can be wrong? I would say, widespread beliefs are often wrong about how things work out in the world, but not wrong about the actual end effect delivered in the mind. A religous fisherman my logic this way I pray → I get more fish → I feel better. Instead it works out as I pray → I feel better. The end effect is still the same. That is because if it would be like I pray → I still feel the same, sooner or later they would find a way to rationalize stopping wasting time.
Of course it is a bit cynical to claim to that we do everything in the world ultimately only to generate warm fuzzies inside our own minds, but it does seem so, unfortunately.
So I am not sure what exactly this quote demonstrate[s]? That widespread beliefs can be wrong?
Yup. You might think that “prayer might not work even though lots of people think it does” is an entirely obvious idea, but I’m not sure it was so obvious in 1872.
(Although I notice that the argument “It must not have been obvious, or Galton wouldn’t have bothered pointing it out” is uncomfortably similar to the argument Galton is refuting.)
not wrong about the actual end effect delivered in the mind
The kind of feeling-better that comes from having more fish to feed your family is not the same as the kind of feeling-better that comes from having prayed. (E.g., one will stop your children starving and the other won’t.) Isn’t this relevant?
I de-converted from Christianity just a few months ago. Prayer is probably what I miss most. We learned that God always hears our prayers and answers in the way that is best for us, even if the answer isn’t always “yes”.
In general, I’m independent, I trust my own reasoning, and I like to be in control and make decisions. Yet, even for me, it felt REALLY GOOD to believe someone all-knowing and all-loving was in control. To believe that whatever happened was part of some perfect plan that I just wasn’t smart enough to understand.
This… really shows how wide is the Atlantic. I know many Europeans who identify with being Christians, but in all of the cases it is just a way to show their national loyalty, their national identity, their conservatism or their opposition to modern culture, their preference for a higher value system that does not worship money and business and consumption but has a more human-faced, soul-oriented, “deeper” approach. This is how they are Christians. Nobody, literally nobody I know has literal faith, the kind of faith people would pray with. The closest to that is having a faith in Christian values being useful for human growth because they remind people that money and consumption is not all.
So it is always surprising to me that America has pockets where faith is still alive pretty much in the old, pre-1800 sense, as if Voltaire, Hegel, Feuerbach or Marx never happened. Where it is not a culture or identity or values, but literally faith.
Or maybe these pockets exist here too, but the newspapers are not writing about them and I have no idea where they are.
Pockets? It’s between a quarter and half of the US, depending on how you put the threshold for “literal faith.” Secularization is also mostly hollowing out the ‘mainline’ denominations, that are more European in their presentation of things, while the hardcore denominations are growing.
This is very easy to determine. The kind of cultural Christianity that is going on here is basically like conservative guys saying “XY is against a Christian system / order of values”. They are not saying “Jesus/Bible said no”. Are these people saying the former or the laer?
I didn’t get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.
From your username it looks like you’re Dutch (it is literally “the flying Dutchman” in Dutch), so I’m surprised you’ve never heard of the Dutch bible belt and their favourite political party, the SGP. They get about 1.5% of the vote in the national elections and seem pretty legit. And those are just the Christians fervent enough to oppose women’s suffrage. The other two Christian parties have around 15% of the vote, and may contain proper believers as well.
These pockets definitely exist in the UK. There are a fair number of devout Christians here, although they don’t shout about it because mainstream society is so hostile to Christianity. They are also easily the nicest people I’ve met.
Physically where? I am moderately familiar with the Black Country area, having done some industrial projects, and it looks like a pretty undereducated area, which should correlate with this. Yet I have not seen any sign of it.
I think your intuitions are steering you wrong if you’d expect this kind of thing among the “undereducated” (your word). That might be true in the US, but in Britain most people from those social echelons simply don’t attend church, and haven’t for generations, as an effect of urbanisation. Of course, there are relatively poor and uneducated people with that relation to religion in the Black Country, but they aren’t Christians.
If you want to find devout Christians, you need to find educated, middle class, small-c conservative types—HTB and the like aren’t filled with manual workers. Or else, recent immigrants—but they don’t normally attend CoE churches.
This comment resonates with me. I am also a Christian-turned-Atheist.
When something bad happens, or I feel in danger, or I don’t know what to do, usually I want to send up a prayer. Then I have to catch myself and remember that yeah, that’s not going to help.
It won’t help the situation, but it might help you to better handle the situation. The useful thing about “prayer” isn’t that it actually calls down any outside help, but that it forces you to clarify your own thoughts regarding what you want and what would be useful… in much the same way that problem solving is made easier by explaining the problem to somebody else.
Verbal communication forces you to serialize your thoughts, to disassemble what may be a vague or complex structure of interconnecting impulses, ideas, mental models, etc. and then encode it in an organized stream for another mind to re-encode into a similar structure. But the process of doing this forces you to re-encode it as well.
So don’t stop using a useful technique for organizing your thoughts, just because there isn’t an actual mind on the other end of the encoding process (except maybe yours). Programmers have been known to “rubber duck”, i.e., use a literal or figurative rubber duck as the thing to talk to. You’re not going to commit some sort of atheist sin by using an imaginary sky deity as your rubber duck. Or ask the Flying Spaghetti Monster to touch you with His Noodly Appendage to grant you the clarity and wisdom you seek. The value of an invocation comes from its invoker, not its invokee.
You’re not going to commit some sort of atheist sin by using an imaginary sky deity as your rubber duck.
Interesting comment! I was catching myself about to pray all the time when I first deconverted, but always stopped myself, thinking that praying or listening to Christian music would make me a hypocrite of an atheist.
I still listen to Christian music occasionally, and reading your comment makes me wonder whether it would have been okay to go on praying, too.
Would any atheists here argue that it’s always bad to pray?
I wouldn’t find it inconceivable for prayer to have some role outside of the belief in supernatural communication with spiritual beings. In a certain sense it’s a form of meditation. If you change the wording of a prayer away from the implication that someone out there will hear you and make supernatural changes in the world accordingly, you could pray as a sort of meditation on a desire or on a value. I guess, at least, that repeating to yourself that you hold a certain desire and care deeply about it is a way to reinforce it.
Reading this reply, I was immediately reminded of a situation described by Jen Peeples, I think in an episode of The Atheist Experience, about her co-pilot’s reaction of prayer during a life-threatening helicopter incident. ( This Comment is all I could find as reference. )
Unless your particular prayer technique is useful for quickly addressing emergency situations, you probably don’t want to be in the habit of relying on it as a general practice. I think the “rubber duck” Socratic approach could still be useful, so this isn’t a disagreement with your entire comment, just a warning about possible failure modes.
Rubber ducking is for when you’re uncertain how to proceed. An incident on a military aircraft is not such a situation: there are checklists that detail precisely how you’re supposed to proceed, which you’d better be following.
If you are doing problem-solving in a distressed aircraft, and that problem-solving activity is not explicitly listed on the checklist for the current issue, you are Doing It Wrong. And if you’re praying in such a scenario, it had better be something like, “grant me the calm and clarity to follow the checklist, so I’m not distracted by any panicky impulses”.
It is. I guess I was probably reading too much into it. It is just, if see a widespread practice, I don’t want to simply take the most literal possible prediction of what they claim it does, and if that doesn’t, then consider them idiots. I will assume people are essentially economical so not idiots as long as time invested vs. some kind of psychological profit gained goes, and want to find out in what other ways does it work i.e. what kind of potential profit it gains, even if just psychological (and sometimes not just psychological but e.g. social).
I take Galton as making the many-religions argument for atheism (often used against miracles): that the mutual inconsistency of religions tends to refute them all. (‘If testimony is enough to establish the truth of miracles claimed by the Bible, why do you not admit the truth of Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist miracles? And if you deny their truth, how can you accept the Christian miracles?’ etc etc.) Note his description:
...It either compels us to admit that the prayers of Pagans, of Fetish worshippers and of Buddhists who turn praying wheels, are [all] recompensed in the same way as those of orthodox believers...
The supernatural justification of all these practices are different and mutually inconsistent, and if there is no divine mechanism behind prayer, then how can it accomplish things like improving the health of someone hundreds of miles away, much less anything like world peace? (The ‘self-help’ model of prayer predicts only extremely limited placebo effects.)
Why, prayer almost certainly has psychological benefits, like being less gloomy and more hopeful about the thing you pray for, such as healing. Placebo effect etc.
So I am not sure what exactly this quote demonstrate? That widespread beliefs can be wrong? I would say, widespread beliefs are often wrong about how things work out in the world, but not wrong about the actual end effect delivered in the mind. A religous fisherman my logic this way I pray → I get more fish → I feel better. Instead it works out as I pray → I feel better. The end effect is still the same. That is because if it would be like I pray → I still feel the same, sooner or later they would find a way to rationalize stopping wasting time.
Of course it is a bit cynical to claim to that we do everything in the world ultimately only to generate warm fuzzies inside our own minds, but it does seem so, unfortunately.
Yup. You might think that “prayer might not work even though lots of people think it does” is an entirely obvious idea, but I’m not sure it was so obvious in 1872.
(Although I notice that the argument “It must not have been obvious, or Galton wouldn’t have bothered pointing it out” is uncomfortably similar to the argument Galton is refuting.)
The kind of feeling-better that comes from having more fish to feed your family is not the same as the kind of feeling-better that comes from having prayed. (E.g., one will stop your children starving and the other won’t.) Isn’t this relevant?
There are some Christians on LessWrong. What is their experience of prayer?
I de-converted from Christianity just a few months ago. Prayer is probably what I miss most. We learned that God always hears our prayers and answers in the way that is best for us, even if the answer isn’t always “yes”.
In general, I’m independent, I trust my own reasoning, and I like to be in control and make decisions. Yet, even for me, it felt REALLY GOOD to believe someone all-knowing and all-loving was in control. To believe that whatever happened was part of some perfect plan that I just wasn’t smart enough to understand.
Thanks for sharing that.
This… really shows how wide is the Atlantic. I know many Europeans who identify with being Christians, but in all of the cases it is just a way to show their national loyalty, their national identity, their conservatism or their opposition to modern culture, their preference for a higher value system that does not worship money and business and consumption but has a more human-faced, soul-oriented, “deeper” approach. This is how they are Christians. Nobody, literally nobody I know has literal faith, the kind of faith people would pray with. The closest to that is having a faith in Christian values being useful for human growth because they remind people that money and consumption is not all.
So it is always surprising to me that America has pockets where faith is still alive pretty much in the old, pre-1800 sense, as if Voltaire, Hegel, Feuerbach or Marx never happened. Where it is not a culture or identity or values, but literally faith.
Or maybe these pockets exist here too, but the newspapers are not writing about them and I have no idea where they are.
Pockets? It’s between a quarter and half of the US, depending on how you put the threshold for “literal faith.” Secularization is also mostly hollowing out the ‘mainline’ denominations, that are more European in their presentation of things, while the hardcore denominations are growing.
Yes but is it faith or a culture of values?
This is very easy to determine. The kind of cultural Christianity that is going on here is basically like conservative guys saying “XY is against a Christian system / order of values”. They are not saying “Jesus/Bible said no”. Are these people saying the former or the laer?
Mike Huckabee:
From your username it looks like you’re Dutch (it is literally “the flying Dutchman” in Dutch), so I’m surprised you’ve never heard of the Dutch bible belt and their favourite political party, the SGP. They get about 1.5% of the vote in the national elections and seem pretty legit. And those are just the Christians fervent enough to oppose women’s suffrage. The other two Christian parties have around 15% of the vote, and may contain proper believers as well.
These pockets definitely exist in the UK. There are a fair number of devout Christians here, although they don’t shout about it because mainstream society is so hostile to Christianity. They are also easily the nicest people I’ve met.
Physically where? I am moderately familiar with the Black Country area, having done some industrial projects, and it looks like a pretty undereducated area, which should correlate with this. Yet I have not seen any sign of it.
My own experience is in London and Cambridge.
I think your intuitions are steering you wrong if you’d expect this kind of thing among the “undereducated” (your word). That might be true in the US, but in Britain most people from those social echelons simply don’t attend church, and haven’t for generations, as an effect of urbanisation. Of course, there are relatively poor and uneducated people with that relation to religion in the Black Country, but they aren’t Christians.
If you want to find devout Christians, you need to find educated, middle class, small-c conservative types—HTB and the like aren’t filled with manual workers. Or else, recent immigrants—but they don’t normally attend CoE churches.
They certainly do. Some of them send out suicide bombers which is when the mainstream media starts to notice them… :-/
Yeah I mean those are imports, I was meaning traditional ones. (Breivik does not count as one, as he is more of a political type crazy.)
This comment resonates with me. I am also a Christian-turned-Atheist.
When something bad happens, or I feel in danger, or I don’t know what to do, usually I want to send up a prayer. Then I have to catch myself and remember that yeah, that’s not going to help.
It won’t help the situation, but it might help you to better handle the situation. The useful thing about “prayer” isn’t that it actually calls down any outside help, but that it forces you to clarify your own thoughts regarding what you want and what would be useful… in much the same way that problem solving is made easier by explaining the problem to somebody else.
Verbal communication forces you to serialize your thoughts, to disassemble what may be a vague or complex structure of interconnecting impulses, ideas, mental models, etc. and then encode it in an organized stream for another mind to re-encode into a similar structure. But the process of doing this forces you to re-encode it as well.
So don’t stop using a useful technique for organizing your thoughts, just because there isn’t an actual mind on the other end of the encoding process (except maybe yours). Programmers have been known to “rubber duck”, i.e., use a literal or figurative rubber duck as the thing to talk to. You’re not going to commit some sort of atheist sin by using an imaginary sky deity as your rubber duck. Or ask the Flying Spaghetti Monster to touch you with His Noodly Appendage to grant you the clarity and wisdom you seek. The value of an invocation comes from its invoker, not its invokee.
Interesting comment! I was catching myself about to pray all the time when I first deconverted, but always stopped myself, thinking that praying or listening to Christian music would make me a hypocrite of an atheist.
I still listen to Christian music occasionally, and reading your comment makes me wonder whether it would have been okay to go on praying, too.
Would any atheists here argue that it’s always bad to pray?
I wouldn’t find it inconceivable for prayer to have some role outside of the belief in supernatural communication with spiritual beings. In a certain sense it’s a form of meditation. If you change the wording of a prayer away from the implication that someone out there will hear you and make supernatural changes in the world accordingly, you could pray as a sort of meditation on a desire or on a value. I guess, at least, that repeating to yourself that you hold a certain desire and care deeply about it is a way to reinforce it.
Relevant: guy experimenting with custom-made gods for 12-step programs:
http://tailoredbeliefs.com/born-again-atheist/
Reading this reply, I was immediately reminded of a situation described by Jen Peeples, I think in an episode of The Atheist Experience, about her co-pilot’s reaction of prayer during a life-threatening helicopter incident. ( This Comment is all I could find as reference. )
Unless your particular prayer technique is useful for quickly addressing emergency situations, you probably don’t want to be in the habit of relying on it as a general practice. I think the “rubber duck” Socratic approach could still be useful, so this isn’t a disagreement with your entire comment, just a warning about possible failure modes.
Rubber ducking is for when you’re uncertain how to proceed. An incident on a military aircraft is not such a situation: there are checklists that detail precisely how you’re supposed to proceed, which you’d better be following.
If you are doing problem-solving in a distressed aircraft, and that problem-solving activity is not explicitly listed on the checklist for the current issue, you are Doing It Wrong. And if you’re praying in such a scenario, it had better be something like, “grant me the calm and clarity to follow the checklist, so I’m not distracted by any panicky impulses”.
It is. I guess I was probably reading too much into it. It is just, if see a widespread practice, I don’t want to simply take the most literal possible prediction of what they claim it does, and if that doesn’t, then consider them idiots. I will assume people are essentially economical so not idiots as long as time invested vs. some kind of psychological profit gained goes, and want to find out in what other ways does it work i.e. what kind of potential profit it gains, even if just psychological (and sometimes not just psychological but e.g. social).
I take Galton as making the many-religions argument for atheism (often used against miracles): that the mutual inconsistency of religions tends to refute them all. (‘If testimony is enough to establish the truth of miracles claimed by the Bible, why do you not admit the truth of Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist miracles? And if you deny their truth, how can you accept the Christian miracles?’ etc etc.) Note his description:
The supernatural justification of all these practices are different and mutually inconsistent, and if there is no divine mechanism behind prayer, then how can it accomplish things like improving the health of someone hundreds of miles away, much less anything like world peace? (The ‘self-help’ model of prayer predicts only extremely limited placebo effects.)
Aren’t you assuming the conclusion? Here is another chain: I pray → No fish bite → God doesn’t like me → Depressed.
Or “maybe I shouldn’t have sinned last week...”