Two lawyers are in a store when two armed robbers burst in and yell, Stick em up. As the robbers move from customer to customer, stealing their money and jewelry, the first lawyer shoves something into the other lawyer’s hand. What’s this? The second lawyer asks. The first lawyer replies, it’s the hundred bucks I owe you. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 

Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. Here, our host uses his experience as both an attorney and an atheist to put religion on trial. We solemnly swear that it is the most informative, educational, and entertaining jury duty you will ever do. And, uh, now it’s time for the cross examiner. • • • • • • • • • • • • • Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast. I am your host, the Cross examiner. I am an atheist. I am an attorney, and I am alarmed. I’m alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States. And more importantly, I’m alarmed by the massive amount of misinformation that is powering that rise. So last episode, we had a fun episode where we talked about the Show Me the Toes incident at the James River Church that started me down a path of research that has taken me quite a while. We had some family vacation and all of that stuff. But it’s been a while since I’ve been able to publish an episode, because faith healing, it turns out, is a massively, deep issue. There’s so many aspects to it. To understand • • • why in today’s society, in arguably the most powerful nation in the world, the most scientifically advanced nation in the world, we have states that let parents kill their kids because they opt to use prayer instead of actual medicine. And so I thought this episode would just be about that. But in order to discuss that, in order to completely understand • • how we got here, we have to go through many, many different steps. And, um, I’m still a novice podcaster. I’m still sort of learning how to do things. So you’ll forgive me as I have to chop things up and take some time as I do my research. I’ve read a couple of books. I’ve read a whole bunch of scientific papers in order to prepare myself for the next several episodes. So I hope to drop the next several in a row very quickly, uh, now that I sort of have an understanding. So let’s go back to that James River church. The pastor who said that they prayed and regrew amputated toes, outrageous claim, we all laughed at it. And • • by the way, after that, somebody reached out to me and pointed this out. I did not realize this. That’s the same church where last year in 2022, Josh Holly, the Missouri congressman he was the one who gave the fist bump in the air show of support to the January 6 traitors, the insurrectionists. As he was walking into Congress, and then was later seen fleeing like a coward from that very crowd as they rampaged through the Capitol looking for people to tie up, kidnap, and possibly kill that guy. Spoke at this church last year, and, • • • uh, he was at a men’s conference. And I watched a video of that event just to sort of get a feel for this. And again, this is a megachurch. Thousands of people. And this conference was held in either, uh, it looked like some sort of arena, sort of an NBA basketball size or hockey size arena, maybe a little bit bigger. And there was a giant stage with a, um, hair metal band playing and electronic signs everywhere with waving red, white and blue flags. There was a dirt area in the middle, like like I said, like an arena area with four cars parked in a two by two grid and out from under the stage at some point during this hair metal song, again, this is a Christian church men’s conference. Out from under the stage comes a giant tank with a man coming out of the hatch on top with two what looked like automatic machine guns, like Uzies or something like that. Small but automatic, with long clips, shooting them into the air • • as the tank with a flag on it, of course, rolls forward and crushes the four cars, right? Wasting four good cars. Crowd goes wild. This is, of course, all tax exempt. Tax exempt event. Um, tax exempt church • • • • with American flags, tank, machine guns, hair metal. Obviously, this is what Jesus envisioned, right? • • This is what we want to encourage our youth to look up to. So I will put a link to that video. You have to see it to believe it. But Josh Holly spoke at that event for this church, who now, a year later, is saying, uh, we regrew toes. And when people said, Show us the toes, can you show us any evidence? They immediately took all the media down off their website and said, oh no, we’re protecting this person’s anonymity and privacy. Even though they had splashed her name all over their social media feeds and made videos or produced videos with her in it. Testifying about how she could now tiptoe in her sneakers as proof that she had regrown her toes. So, I’ll post a video of the tank, • • the Jesus Tank, I guess, is what we’ll call it. The Jesus tank. Crushing cars with a hair metal band and American flags and machine guns on my website@thecrossexaminer.net for this episode. But it did remind me of a quote. Uh, and it goes like this when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying across • • • that’s what we’re seeing white, uh, Christian nationalism is fascism. And I say white Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism is fascism. But on a whole, when you look at the demographics, the vast majority of people that hold fascist, nationalistic, Christian ideals are white evangelicals. They’re the people that carried Trump to power. That quote sometimes is improperly attributed, uh, • • to Sinclair Lewis when I did my research, I couldn’t figure out who actually originated it’s. One of those that just sort of evolves over time and has been attributed to a lot of people. But think about that. When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying across. That’s what we’re seeing everywhere. Not just in the Jesus tank, but in Texas and in Florida, in every little school district that the GOP is trying to take over and insert religion into the schools. That’s what they’re doing. So that was fun. And we can say, okay, so what? So what? People are doing faith healing in churches and praying and who cares? Prayer is everywhere, right? Prayer is part of society. In fact, I went out to sort of immerse myself in instances of prayer. I’m going to do a little montage of media references to prayer that I think you’ll find entertaining. First, let’s take a look at some music you may recognize. This is a song about prayer or that references prayer that contains possibly the most famous rock and roll key change • • modulation, I guess I should say the sound intellectual key change in music history. Which one is it? Uh, think about that for a second before I play it. • • •

Speaker B

We got a • • • • • • ready all night you live on the fight when I fall as you got • • • • • • • • • waving. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Speaker A

That, of course, was Bon Jovi. Living on a prayer. You’ve got to love it no matter what. Here’s, uh, • another one that you may recognize. • •

Speaker B

Jesus take the wheel • • • • take it from my head • • • because I can’t do this all night • • • • • • • • I let it go • • • • give me one more chance • • • • • save me from this road I know • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • jesus take the wheel um. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Speaker A

Jesus take the wheel carrie Underwood I got a real problem with that one. Uh, that one is all about, • • uh, I can’t do this on my own. You know, the story that the, you know, the country formula where you do at least one verse of just a normal thing and then you repeat it, but it’s at a sort of a metaphorical level. So you sort of catch on that it has two meanings right here. Uh, first, this woman’s driving down the road and her car is sliding on ice and she takes her hands off the wheel as Jesus takes the wheel, • • • • throwing herself up to prayer to God, and say, please help me, I can’t get out of this. And the lyrics, as you may have heard, say, I can’t do this on my own. Well, for those of us who actually see no evidence that prayer works, whether or not there’s a deity or a God, • • • • we, uh, • say, you have done it on your own. Right. • • I have a real problem with the twelve step programs that say you have to turn yourself over to higher power to recover from addiction. • • • Uh, that’s not true. Everybody that’s gone through that has done it on their own. • • • People who give credit to a higher power, just getting them out of trouble are selling themselves short. So I’m always very frustrated when I hear that it’s also very dangerous. Don’t take your hands off the wheel, right? Just don’t do it. Uh, here’s another one you may recognize. This is one of my favorite sort of prayer songs. I loved this song when it first came out. Sometimes, um, i, um, thank God. • • • • • • • •

Speaker B

For unanswered prayers. • • • •

Speaker A

Remember when you’re talking • • • to the man.

Speaker B

Upstairs that just because he doesn’t answer • • • doesn’t mean he don’t care? • • • • • • • • • •

Speaker A

Some of God’s greatest gifts • • • • • • are, uh, unanswered prayers. • • • • • • Garth Brooks unanswered Prayers • • • • • used to pray to God for this girl. I wish he would marry me. And then my actual wife and I meet her years later, and I realized, whoa, that would have been a big mistake. So sometimes God answers your prayers by saying, no, I’ve got other plans for you. We’ll get into that later. But I always enjoyed that song. • But what about movies? Prayers all through movies. Here’s some of my favorites from the movies. Obviously, we have to start with the single best prayer ever • • done on film.

Speaker C

Dear Lord baby Jesus, or as our brothers to the south call you, Jesus, • • we thank you so much for this baniful harvest of domino’s, KFC, and the always delicious Taco Bell. • I just want to take time to say thank you for my family. My two beautiful, beautiful, handsome, striking sons, walker and Texas Ranger, • • or Tr, as we call. And of course, my red hot smoking wife, Carly, who is a stone cold fox, who, if you were to rate her ass on 100, it would easily be a 94. Also want to thank you for my best friend and teammate, cal Naughton Jr. Who’s got my back no matter what. • • • • •

Speaker A

Shaken bait.

Speaker C

Dear Lord baby Jesus, we also thank you for my wife’s father, Chip. We hope that you can use your baby Jesus powers to heal him and his horrible leg. And it smells terrible, and the dogs are always bothering with it. Dear tiny infant jesus.

Speaker B

Hey, uh, you know, sweetie, • • • Jesus did grow up. You don’t always have to call him baby. It’s a bit odd and off putting to pray to a baby.

Speaker C

Look, I like the Christmas Jesus best, and I’m m saying grace. When you say grace, you can say it to grown up Jesus or teenage Jesus or bearded Jesus or whoever you want.

Speaker B

You know what I want? I want you to do this grace good. So that God will let us win tomorrow.

Speaker A

That is, of course, only part I can’t play the whole thing and take forever. But that is, uh, Ricky Bobby will Ferrell playing Ricky Bobby, uh, praying to tiny baby infant Jesus. Love that scene. That is so good. But there’s actually a moving prayer that is actually, I guess, my my most favorite prayer. And you may recognize this scene. This is Jimmy Stewart and It’s A Wonderful Life having an utter breakdown. • •

Speaker B

Dear Father in heaven, • • • • • • • • • • • • • • I’m not a.

Speaker A

Praying man, but • • • if you’re up there.

Speaker B

And you can hear me, • • • • • • • • show me the way. • • • I’m at the end of my rope. • • • • • • • • • • Show me the way. • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Speaker A

And no review of prayer and film would be complete without • • Monty Python. The meaning of life. The prayer at the Church of England Run School for Children.

Speaker B

Oh, Lord. • • • • • • • • • • • • • Oh, you are so big. • • • • • • • • • • • • So absolutely • • huge. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Gosh we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell you.

Speaker A

I love it. • • Cracks me up • • every time. • • • • And one last clip, as you know about me, if you know me, I love musicals, stage and screen. This is from Les miserab. This is Jean Valjean praying to God to save the life of Marius, who’s been wounded. He’s trying to get him back home • • because he knows that his daughter is in love with Marius and he wants them to be together forever. This is Jean Valjean pleading with God in the song bring him home. • • •

Speaker B

Gord. • Don’t know • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • my breath • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • in my knee • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • have always been there • • • • • • • • • • jesus, you • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • pray, • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • let him rest • • • • • • • • • • • • heaven bless • • • • • • • • • • • bring him • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • and love • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • bring • • you. • • • • • • • • •

Speaker A

Absolutely stunning. I love that performance. I love that song. I love that musical. Wonderful. So, obviously, prayer and on a broader scale, religion, are infused in our culture. It’s part of a large swath of society, and one can enjoy it. These events, these musicals, these songs, these movies, without being religious. I love all of this stuff. It’s great. It describes the human condition, this longing to appeal to a parental figure to help you out of a problem. But the question at hand is, despite the fact that it’s infused in our society, is it true? That’s the important question. We can appeal to this in an artistic sense, and some people will appeal to it in a sort of academic sense, but is it actually true? With a capital T, so to speak, right? Does it comport with reality if Jean Valjean prays to God to intercede and cure or heal or prevent from dying Marius, will Marius in fact, be healed by God? That’s the question for this series. The answer is slightly complicated because prayer does have some beneficial effects. Based on the research I’ve done, is going out and reading papers on PubMed and all the literature, but the overall answer is no. And I want to go through that because that’s very important. Because to move on from this and talk about faith healing in America, we have to set the foundation that prayer doesn’t work. It does not work. So let’s go through the regime, shall we? I’m going to start from my background. My background in the law was in FDA regulatory law. I represented clients who were interacting with the FDA. It’s what we would call administrative law. It’s probably and here’s a law nerd for you the most important body of law for any lawyer to actually learn, uh, the rules and procedures surrounding administrative law, because that more than everything else • • • in the body of law in the United States. That is what affects most people’s day to day living. It’s not criminal law. It’s just, • uh, agencies carrying out congress’s directives, right? So we say as a lawmaking body, make sure the food is safe, make sure drugs are safe, actually, not just safe, safe and effective. And that’s important. And then in order to do that, they say, okay, create this agency and you go make it safe. And we don’t have the time, expertise, or manpower to do that, because it’s a huge undertaking. So we’re going to delegate our rulemaking authority to you, the FDA. There was a whole history as to whether or not delegating that rulemaking authority was constitutional. Back in the industrial revolution, things changed, and we had to change our viewpoint on that and say, yeah, the modern world is too complicated. We can’t have congress making rules about every single little food or drug or medical device that comes out. Uh, cosmetics that comes on the market. Congress would be ginormous and would never get anything done. So that view, the view that delegating this rulemaking authority is now under attack again with the new conservative court. There’s a case pending that might overturn something called chevron deference. That’s sort of my expertise. We’ll talk about that in another episode. But. Let’s get into FDA. Why am I talking about FDA? Well, as I mentioned, their mandate is to make sure that drugs are safe and effective. What does that mean, safe and effective? • • Safe is sort of a weighing of risk. No drug is risk free or side effect free, aspirin is pretty close to being side effect free, but no drug is side effect or risk free. So FDA weighs the benefits from the risks. • • Given the fact that they can label a drug properly, they can put in the appropriate information. • • So, for example, I am a cancer survivor. I had stage four cancer early in my life, and I went through chemo and radiation and more chemo, and surgery and more chemo. And that chemo came with a risk. It’s called neuropathy. It’s a poison. It kills your nerves. So now I have really • • tingly feet a lot of the time. It’s really irritating. But that cost was known, and it far outweighed the risk of death. So it is deemed to be safe for its intended use. It’s safe with respect to trying to cure cancer. It would not be safe if its purpose was to relieve you of a headache. So safety goes to the intended use. Curing cancer benefits outweigh the risk. Curing a headache, • • • • • • • it won’t cure your headache, and it will give you neuropathy at least. And you may have allergic reactions and all other things. So safety goes to the intended use. So that’s safety uh, a funny side note. FDA, back in 2017, said, no, you cannot import certain drugs into the United states that you want to. And these drugs were death penalty drugs. I believe the history was us manufacturer, like the last manufacturer of death penalty drugs, stopped manufacturing it. And there were several states that desperately wanted to kill people, and they couldn’t. So they started importing these drugs. And when you import into the United States, • • you have to go through a port and have to have your goods inspected, have a bill of lading and all of that stuff, so that people can say, HM, I think I want to take a look at this. And when FDA, which has a presence as our ports, when FDA saw you’re importing these drugs, well, those drugs, they’re not safe. Even for their intended use. There is no upside to killing a person. So they actually said, no, you can’t import that drug. • • And the states freaked out, and the US. Justice department got involved. And to mollify, the states, uh, said, oh, okay, well, we’ll issue a memo that says these drugs are not and I think this is actually the correct ruling. It’s just kind of odd that they went through this fight. Justice department came in and said, okay, we, the lawyers for the executive branch, basically say it’s our opinion that these drugs are not covered by the food and drug and cosmetic act that enabled the FDA, because that was intended for medicine, for things that were trying to treat a condition. These drugs, by definition, are not trying to treat anything. They’re trying to kill somebody. So FDA, you have no authority to regulate these drugs. • • And so that led the states, who wanted to, to start gleefully killing people again, uh, with drugs. But FDA said at the beginning, hey, drug not safe, not letting it in. It’s very effective, but it’s not safe. It has to be both safe and effective. So what about effective? How do we measure that effectiveness? • • It’s easier. You basically say, all right, as a drug manufacturer, I’m making this claim. This thing has 87% chance to decrease the size of this type of cancer tumor by this percent over this period of time. Right. You’re making this claim, and then you have to do millions and millions of dollars worth of studies to prove that, and you have to do that before it even gets on the table. At FDA, you file what’s called an NDA, a new drug application. And to do that, you have to have all these clinical studies. So we invest millions of dollars to make sure that each drug is safe. Look for an alternative example of why we want safe drugs. You need to look no further than alternative medicine, quote, unquote, right? What they call complementary alternative medicine cam. They try to say complementary because they know that you better go get • • real medical treatment, and this will complement it, there’s always somebody willing to sell you something in addition to • • what is good for you to say, well, this will make it work even better. And that’s what alternative medicine really is. Before we get going, alternative medicine, let’s just remember the great quote from Tim mentioned, one of my favorites, who said, quote, alternative medicine, by definition, has either not been proved to work or been proven not to work. Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work? • • Medicine. • Always remember that when you hear alternative medicine, by definition, if you’re an alternative medicine, that means you haven’t been proved to work. You haven’t gone through the effort to actually prove, using your clinical trials, that what you’re proposing actually works. And usually that’s a good reason you haven’t done that or you have done it and he’s been proven not to work. Otherwise we would just call you medicine. And the example he uses during that, uh, that’s called his Nine Minute Beat poem. It’s called storm. I highly recommend it. It’s a great poem about sort of, hey, science is important, and it doesn’t have to be like, dry and you don’t have to invent all of these magics and mythical creatures to make the universe interesting. The universe is in and of itself interesting. • • What he goes on to say is, • • we do take alternative medicine and make it medicine. Aspirin is a perfect example. I used it earlier. Aspirin is derived from the bark of the willow tree, and it used to be alternative medicine. And then we did a bunch of studies and we went, yep, yep. The old wives tales, or whatever you want to call them, proved to be true. This is both safe, one of the safest drugs out there, and effective for a bunch of uses. It cures headaches, it can lower blood pressure. There’s a bunch of things you can do with aspirin. So, yes, that used to be what we would call an alternative medicine. And then we actually • • did science. We messed around with it and wrote down the results and remembered what those results were. That’s science, right? Messing around plus writing it down is science. So other alternative medicines give us a good example of what isn’t safe. There was a study called Fatalities, uh, • • • • after complementary alternative medicine that over reporting period, studied acupuncture, chiropracty, and something called EDTA. • • • In acupuncture, they found 86 instances of people dying from acupuncture. The causes include, like, puncturing organs, but most commons were bacterial infections. So, • • uh, not only did they not find effectiveness, they found lack of safety, mostly in how it was administered. Right. If you’re puncturing a heart or a liver or a central nervous system, like going into the spine of somebody, or not cleaning your tools, that’s what you get right under chiropracty. They found 26 published cases where people died. • • • Usually fatalities were not published in the medical literature • • • • • • • • • because • • • chiropractic doctors are not doctors, they’re not MDS, let’s be clear about that. They are quacks. And the pathology they usually found about this was a vascular accident involving the dissection of a vertebral artery. After upper spinal manipulation, • • • these quacks start twisting and shaking you and doing all sorts of horrible things, and rip an artery and kill you. Because they’re not trained doctors, they’re just quacks. And finally, there’s EDTA. It’s an amino acid ethylene, uh, diamine tetra acidic acid. • • It’s a synthetic amino acid that’s delivered intravenously. There was a study with over 1700 participants who were 50 years or older who had a heart attack. This is m, designed to sort of treat that, and they found out that it was indistinguishable from placebo and had a similar adverse event rate as placebo. That study took $31 million and ten years to conduct. $31 million and ten years studying EDTA to prove • that it was utterly ineffective and just as dangerous as doing nothing. So we want drugs to be safe, otherwise you can kill people. • • But what about effectiveness? Why is that important? Well, there’s two reasons. One, there’s just plain old fraud. See, for example, most of alternative medicine, they’re trying as hard as possible to give you the impression that they are going to help your problem, but they always caveat it with very • • • wishy washy words, • • trust me. I’m an attorney for people who were trying to import goods from china into the United states, and you saw all sorts of claims on their labeling. I saw a head massager, uh, um, a, like, helmet that you put on your head that just sits there with a motor and massages your head. And the claims on the labeling and packaging were, it’s going to cure your cornea, it’s going to lower your blood pressure. It’s all these things. And I had to tell my client, you can’t make those claims in the United states. You will get in trouble, you won’t be able to import it. And if you get caught trying to import it, they’re going to put you on what’s called the red list, which means you, as a company, can’t import anything to the United States anymore without • • paying for a full inspection and full test to prove that you’ve fixed these problems. It’s very expensive. Red list is usually death, so don’t do it. And that was a good part of my job. I get to help companies realize • • • • you need to moderate your message. You cannot say that you cure, ah, corneas or glaucoma, I should say, if you don’t have the scientific evidence to do so, that’s sort of the FDA in action. And let me be clear, I am totally on board with the FDA’s mission. Oftentimes I was in an adversarial relationship, and they’re all humans. They do mess up, right? • • • Ah, • • one of my favorite cases was, • • um, a port person, uh, • • a, uh, port officer for FDA • • • denied entry to the United States of Children’s mucinex, which was manufactured over in England. And • • • they did so based on an improper reading of some obscure laws about does your manufacturing facility have to be registered with the FDA under these conditions? And the answer was no. I only have to register my main one, and if I have satellite ones, I don’t have to. But the officer didn’t read that right and banned children’s mucinex from the United States. So, yes, sometimes you have to step in for your client and say, hey, you’re, uh, not reading the rules right here’s the rules. Here’s what’s been decided in the past, please unban children’s mucinex. But a lot of times, you’re also helping the FDA, right? You’re telling your clients ahead of time. You can’t say that. And every single person I ran into that worked for the FDA shared the same mission. And that was we are helping keep food, drugs, cosmetics, all of the medical devices safe and effective. Well, not effective in some of those cases. You don’t have to be effective, uh, for cosmetics, but you do have to be safe for not only the United States, but for the world, because they recognize that many countries don’t have the resources to put into a full regulatory scheme. And so they piggyback off of FDA. If FDA does something, they adopt that rule in their country, too. If FDA inspects a tuna factory in Vietnam, and by inspecting it, makes it safer because that tuna factory wants to sell their tuna in the United States, well, that tuna factory is now safe, even if it sells stuff to Vietnam as well. So they keep humans around the world safe from quacks and mistakes. All right, so we do want to prevent fraud. That’s one reason we want to be effective, and one reason that we have the FDA, but the other is opportunity cost. When we say we want a drug to be effective, it’s because if you take something that’s not effective, you may be foregoing the chance to take something that is effective. That’s what I mean by opportunity cost. You have lost the opportunity • • to do the effective thing. The perfect example of this is Steve jobs. Steve jobs, if you don’t know who he was, he was the guy who created apple. Billionaire, smart business savvy, an engineer, intelligent guy. He got pancreatic cancer. At the time he was diagnosed, he had an 87% chance of living for five or more years. Survival rate of 87%. But he was a buddhist, and he distrusted medicine. And so he declined the surgery. He declined the treatment, and instead took up what, alternative medicine? He ate fruits and veggies and consulted psychics and had something called hydrotherapy, which is exactly what it sounds like. Water therapy. What do we use when we want to do a placebo that does nothing during an experiment? We use water. Right. Water therapy. And, uh, he did nothing to help himself, and he made a. Bunch of quacks kind of rich while he was dying of cancer. Nine months later, after everything showed that not only had the tumor not shrunk, it had grown massively, he decided to then, in a panic, revert to actual effective treatment. By then, it was too late, and he died. One of the richest people on the planet, a very smart person, fell prey • • to the lack of effectiveness of alternative medicine based on the unsubstantiated belief that it would work, right? There is insufficient evidence to say that alternative medicine works. What did we say at the beginning? What did Tim mentioned say? By definition, alternative medicine has not been proved to work or been proved not to work. If it had been proved to work, we would call it medicine. So if Steve Jobs can fall prey to this, anybody can fall prey to this. I guess the reason I’m going through this, if, uh, I’m not clear, is this is how the adults in the room handle claims of drugs, medicinal claims, drugs, medical devices, things like that. This is how the grownups figure out what we should let people • • market and what we should not let people market. • • • • Show me the evidence. Show me the studies. Prove to me that it’s effective. And then on an ongoing basis, we will continue to review that. Right? Because if you put out something that’s not safe, it’s going to hurt people. If you put something out that’s not effective, you’re going to steal from people or you’re going to hurt people. See, for example, Steve Jobs. So what does prayer do? That’s why I’m doing this. If this is the absolute best method we have come up with to determine what is safe and effective for treating injuries and other things, what does prayer do? What do we know about prayer? So this is what the rest of the episode will be about. I’m going to go into the science about what prayer does, and I think at the end, you will agree it does nothing. We know that as a species. And then we will ponder the question of, if it does nothing, why do so many people believe that it does? I have many more episodes in the faith healing series to get through. I have to set this foundation, as I said earlier, because we need to know this for sure. We need to review the study so we can then go on and review what’s actually being done with prayer and then ask the question, okay, if we know it doesn’t work, • • • why are we, as a society, still doing this in our laws? So I’ll start off, uh, when we analyze the scientific literature on prayer. And as I’ve said, I’ve read several books. I’ve read lots of studies on this. Most of them can be found on PubMed. We do have to recognize that there are some positive effects to prayer. The problem is, those positive effects are usually no different from non prayer activity that is similar to prayer. So, for example, there are some placebo effects for people who are praying for themselves. • • • Studies show that people who pray can have some physiological outcomes that are beneficial. • • An example of that is a study on meditative prayer that was done by uh, dr. Bernardi is the author in the British Medical Journal in 2001. And it reported that by doing sort of mantra like prayers, so praying on the rosary or reciting yoga mantras ones where you’re sort of basically meditating to yourself, you could improve your barrow reflex sensitivity, basically improve your blood pressure. So, uh, common sense being self reflective, meditating, saying mantras, calming down can help with your blood pressure. There was another study, uh, that was interesting, that was done in 2008 on Irish students in Catholic and Protestant schools that were self reported high levels of prayer. And they had conflicting outcomes on one scale. This was using something called the I thinks, dimensional model of personality based on neuroticism and psychoticism, neuroses and psychoses. And higher levels of prayer were associated with better scores, I should say lower scores of psychoticism. However, higher levels of prayer were also associated with higher levels of neuroticism. So I found that one interesting sort of a wash there. And there was a study that was done by Central State Healthcare System that showed, again, this was a mantra type of thing, that the psychological benefits of prayer, quote, may help reduce stress and anxiety. So not only lower blood pressure, maybe that lowered by the lowered stress and anxiety, but promote a uh, more positive outlook and strengthen the will to live. They studied, uh, yoga, Tai chi, meditation, all of that stuff, plus prayer. All of it had the same effect. So there seems to be nothing special in these studies about praying to Jesus, right? That’s the claim that we hear by Christian nationalists that’s praying to Jesus is the one that matters. But all these studies say any sort of prayer seems to have some sort of calming effect. But what about intercessory prayer? These were all first person studies. These were all me praying inside of myself, for myself, or just having a conversation with God in my head. But what about me praying for somebody else, right? What about Jean Valjean who is praying to God to bring Marius home? Does that work? No, it doesn’t. We know this for sure based on the science. The best study we have. There are many, but the best is the Great Prayer Study as it has become known. This was in 1998. A Dr. Benson was funded by the Templeton Foundation. I mentioned this last uh, episode. They are a Christian organization, but they don’t do science the wrong way like many Christian organizations will. Many organizations like Answers in Genesis and things like that, that are online hacks, hire people that are devoutly Christian and have some sort of degree. It may or may not be related. Like, a lot of times they’ll have engineers make claims about evolution just because they’ve got a PhD in engineering. And they will start with the assumption that, hey, God and the Bible are true. Let’s go out and make arguments and pretend to do studies to prove that Templeton actually does science. They say, hey, does prayer work? Is intercessory prayer effective? Can we show that there is a correlation between being prayed for in the name of Jesus and having better medical outcomes? And they did this study. They paid Dr. Benson. They stayed out of it. And they do these studies to look for the handprints of God on creation, but they don’t come from a conclusion. They do it the right way. • • So this was funded by Templeton. Let’s be clear about this. And this was called the Study of Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer or Step for short. Or the Great Prayer Experiment. And it’s described as, quote, the most intense investigation ever undertaken as to whether prayer can help to heal illness. And this was a trial on people who had suffered cardiac issues and had surgery and were recovering. And the trial created three groups of patients people who were uncertain of whether they were being prayed for and were actually being prayed for. • • Group two was people who were uncertain of whether they were being prayed for, who were not being prayed for. And third, a, uh, group that was certain they were being prayed for and were actually being prayed for. Okay, so you’re a patient in this study. You’re told you may or may not be in a group that’s being prayed for. Right? And then you split up into three groups. One group is being prayed for, but they’re not told. Another group is not being prayed for, but they’re not told. And the third group is being prayed for. And they’re told you’re in the group that’s being prayed were okay. The conclusion and this was in 2006, so this took eight years intercessory prayer has absolutely no beneficial effect on those patients at all. In fact, • • • the third group, the group that was certain that they were being prayed for, had a much higher incidence of complications of bad outcomes as opposed to the other two groups. • • So certainty that you’re being prayed for was correlated with, uh, higher incidence of complications. Does that mean anything? I’m not sure, but it certainly runs counter to the claims that when you pray to heal somebody, god will grant your wishes. And these people, again, founded by the Templeton Foundation, christians who found devout people to do the praying. This was not just find a bunch of atheists to recite something off of an index card. This was Christians who were praying for people. No effect. You couldn’t determine between the first two, right? But the two groups who was prayed for and who wasn’t. If you took the patients and controlled for age and weight and preexisting conditions and all that stuff and mixed them up in a pile. You could not even come close to sorting out which ones were in the normal group and which ones were in the praying group. I should say the control group and the ones who are being prayed for. That’s pretty conclusive, at least to the effect of recovering from heart surgery. Right. But there’s more. Of course there’s more studies. A 2003 • • review of the literature. • • • • An easy way to get published is to do a review of the literature to say, I’m not actually going to do a study. I’m going to go out and review all the existing studies and look for patterns and draw some conclusions. So this is 2003 studied. The hypothesis, quote, being prayed for improves physical recovery from acute illness. That was the hypothesis. And it concluded that though there’s been a number of studies along these lines, only three studies had significant rigor for review • • • in this person’s article. So they went out and looked at the studies and said, most of the studies are so poorly run we can’t even trust them. This was back in 2003. So they found three. And in all three, they found the strongest findings were refer. The variables that were, quote, evaluated most subjectively. So you know what a subjective evaluation is like. How do you feel? How do you look on a scale of one to ten? Those sorts of things. Not is your CEA level in your blood at, ah, above or below ten? Right. We have very objective measurements we can do, but some are subjective. How do you feel? How does it appear you’re walking? How do you look? • • Those were where we found the strongest correlation, which, as the author points out, raises concerns about the possible inadvertent, unmasking of the outcomes assessors. Right? • • Basically a corruption of the assessors being influenced. If the study was not double blind, then you might be influenced by knowing these people were prayed for and these weren’t. So other meta studies of the literature also sort of came to the same. There’s no good evidence conclusion. There was a 2006 meta analysis on 14 studies that found no discernible effect was, uh, their conclusion. So the closer we look at it, the more we realize there’s no evidence. And it’s not limited to scientific literature either. There was a paper that was published in a religious journal by Patricia Faucerelli. She’s an MD and a D. Min, a doctor of ministry. So she’s got a degree, she went to medical school, but she’s also • • a, uh, divinity minister. Right? Uh, • she’s gotten a degree in religion as well, for one. And her study was called Outcomes of Intercessory Prayer for Those Who are Ill. And her conclusion was, quote, overall, studies have yielded mixed results and have been criticized on a scientific basis as having methodological flaws such as small sample size, varied endpoints, varied definitions of prayer and varied expertise of the intercessors, the people praying. Such studies • • • have also been critiqued on metaphysical and religious grounds, namely that God’s actions cannot and should not be subject to scientific scrutiny. And, uh, I wanted to end on that study to say, even the studies in the religious papers are saying, yeah, there’s no effect. But this study sort of slips in that little religious escape clause of, well, maybe we shouldn’t study God’s actions. Maybe we shouldn’t. If prayer doesn’t work, we’ve got study after study after study. We’ve spent millions of dollars • to try to do what the FDA does every day with every single drug we put on the market. We know we don’t want unsafe, ineffective drugs on the market. Do we want unsafe or ineffective prayers on the market? By the way, no study except the Great Prayer Study indicated that prayer would be unsafe. • • • • • The big one, the really well done by the templeton one that said, if you are being prayed for and you know you’re being prayed for and you’re recovering from heart surgery, you actually have a higher chance of a negative outcome • that indicates some unsafeness. But I’m not going to say that prayer is not safe. Let’s just say prayer is safe, okay? It’s as safe as drinking water, right? When you take homeopathy for your cold or whatever, it’s safe. It’s just water. There’s nothing in it. But it’s not effective. So we don’t let you say that it’s a drug. We make sure that you label it as a supplement or its effectiveness in a homeopathic paradigm or whatever wording you want to use, but you can’t say that it’s a drug. So if prayer doesn’t meet those standards, if prayer is no more effective than homeopathy or water, then why do people still believe in it? If we all agree that we want safe and effective drugs, shouldn’t we want safe and effective prayers? Because if we don’t ban them and I’m not suggesting we ban prayer if we don’t ban them like we would ban drugs that are not effective, then we risk everybody pulling a Steve Jobs. Everybody decides, I’m going to pray instead of getting medicine, and then they die. And that’s what’s going on. We have children in this country every year dying because their parents elect to pray instead of going to get medicine. And we know it’s going on. And we know that prayer doesn’t work, yet our state legislatures are allowing it to happen. So what reasons do people give for still believing in prayer • if we have all of this evidence that it doesn’t work? • • And to be clear, I’m talking about intercessory prayer. We know that self reflective prayer lowers the blood pressure and chills you out, just like any other meditation. There’s nothing special about praying to Jesus. It’s meditation. So meditation works. But we’re talking about people who believe that if you ask God to do something for you or someone else, that thing will happen if you’re a true believer. We saw thousands and thousands of people listen to this huckster of a preacher say that his prayer or his prayer team’s prayer, caused a woman’s toes to grow back, and they went out of their mind cheering for it. They absolutely bought into it. They believe that this stuff happens on a daily basis. That’s the type of prayer I’m talking about here. I’m going to run through some of the reasons just to discuss them. • • • • There’s some important points to be made here because • • • it will inform our discussion about faith healing of children. So one, the one that, uh, Dr. Fossarelli mentioned is the number one reason that people give, which is God can’t be tested. In fact, there was, • • um, one of these mantra studies came out and an English bishop replied and said, quote, prayer is not a penny in the slot machine. You can’t just put in a coin and get out a chocolate bar. Similarly, in an article in the New York Times, there was this was October 10, 2004, reverend Raymond J. Lawrence, Jr. Of the New York Presbyterian Hospital, a hospital employee, said, quote, there’s no way to put God to the test. And that’s exactly what you’re doing when you design a study to see if God answers your prayers. This whole exercise cheapens religion and promotes, end quote, infantile theology, that God is out there ready to miraculously defy the laws of nature in answer to prayer. So here you have a pastor, a reverend working for a hospital, saying it is an infantile theology to believe that God is out there ready to miraculously defy the laws of nature in answer to prayer. First guy says you can’t just put in a coin to get out a chocolate bar. You do just pray to get what you want, or what both of these people are saying, with the second one doing what something that’s very common saying to believe so is to use an infantile theology. • • I the academic think of religion as something bigger and deeper and more mysterious, and we’ll all sit around and ponder it, but we won’t take the stories literally. There maybe it wasn’t even, uh, a Jesus, but religion is important. This sort of approach, this condescending, paternalistic approach of, oh, anybody who takes any of this that we have proven to be false seriously and literally is obviously infantile. • Remember that, okay? Remember • • that attitude. Because that points to a great disconnect between what is practiced in the streets and what is researched in the halls of academia. In fact, it constitutes a get out of jail free card for Christian scholars. Christian scholars will tout their Christianity. They will sell books about Christianity. And then when people believe the stories of the Bible, where they are told literally this happened or literally that happened, and they believe it, and then they do awful things based on those stories, ranging from mild racism to trying to take over the halls of government, trying to ignore science all the way up to killing their kids before they get old enough to sin so the kids will go to heaven. When any of that happens, they wash their hands of it and describe it as an infantile theology. Meanwhile, raking in the bucks dabbling in that theology. • • It’s very hypocritical. It is very, uh, • • disconnected from the man in the street. I agree with them. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read the Bible, I’ve read criticisms of the Bible. I agree with them that you can’t take this stuff literally, but it doesn’t absolve them of guilt because they’re playing the same game that, uh, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh used to play. I’m going to get people all riled up. I’m going to talk about something needs to be done. And then when • somebody actually acts on that and goes out and kills a politician, they say, oh well, that’s not what I meant. That’s called stochastic terrorism, publicly demonizing another group. So that statistically it’s almost certain that something bad’s going to happen. Somebody’s going to take a gun and go kill somebody. But the details can never be predicted and you can never blame the speaker. Right? That’s not what I meant. See, for example, January 6, by the possibly now most famous stochastic terrorist, Donald Trump. • • • Although strike that, he probably would say that he wanted that result. That’s his intended result if asked in an honest environment, right? So I’m not sure if that counts as stochastic terrorism and not just incitement to overthrow the government, but I digress. I’m not saying that the Pope and the bishops and the theologians, all the academics are responsible for killing people. What I am saying is they’re in the same ballpark. They are profiting off of a theology that depends upon the people in the pews believing what they say. They are getting up on Easter Sunday and saying jesus rose from the dead, the Bible is true. This is how you go to heaven, give me your money. But when something bad happens as a result of their religion, they pull a notes True Scotsman and wash their hands of it. Well, that’s not what I meant or that’s not a true Christian, right? That’s a fallacy they make. Or as in here, when they’re questioned about the fact that the literal beliefs of people are proven to be not true, they clutch their pearls and say, I can’t believe you’d ask me such an immature theological question. Of course that’s not the case. They are profiting off of a theology that depends upon the people in the pews believing what they say. They are getting up on Easter Sunday and saying jesus rose from the dead, the Bible is true. This is how you go to heaven. Give me your money. But when something bad happens as a result of their religion, they pull a notes True Scotsman and wash their hands of it. Well, that’s not what I meant, or that’s not a true Christian right. That’s a fallacy they make it’s sad to see, but it’s not unexpected. So is there any support for this claim, at least in the Christian theology, that God shouldn’t be tested? People always point to Deuteronomy 616 quote, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. • • • Dot, dot, dot. Why do I say dot, dot, dot? Because oftentimes, • • • and Christians love to shout context. When you quote something of the Bible that they don’t like, oftentimes they will leave out important context as well. Well, the dot, dot, dot here the Ellipses, is • • • the full reading is, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested him at Masa. • • Well, what’s? At Masa? Okay, masa was the story from the Old Testament, from, uh, Exodus, where Moses had been wandering in the desert. Also, by the way, we have no archaeological evidence or historical records that there were any massive amounts of Jewish slaves in, • • uh, Egypt, uh, nor that they traveled around the desert, nor any of that. So we’re pretty certain • • • • as a human species that that didn’t happen. But in the Bible, there’s a story, moses is wandering in the desert and they can’t find water, and God says, okay, people are sort of starting to doubt whether I exist or not. Bring three elders with you, Moses, and come and meet me at this place. And he says, okay, see that rock? Crack it open, boom. Cracks it open, water flows from it, and they can drink. And then God says, or then the Bible says the passage says and he called the name of the place Masa and Mariba because the chiding of the children of Israel and because they tempted the Lord, saying, is the Lord among us or not? So here’s a case where people were doubting God, and God, in the presence of Moses, says, bring witnesses. Come over here. Boom. Water from Iraq. What do you think about me now, huh? • • So even the passage that Christians point to, to say, you cannot test God has this context of God can be tested and has been tested. And there’s other examples of Him testing. Uh, • • for example, uh, let’s just run through them. Malachi 310, bring the full tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, put me to the test. One. John four. One. Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether or not they’re from God. Romans twelve two do not be conformed of this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God. You have to figure out what the will of god is you have to test first. Theologians 521 but test everything. Hold fast. What is good. Test everything. • • So maybe it’s a little bit ambiguous us, right? Maybe • • we are supposed to test. Maybe we should look and remember whether or not we get what we pray for. Because keep in mind what those reverends were that protested to these prayers, uh, that are read above that called it an infantile theology. To think you can just put a coin in the vending machine to get a candy bar. What they’re saying is to believe that you pray. That, um, a true believer can pray sincerely and get what they want is infantile, right? And these things that we just read basically have to do with testing. So what they’re saying is you should just pray but not test. Well, what is testing? What did I say earlier? What is the scientific method? Is it fucking around with stuff? Kind of. It’s fucking around with stuff and writing down your results. That’s science. Mess around and write it down, that’s science. So what they’re saying, what they’re proposing here is that you should pray, but don’t try to remember the results. Don’t try to discern whether or not the prayer actually works. Don’t write anything down. That’s literally what they’re telling you. That’s an infantile thing to do. I tend to disagree, but what does the Bible say about whether or not it’s an infantile theology? • Matthew seven seven, starting there, it’s it’s long. Jesus says, quote, • • ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be open to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks, it will be opened. Right. So some people might say, well, that’s just a metaphor, right? Well, let’s see, what does it say? • • • How do we tell what is a metaphor versus what is literal? Well, there’s frequently times in the Bible where Jesus says truly, truly. Before what he says doesn’t say it there, but he does say elsewhere. Matthew 1720 jesus says, quote, truly, I say to you, if you have faith as the grain of a mustard seed, very little mustard seeds, uh, are very small, very little faith, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there and it will move and nothing will be impossible to you. Truly, I say to you right, truly. This is literally what I mean. Matthew 21 21 jesus says, I tell you the truth, truly, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, I don’t remember. Like, I think God hates fig, so I think he god smote the fig tree and then it regrew or something. Not only can you do what is done to the fig tree, but also you can say this to the mountain, go throw yourself into the sea and it will be done. If you believe you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. Mark 1124 therefore I tell you whatever you ask it for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. • • • John 1412 jesus tells all of us just how easy prayer can be. Quote truly truly I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these will he do. Because I go to the father. • Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in my name, I will do it. Close quote. Truly truly. Matthew 1819 jesus says it again. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them are these metaphors he is saying truly, truly, over and over again, whatever you ask for in prayer, I will give you. Is this the infantile theology these priests were saying or is shouting about it being an infantile perception only what they start saying once the science started proving them wrong? Which is more likely? Was anybody in the past before the Enlightenment, before we really discovered the scientific method? Was anybody back there saying it would be an infantile theology • • • to believe that whatever you pray for you will get? • • We take other very important claims that are just as sort of outrageous as the literal truth from the Bible, possibly the most famous one. John 316 you’ve all seen the signs at football games. Quote for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. People take that at face value, that you will live forever. That is the most unlikely claim compared to I will give you what you want if you pray infinite life, right? They take that as literal truth. He doesn’t even say truly before it. He doesn’t say truly truly. He just says God so loved it that he’s going to let you live forever if you believe in him. If you believe in Jesus, you will have eternal life. So when Jesus says, believe that you have received it, it will be yours. We don’t take that at its face value. Isn’t that the same category of claim? Why can’t we take john 316 • • literal and • • • • • • • all the other gospels about prayer as literal as true, right? And I think you know the reason, because we have yet to be able to investigate whether there is an eternity, whether or not you can live forever. So therefore they can make the claim that that’s true. But as soon as we started proving • • that prayer doesn’t work, all of a sudden it became an infantile theology. To think that it. Would, even though they are the exact same scriptural structures, right? I am telling you this. It is true, and you better believe it. One we believe, one we say is metaphor. All right? So that’s the first one. Uh, that’s the most important one. God shouldn’t be tested. Not only has God been tested, and not only does God tell us to test Him, but God says, I’m going to grant your prayers. So if we write it down and try to remember how many times he granted prayers, all of a sudden it just won’t work because it’s an infantile way of doing things. I hope you see how ridiculous that is. Number two, the reason God’s cures thousands of cancers, infections, et cetera, each day, but never intervenes with amputees is because it’s not God’s will to do that. It’s not part of his plan. Right? And that’s important. It’s sort of the amputee one. Right. That’s the point we made last time, which is anything that is mysterious can’t be seen with the human eye. We can still claim that God’s doing it. It’s the God of the gaps, right? • • If you are not familiar with God of the gaps, the God of the gaps is God. Once in our minds as a race, as a human species, was in control of everything. • • God made lightning, god did this, God did that. God created life. God created the variety of animals that we see on the planet today. All of these things. And then the enlightenment comes. We start doing science, and we start discovering things. Well, you know, God didn’t create this light. There’s a sun out there. Oh, okay. Well, God created the sun. That’s how he made the light. We didn’t mean there was literally light first and then the sun, but he created the sun. You know, uh, this evolution thing has more evidence than, uh, scientific evidence, experimental evidence, and investigatory evidence than, uh, any other theory we have, including the theory of gravity. So it’s pretty much, uh, our best model. Well, God didn’t actually create the variety of animals. He created the starting point, knowing that they would evolve. Religion keeps backing God into a corner. Every time we make an invention, they say, well, God didn’t do that. God doesn’t do the lightning. God created the storms that create the lightning. And they back and they back and they back up into a corner until God just exists in the gaps of our knowledge. And that’s what we’re seeing here. No, you cannot put a coin in a vending machine to get what you want, even though that’s exactly what the Bible says and what we’ve believed for millennia. Now that the science is showing that doesn’t work. Well, that’s not how God works. I’m going to back up into this gap. • Same thing. God cures cancer, God cures infections. All of these things that can be cured naturally, they can go into remission. Your immunity system fights them off. In fact, most of our cancer research now is focusing on how to boost our immunity system and train it to fight at cancer. All of these things that can go away naturally or can’t be seen with the human eye, those we attribute to prayer every day, but amputees we don’t. And that’s why the Show Me the Toes Church event was such a big deal. That’s why international media picked up on it and said, oh, really? Show us proof. And they decided, no, we can’t do that, right? So saying that it’s not part of God’s plan, right, we’re going to cure all this other stuff, but we won’t do it with, um, amputees because it’s not God’s will to do that or not God’s plan. That’s a cop out, and I hope that’s obvious, but let’s discuss it because it actually goes to the core of the issue. Many people in their theology have sort of these conflicting ideas. They have this conflicting idea that God is omniscient or knows as much as possible, and God is super powerful, if not omnipowerful. Um, • • • omnipotent that God created the universe and had a choice, right? When he created the universe, he knew the future and he had all these choices to what to make, and he decided to create a universe where I would become an atheist and have this podcast. He knew this would happen and theoretically under that it means I would go to hell. And God just chose to do that. He decided to create a universe where humans would go to hell. I don’t think that’s a good choice, but that’s it. So now you’re coming along and saying, dear God, cure my cancer. Either God planned on you praying and planned to already cure your cancer, or God didn’t plan on curing cancer and you’re asking him to change his mind. So for people who say God’s will, it’s part of God’s plan. They shouldn’t believe in prayer. They should be like the Calvinists I believe it is, who are basically, well, God already knows what’s going to happen. You are already either in the select or you are not in the select of people who are going to heaven. So you might as well try to live a good life to see if • • you’re one of those, because only good people are going to go and God knows who’s going to be good, so you better be good. But praying is kind of pointless because he’s already made up his mind. So don’t say that some prayer works and some prayer doesn’t work because it’s part of God’s plan. Either prayer should work or it isn’t. Either God will change his mind, hasn’t made up his mind, or won’t change his mind. Number three god always answer prayers, but sometimes the answer is a no. Remember that Garth Brooks song I played? I thank God for unanswered prayers. • Just because God doesn’t answer doesn’t mean you don’t care. I loved that song when it came out. It sort of gives you goosebumps when you think about it. It’s like, oh, it’s a song about, oh, I was lucky I escaped, that sort of relationship thing. But when you think about the religious aspects of it, it’s a bunch of hooey. The common trope in churches, you’ll say, is God always answers prayers. Sometimes he says yes, sometimes he says no, and sometimes he says Wait. Well, you know what we call that? We call that indistinguishable from random chance. I cannot tell the difference between a universe where God is doing that and a parallel universe where God doesn’t exist. Because I could pray, as they say on the, uh there’s a website called Why Won’t God Heal Amputees.com? I’m cribbing some of these, uh, excuses from them. • • They are the site, probably that, more than anything, got me thinking about religion and realizing, yeah, I always had this sort of general sense that I was a Christian growing up, because that’s how I was raised. But when you actually think about it, there’s not much there. So they have the analogy of, okay, I’ve got a universe where I pray to this milk jug. Sometimes the milk jug says yes, sometimes the milk jug says no, and sometimes the milk jug says wait. You can’t distinguish that universe from the universe where you’re praying to a God. You cannot tell it’s a nothing answer. It’s a deepity. Ah, it seems profound, but to the extent it’s profound, it’s false. And to the extent that it’s true, it’s trivial. That’s what a deepity means. Number four god needs to remain hidden. Restoring an amputated limb would be too obvious. • • What is this game of universal hide and seek that people think that he needs to play? It’s another excuse for the God of the gaps. Usually this comes along with an argument that God doesn’t want, uh, automatons. He wants people to exercise their free will and worship him. Let’s not even ask why a supposedly perfect being would want anything. Like the fact that you would want somebody to worship you. Kind of means you’re not perfect. But the argument goes that if you don’t have free will, like if God revealed himself to you, they will say, if God came down and revealed himself to you, you would have no choice but to just drop down on your knees and worship him and do whatever he says. And that’s not what he wants. That’s what they mean by he can’t be too obvious because he wants you to exercise your free will. That’s a load of hooey. For multiple reasons, in their very own stories, there are multiple characters who are in the presence of God and exercise their free will and don’t follow him. The number one being Satan. Satan, if I recall correctly, was an angel in heaven in the presence of God for a long time and decided, you know what? Me and all these other people who were in the your presence are leaving because we don’t want to follow you. Free will doesn’t seem to be an issue there. Right. So that’s, again, another sort of crazy excuse that is • • really in its cover. It’s god of the gaps. Right. From a non scriptural standpoint, number five, everyone’s life serves God in different ways. Perhaps God uses amputees to teach us something. Well, that’s horrible. Can’t you just teach it to us? Can’t you just write it onto our hearts from the minute we’re born? The way that ducks know how to swim and dolphins who are born underwater automatically know how to breathe? Like, can’t it just be part of the rules of nature? Why do you have to use, uh, a being, a thinking agent, a moral being, torture them? Not just with amputations. I mean, I’m not saying that’s torture for everybody, but there are people who are born, live in pain for a matter of hours or weeks or years, and then die because of horrible birth defects. Their parents are praying for a cure, and you don’t grant them. Are you using their pain to teach us something? That’s disgusting. What about number, uh, • • six? God does help amputees. He inspires scientists and engineers to create artificial limbs for them. That’s avoiding the question. Right. The question was, I prayed to have my limb grown back and it didn’t happen. This is a form of, well, God answered your prayer, just not in the way you want. Right. There is a great scene in that movie. I think it’s called Evan Almighty, um, maybe M, • where Morgan Friedman plays God and he has a conversation with a woman and he says, when you pray for courage, do you think God just makes you courageous, or does he put you in an opportunity where you can be courageous? And he has several of those. • • • • When you pray for a closer family, does he make your family closer, zap you with good form and fuzzy feelings? Or does he give you the opportunities to become close? That’s the same sort of answer. It feels good. It feels inspirational. And it’s this moment in the movie where it’s a great revelation, but in the end, what it is, it’s escaping and ignoring the question. • • • • It’s a form of sometimes he says no. Sometimes he says wait. Sort of thing like, no, you don’t literally get what you want. Right. It’s really what they’re saying. Well, no, you don’t get what you want. You get something else. And we’re going to, after the fact, paint it as, oh, that was the success. It’s not what I asked for, but it’s what I needed, is the common quote. That’s one big cop out. Jesus is number seven. Jesus never says when he will answer your prayers. Maybe your prayer will be answered in the afterlife. Well, again, no different from the milk jug. Nine, you’re taking the Bible literally. Well, that’s an interesting one. So how are we to take it? Right? And that goes back to the other question of which parts are literal and which parts are metaphor. When Jesus says truly truly before telling you something, I’m going to take that literal. Unless he says, this is the story or the parable of the man who prayed, right. When it’s repeated across all the Gospels and elsewhere, where the Bible says, repeatedly test me so I can show that I’m God. All of this points to people in the desert who wrote this imagined a being who would do what they wanted, right? That’s what you get. So I don’t want to be like the pastors, right? The infantile theology. This is their answer. You’re taking the Bible too literally. People do take it literally. That’s the point. On one hand, they’re going to say, don’t take it literally. You don’t get what you want when you pray. No, you can’t literally pray to move a mountain and have the mountain move, even though Jesus says multiple times in the Bible, truly, truly. If you pray to move the mountain and you believe, then you will. Right? Sort of the Luke Skywalker moment. You got to believe you can get the X Wing out of the swamps of Dagoba. Uh, and it’s only because you don’t believe that you fail. • • • So people on one hand will say, no, that’s not literal. But then in our previous episode, we had Congressmen on the floor of Congress saying, we don’t have to invest any money to even investigate climate change because the God gave us rainbows so we would remember that he would never flood the Earth again. We’re going to take that literally. • • We’re going to say we need prayer in schools to save us. We’re going to take that literally. But we won’t actually say that you can literally get what you want when you pray. It’s one big, massive cognitive dissonance, right? They want it both ways and they get neither. And then they start whining when they can’t get what they want. And there’s a couple of others. I won’t go into it. The final one, of course, is always, well, God works in mysterious ways. There is no way to understand the mysteries of our Lord. People have believed in Jesus for 2000 years, and there must be a good reason for it. That’s a logical fallacy, right? The argument for popularity, uh, argumentum add popularum, right? That because an idea is popular. It must be. Right? Or as Tim Minchin puts it again, I go to Tim mentioned, he’s so brilliant. I don’t believe that just because an idea is tenacious that it means that it’s worthy. Right? Just because something’s been around for a long time doesn’t mean that it’s true. The Earth was flat for tens of thousands of years until we discovered it wasn’t. So many people believe that God answers millions of prayers every day. • • He uses his love and his power to bless people all over the globe. They express their beliefs in all the things we heard right in when I played the Montage. We’re living on a prayer. God, bring him home. Jesus, take the wheel. Jimmy Stewart praying to God and It’s a Wonderful Life. All of these moments are what we do as a species. But they also believe that God ignores the hundreds of thousands of prayers of amputees and other people who, if they got their prayer granted, would obviously be something that we’d never seen before in history, right? Growing limbs back, that’s what we’re dealing with. So in one universe, we’ve got a uh, God that answers millions of prayers to find car keys and cure my son’s fever, but doesn’t grow limbs back or raise people from the dead. In another universe, we have one where God doesn’t exist. He’s imaginary and doesn’t answer prayers. And the finding of the keys and the curing of the fever happen because they can happen naturally. Sometimes • • one of those two universes makes sense. I hope you can see that it’s the latter one, because if it were the former one and we could prove it, as I said in the last episode, we would have Nobel Prizes, we would have colleges of religious medicine in every university. We would be a very different society. If even for one type of illness, we could prove that prayer was an effective treatment. It is neither safe nor is it effective. We’ll get into it later as to why it’s not safe. So this has been a long episode. I appreciate you sticking with me. Next, we have to ask, how does this apply to faith healing today? If we are so sure by this evidence that we can show that prayer does not help people get healthier or have better medical outcomes, why do parents let their kids die? Because they use prayer. And to understand that issue, we have to understand politics and religion, because that’s why it’s happening. And to understand the politics and religion, we have to go into things like the history of Christian science, the history of medical science as it relates to kids. We have to go into things called children’s rights under the law. We have to examine conspiracy theories. We have to do a history of the Nixon administration. And we even have to take a look at the Affordable, uh, Care Act, aka Obamacare. All of this, believe it or not, combines into what we have today, which is a huge mess that lets not let, but actively encourages • • • by uh, giving parents permission, actively encourages parents to kill their children in the name of their religion in the United States and those parents get away with it. So next, next episode, we’ll go into the history of Christian science, and medical science and children’s rights to find out how did we get here. So thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. I’m going to end on this observation. We noted earlier that the FDA regime is that a drug must be safe and effective to be marketed in the United States or to even be imported. • • Prayer, we know, is making drug claims, medical claims. If you do this, • • give me money, attend my church, and, uh, when we pray for you, you will have your toes grown back. We will cure your cancer. We will help you. Steve Jobs we know that that’s not effective, but it’s being marketed, making medical claims. And I talked about last episode like, you could actually arrest these people on fraud in some cases and possibly practicing medicine without a license. But even if we reduce it to say, hey, here’s a vial of holy water, drink this or sprinkle it on the affected area, and we will cure your eczema or your cancer or your Droopy. Eye, if you did any of that, • • • • you would be in trouble with the FDA. And if you didn’t do what they said over long enough periods, like, they would fine you, they would order you not to market it. They could literally end up putting you in jail. That’s how serious we take this. If you said, here’s some holy water, sprinkle it on, and it will cure your cancer, you could end up in jail for that eventually, if you did the same exact thing, just took away the vial of holy water and just said, just think about being cured in the name of Jesus, and you will be. FDA can’t do a thing to you. • • • I think we need to start recognizing that. That’s a ridiculous state of affairs to take into account when we’re making public policy. If you want in your own private life to pray and feel good about yourself, that’s great. Just don’t treat it as medicine. Go to the doctor. Don’t kill your kids. • • • • Next episode coming up. I really appreciate your time. This has been the Cross examiner • • • • • • • • • • this has been the cross examiner podcast. The Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing. See you soon. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •