Pi, prophecy, and prayer

Their topic for that day was Happiness. The man asserted that spirituality was necessary for happiness, and proceeded to quote a verse from Matthew to ‘prove’ his statement. So I asked if only spirituality from the Bible would work, or if the principles of other religions would make someone happy as well. At some point, the woman asked if those other books were reliable, and I asked her if she thought the Bible was completely factual. She, of course, said yes.

I pointed out that the Bible said the sun moved around the Earth in Joshua 10:13 and that 1Kings 7:23 said the value of pi was 3 instead of 3.14. She said that maybe the sun did move around the Earth back in those days, while the man argued that, since the final value of pi was not known, maybe 3 was correct. He simply could not grasp that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter could not be a whole quantity.

This is all too typical of believers. But the ignorance of the average believer is not strange. What is puzzling is how otherwise intelligent people so readily accept the blatant contradictions and factual errors of religious texts. Michael Shermer, in his book Why People Believe Weird Things, argues, “We have magical thinking and superstitions because we need critical thinking and pattern-finding. The two cannot be separated.” My own suspicion is that the brain is modular in its psychological structure, so that religion is contained in one compartment that deals only with matters of the unknown and the inexplicable. However, the compartment is not hermetic. Silliness does leak out, and intellectual training does modify the religion module. This is why the more educated a person is, the less likely they are to be conventionally religious. It may also be why few very religious persons are intellectually outstanding. In one US survey, only 40 percent of scientists believed in God and an afterlife, as compared to 90 percent of the general population. And, among the most eminent scientists, only seven percent were religious.

Obviously, anyone who does not believe in pi would also reject historical facts which contradict religious propaganda. So last week hundreds of Trinidadians went to hear author Hal Lindsey, who was here to prophesy the end of the world and sell some books. It doesn’t matter that the Bible does not have one prophecy that has ever come true. As author Tim Callahan points out in his book Bible Prophecy: Failure or Fulfillment?, all the so-called prophecies can be dismissed on several bases: statements too obvious to be a prophecy; circular reasoning; misinterpretation; prophecies taken out of context; translation errors; excessive stretching of definitions; and prophecies so vague as to be open to any number of interpretations.

Callahan also notes that Lindsey, in his 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth, originally predicted that Armageddon would occur in 1995. Lindsey has since changed it to a generation after 1967 (when Israel captured Jerusalem), which means the world should end sometime next year. If this is so, then you needn’t pay your loan on that foreign-used car. However, Lindsey has fudged by estimating a “generation” as either 40 or 100 years — no fool he.

The funny thing is, the same people who believe that Biblical prophecies are inevitable also believe that prayer can affect events in the world. This even goes to the extent of asserting that prayer would cure the social ills of the country. But, if prayer does help a nation, then why is it that the World Values Survey shows that countries with the highest levels of religiosity are also countries with the highest levels of poverty, violence and official corruption? I am not saying that religion causes these ills: but it clearly doesn’t help cure them.

Prayer’s lack of efficacy at the social level is also reflected at the personal level. A 10-year study conducted by the Harvard Medical School tracked three groups of 1,802 heart patients recovering from surgery. One group was prayed for but not told they were being prayed for; another was not prayed for; and the third group was prayed for and told they were being prayed for. All the patients were believers. About half the persons in the first and second groups had post-surgical complications, as compared to 59 percent of the third group.

“Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on whether complications occurred (and) patients who were certain that intercessors would pray for them had a higher rate of complications than patients who were uncertain but did receive intercessory prayer,” said the study’s authors.

What all this suggests is that anyone who really wants the best for their loved ones and their society should actually not pray for them. So perhaps one reason Trinidad and Tobago is having so many problems is precisely because we have too many persons in power who think prayer is better than policy, that policy should be determined by prophecy, and that prophecy can predict pi.

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Website: www.caribscape.com