prayer works (but only if you don’t check to see if it works)

Does prayer do anything? Like, if you came down with the swine flu mexican flu H1N1, and you didn’t feel like rooting it out at the causal level, would it be worth your while to force your friends to pray for your cure?

The evidence, naturally, says, “no, of course that doesn’t work, what kind of stone-age moron are you to even consider such a possibility?”

And if you’re a religious person, you’re probably scrambling to reconcile this predictable failure with your belief in an all-powerful, all-caring god. Luckily, Kingdom of Priests has the answer:

does anyone who’s a traditional theist of a Biblical variety seriously think that God would consent to be tested this way? I assume that prayer does work. However, doesn’t the Hebrew Bible warn pretty strenuously against testing God?

[…]

But testing God by praying for sick people, coolly tallying up the results to be reported in a science journal and then in the media? It’s just impossible to believe, given what we know about Him from the Bible, that God would go along with that.

In other words, praying works (because David Klinghoffer “assumes” so), except when you actually check to see if it works (because the Bible says god doesn’t like it when you check to see if he gets results).

“I assume it works, but it definitely won’t work if you test it” is an awesomely low bar to set for proof. (Although I should probably be more sympathetic, on account of it being the same reasoning I used in 7th grade to convince people that my hypercolor t-shirts gave me the power to fly.)

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baptism is bad for children and other living things

If you have a Google News Alert for “LifeWay Christian Resources, the Southern Baptist Convention’s publishing arm” like I do, you probably saw the large number of articles describing how sales of new baptisms slipped again in 2008. (I was unable to find any good statistics on sales of pre-owned baptisms.)

And if you are a scholar of religion like I am, you probably ran to their website so you could download the data and play with it in Excel. You probably also hunted down some UCR data on crime. You probably started searching for correlations. And you were probably surprised to discover that higher Baptism rates mean higher murder rates!

Now, whenever we discover a relationship like this, we need to be careful. In general, correlation does not imply causation. There are certainly other options available for explaining this relationship:

1. Reverse Causation

If you flip the graph, you could construct the alternative hypothesis “murder causes baptism”. However, dead people cannot be baptised (unless you are a Mormon, which most Southern Baptists are not). QED.

2. Third factor causes both

Maybe Global Warming is responsible. After all, when it’s hotter, the blood gets angry. And also when it’s hotter, the cool dip of a baptism seems more appealing. Some NASA data should clear things up:

Looks like that doesn’t work either.

3. Coincidence

If this weren’t a religious phenomenon, we could chalk it up to “coincidence”. However, as everyone knows, a coincidence is just “god’s way of remaining anonymous” (as opposed to everything else he does to remain anonymous, like being invisible and silent and imaginary). In the land of religion, there are no coincidences!

4. Both cause each other

Maybe there’s some sort of physical law linking both, like “Joel’s Law of Murder and Baptism”: M = sB + G, where s represents sunspots, and G represents god’s wrath. If this were the case, increasing the murder rate would necessarily increase baptisms too.

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Clearly there is room for further research here. Nonetheless, my preliminary Sunday-morning social science makes one thing clear: Baptism kills!

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