The Agnostic Argument - 4 (A Personal Experience of Faith)

OK, time for the confessional!

Kip's specially-designed confessional for unbelievers

I'm going to commence my defence with a quote by Scott Fitzgerald:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

With that quote, not only can I justify contradicting myself but I can also prove my intelligence to be first-rate! (Thanks, Scott Fitzgerald, I owe you one.)

I've always been uncomfortable with the atheistic position that a lack of evidence of God's existence is sufficient reason to stop praying. I think that argument is a non sequitur. I argued that point earlier with the example of imaginary numbers, because humanity has achieved useful results by working with something that doesn't exist!

Let me now talk about how faith has helped me in my own life, even though I'm an unabashed agnostic.

On three occasions so far, I have suffered excruciatingly painful back spasms. These have been so traumatic that the dates have been burned into my memory: 30 Aug 2001, 27 July 2002, 31 Jan 2007.

I have never before or since experienced such pain. Every time I had a spasm, it seemed as if my back was on fire, and I could not keep myself from screaming. I used to suffer more than one spasm during the first couple of days of each episode, and it was only with the passage of time (and lots of painkillers) that the inflammation eased and the spasms stopped. (It's also chiropractic that has given me what I think is a more permanent solution, but that's another story.)

The specific situation I want to talk about concerns me lying on my side in bed during one of these episodes when a spasm has laid me low. As long as I'm lying still, there is no problem, but I've been lying on my side for a long time, and I'm getting tired. I want to roll over onto my back, but I'm deadly scared that the movement will trigger another spasm. The memory of that excruciating, burning pain paralyses me. I want to turn over, and it's such a simple movement, but I dare not.

How does science or rationalism help me now? They do nothing for me. If I apply my scientific mind to the problem, I cannot rule out the possibility of a spasm with 100% confidence. Even a low probability is to be dreaded, and I cannot bring myself to take the chance and roll over. So I just lie there, paralysed by fear.

Long moments pass. And you know what happens next. There are no atheists in foxholes or with back spasms, and I pray. I pray fervently to any deity I can think of. (Hinduism provides a rich variety ;-). I pray and pray. I rage. I weep.

Ultimately, calm descends on me. A feeling of peace, and a conviction that my fervent prayer will be answered. Note that this is a completely irrational feeling. I have no evidence at all that a deity has heard my prayers or that such a deity even exists. But I need that faith.

And armed with that faith, I turn. And nothing happens. Moments pass, and there is no spasm. I say a prayer of thanks. To the same deity. Who may or may not exist.

After the fact, the incident is easy to analyse and explain. Faith caused my muscles to relax. Relaxed muscles do not go into spasm. That's the scientific explanation, and there is no need to invoke a deity of any sort to explain this phenomenon.

But here's the catch-22. If there's no deity, then where can the faith come from? Rationalism cannot produce the relaxation required, because rationalism stubbornly insists that there is always a finite probability of a spasm occurring. Only faith can assert with absolute certainty that a spasm will not occur. And faith then proceeds to prove its point.

The other area in my life where faith has helped is in dealing with stress, especially at work. I went through a particularly bad phase in a previous job where a particular individual used to give me a lot of stress. My solution was to sit in my car for a few minutes before entering the office and put myself in a state of mind (through prayer) that told me with absolute confidence that my problems would be taken care of. Again, there was no rational reason for arriving at this level of confidence. It was entirely possible that my professional reputation would be damaged and I would be out of a job as a result of the conflict. Faith, however, is self-standing and doesn't require reasoning to back it up. And it worked. I remained calm at work, and nothing catastrophic happened. Pure rationalism would not have helped me control my stress as simply and effectively.

Analysing the situation after the fact, perhaps my calmness was itself a major contributor to the solution. Keeping calm and not reacting to provocation helped to defuse many potentially explosive situations. And being level-headed in a crisis always helped me make better decisions. That's probably what helped me maintain my professional reputation and make a success of what I was working at. But I needed faith to kickstart all of that.

Now this will sound ungrateful on my part, but none of these positive experiences with prayer and faith has caused me to become a 'believer' in the whole spiritual/religious shebang. I'm still fairly convinced that there is no such thing as a soul (no evidence, after all), and that therefore there are no such things as an afterlife, heaven, hell, reincarnation or karma.

But still, why would an agnostic throw away a perfectly useful tool without an adequate substitute? Agnostics are nothing if not practical. And this is why I can hold two opposing ideas in my mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Indeed, I need both sets of ideas to function. I don't consider faith to be the enemy of reason or the opposite of reason. Faith is the dual of reason. Each solves a different set of problems.

The Agnostic Argument - 2 (Imaginary Numbers and the Power of Prayer)

In the previous instalment, I set up a framework to decompose the various aspects of the "God" concept into "assertions" that could be evaluated relatively independently. Using this framework, compound claims can be broken up into their constituent assertions, and we can tell whether disproving one assertion automatically invalidates the others or not. On a personal note, I'm gratified that it upgrades my position of agnosticism from a rather embarrassing "I do not know" to "I know exactly what I have proved to be false and what I have not".

In this post, I want to talk about another case of compound claims by theists that results in a logical error on the part of the atheists. A frequently-stated atheist position is the inefficacy of prayer. The argument goes that since God does not exist, all prayers directed at God are a waste of time. Therefore, a true atheist must not pray. To my mind, this argument also seems over-reaching because it involves a non sequitur. To wit, God may not exist, but prayer may still be useful for some neuroscientific reason that we still don't understand. Disproving the existence of God does not automatically disprove the efficacy of prayer.

As an analogy, the square root of minus one does not exist, but it would be silly to assert that it is a waste of time to solve mathematical equations involving such "imaginary numbers" merely because they don't exist! On the contrary, very useful results have been obtained, notably in electronics engineering and electrical circuit design, through the use of imaginary numbers.

We know that "faith moves mountains". We have heard of doctors curing patients with placebos, and sometimes with nothing more than their confident word. We know of people who achieved stupendous tasks under the stress of a crisis, and who could not repeat the feat later once they realised how "impossible" it was.

The mind is a very powerful thing, and neuroscience constantly surprises us with what it is capable of achieving.

Opposition to prayer is another trap that atheists have fallen into because of a logical fallacy. They have accepted yet another of the theistic compound claims at face value and failed to break it up into separate assertions to be dealt with independently. The compound claim of the religious ("God answers the prayers of all those who believe in Him") could be thought of as being composed of the following assertions:

• God exists
• We should pray to God with faith
• If we have faith, our prayers will be answered

It may well be that the third statement is independently true regardless of the truth of the first and second statements.

In other words, the "magic" ingredient may be faith itself rather than the object of that faith. Somehow, the mind may be organising itself and influencing others in ways that bring about desired results. We need more research into prayer. A rejection of prayer merely because of its traditional association with a being whose existence is doubtful may be an illogical position, and could be costing us many free benefits.