Theology as a science

The people at Science & Theology News have been thinking about these experiments that look at prayer in relation to patients being prayed for. The article linked under the heading of this post has some helpful and valid points to make, among them this one which puts succinctly into words one of my misgivings about it all.

When scientists investigate the physical world — provided they ask the right questions and adopt sound scientific methodology — nature has no alternative but to yield its secrets. But applying that methodology to God — or to anyone else with a will of his own — is not a guarantee of success. God might simply decide not to cooperate.

The author of the article, Russel Stanard, rightly points out earlier in the article;

let us be clear that any positive correlation between prayer and a better outcome would not have amounted to proof of God’s existence. Persuasive evidence, maybe, but not out-and-out proof. An alternative explanation might have invoked some kind of direct telepathic link between the minds of the intercessor and patient — one that did not entail God as an intermediary.

In a further article, David G. Myers points out that

The Lord's Prayer, the model prayer for Christians that I pray every day, does not attempt to control a God who withholds care unless cajoled. Rather, by affirming God's nature and human dependence even for daily bread, it prepares one to receive that which God is already providing. Through prayer, people of faith express their praise and gratitude, confess their wrongdoing, voice their concerns, open themselves to the spirit, and seek the peace and grace to live as God's own people.

Just so: in attempting to investigate extraordinary providence, the ordinariness of God's providence is missed and we veer towards God-of-the-gaps approaches which is less than helpful in the ongoing apologetic and doctrinal tasks. It misses the way that God seemingly chooses to use the everyday humdrum means of this-worldly processes to achieve things: we should as Christians reflect on the fact that there are among us those who clearly have a vocation to be surgeons, GP's, paramedics, nurses, psychiatrists and the like; how is God intending to work in their vocations, do we think?

And that last quote is quite right too in affirming that there is a whole lot more to prayer than simply asking God for things or telling God to do stuff [!], in fact, really, we can't do intercessory prayer without relationship and listening, and double-blind tests don't really work with that, especially when the prayists will be at all sorts of different points in their own relating to God who may have other agendas for them than answering experimentor-inspired [rather than Spirit-inspired] prayers for tests that they may or may not have God's active approval to be part of in the first place. See what I mean?

Then in this article, Richard Swinburne makes the bold and perilous, but probably correct [read the context] claim that

Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others. Only in that way can some people be encouraged to make serious choices about the sort of person they are to be. For other people, illness is not so valuable.

And, again, factoring that kind of consideration into the experimental hermeneutics and methodologies is not going to be easy. That's not to say, either, that we should not try or that we should be hostile to such studies. There may be valuable things to learn from them. We just have to be careful about what conclusions we draw and to be aware that in all probablity nothing is going to deliver the knock-out punch either for theism or atheism: it's all going to be a lot more subtle than that.

Science & Theology News - Theology as a science: Filed in: prayer, effects, science, methodology, agency