Thursday’s New York Times op-ed section posed a curious question to five people: “Should atheists pray?”  The question:

With atheist church services this month in Louisiana and New York, nonbelievers are borrowing some of the rituals of believers: gathering, singing, sermons.

Would it be fruitful for atheists to pray? For believers and others, what is the point of prayer?

Now this is bizarre.  If you’re an atheist, you don’t believe in prayer, which is an explicit address to a deity. The Oxford English Dictionary gives its first meaning it as:

 A solemn request to God, a god, or other object of worship; a supplication or thanksgiving addressed to God or a god.

And there are in fact no secular meanings in the OED save the common one of “asking someone for something,” as in the archaic expression, “I pray you spare my life.” Of course there may be benefits to atheists in meditating, and I suppose you can meditate by pretending to talk to God, or ask him something, but that’s no better than pretending to talk to Santa Claus or Harvey, your invisible friend. It’s hypocritical, and I don’t know any atheists who do that.

So why the stupid question? It’s just another way that, in an age of declining faith, newspapers try to reassure the religious that they’re okay. After all, even atheists should pray.

The people asked, and part of their answers, are these:

Kevin L. Ladd, associate professor of psychology at Indiana University, South Bend and a former pastor, and co-author of “The Psychology of Prayer: A Scientific Approach.” Ladd’s view, expressed in “Prayer is ubiquitious for a reason,” is basically, “Well, it has psychological and physical benefits  for some, and perhaps even answers from God, but who knows?”:

Is prayer effective, for believers or atheists? Multiple sacred teachings indicate that prayer’s benefits are often beyond the physical realm; that claim is, by definition, not subject to scientific evaluation. Regarding physical benefits, the data are ambiguous. Very ill, very devout people pray hard every day. Some sick people live (including those who never pray). All of us eventually die (including those who pray).

The bottom line is that prayer is a paradoxical spiritual practice that does not guarantee predictably discernible efficacy at every turn. It’s not a cosmic vending machine. So why do people pray? Because they have faith that it is the right thing for them to do.

I can’t construe the phrase “benefits often beyond the physical realm,” since all benefits of prayer are physical: it either helps your mental state (which can be measured by psychological tests or brain scans) or it has tangible benefits in fulfilling your desires, which can also be tested.  The former benefits, if real, are no evidence for a God, while the latter are.  But the whole piece is confused.

Deepak Chopra, woomeister and quantum obfuscator, contributes an essay called, “Try silence and see where it leads.”  Deepak says the obvious: that prayer and meditation (which may have the same physiological effects though directed toward different ends), but then messes up his essay, as he always does, by talking about “higher realities”. What, exactly, is a “higher” reality.  There’s just reality.

Prayer and meditation both come with user’s manuals written by sages, seers and saints. The manuals point to a higher reality.. . .

. . . The next frontier is spiritual, drawing us into the mystery and excitement of higher consciousness, which is where the game really lies. Prayer is directed to an external God. Meditation is directed to the higher self. In the end, this distinction may not matter. As the spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti reputedly said, “I used to pray to God, until I realized that I was praying to myself.”

Now there’s a Deepity! Or should I say “Deepakity”?

Rev. Joy J. Moore, described as  “the associate dean for African-American church studies and an assistant professor of preaching at Fuller Theological Seminary.” Her essay, “Prayer is not a monologue,”  She gives the only honest answer among the believers and accommodationists, for she sees it as a genuine interaction with an existing God:

Prayer should not be just a therapeutic mantra of positive thinking, as it might be for atheists. It is through prayer that theistic believers acknowledge both the existence and the intervening concern of a deity. Both reveal who we think is listening and what we believe the listener is capable of and willing to do.

. . . A belief that God is both just and influential invites petitioners to request a demonstration of that presence in the midst of a tragically dysfunctional world. Requests, then, acknowledge a power outside of ourselves whose concern for the good of creation is demonstrated by intervening to bring healing and restoration.

Prayer is not only a request of God, but a conversation with God. . . The efficacy of the act of prayer may indeed be quantified scientifically. But for those who believe in a deity, prayer is as much as a response to God as a request of God.

The last two sentences are bizarre. Tests of the efficacy of prayer have shown no effect.  Given that, she saves the day by arguing that even if it has no effect, it still reinforces your hope and faith. But if it doesn’t work, and it’s supposed to be a dialogue, then God isn’t talking back—so why believe?

Hal Taussig, described as “a visiting professor of New Testament at Union Theological Seminary and co-pastor of Chestnut Hill United Church in Philadelphia.” His piece, “An outpouring, not a loyalty oath,” sees the benefits of prayer as both social and psychological:

Prayer is not just one thing, but an inexact set of practices that allow people to connect more deeply to lived experience.

So, the main point of prayer is human aliveness. . . Although in some circumstances praying can be boring, pretentious or silly, it mostly contributes to people shining, growing, reflecting, seizing the moment, resisting numbness, opening themselves, facing pain and problems, and coming closer to one another.

And his answer seems to be “Yes, atheists can pray,” but only because he redefines “prayer” as meditation:

Perhaps even more surprising is that prayer does not require conscious allegiance to God. That some want prayer to be a kind of loyalty oath to God robs prayer of much of its power to orient and energize people. The urge to pray comes not so much from some divine policing of our behavior as from needs to cry out in pain, roar with joy upon landing a job, or stand still to remember a friend.

Hemant Mehta, the”Friendly Atheist.” We all know Hemant, and I’ve saved him for last, since he pulls no punches in his piece, “A useless habit with a dark side.” I’ll reproduce his pice in its entirety because it’s good, and it expresses my own sentiments exactly. It’s also a good palliative for the weaseling of the other commenters. In effect, Hemant says that not only should atheists not pray, but neither should anyone else.

While the main purpose of prayer may be to help others, it never demonstrably does that. Prayers benefit only those believers who say or hear them. Prayer gives them comfort. It lets them think they have some control over a situation that may be out of their hands. It’s the last resort of people who have run out of ideas, and the first resort of people who never bothered to think about how they could actually fix the problem at hand.

This is not harmless. There’s a very real downside to praying. It lulls believers into a false sense of accomplishment. We cannot solve our problems – much less the world’s – through prayer. We often see people with good intentions praying for victims in the wake of a tragedy, but prayer is useless without action, and those actions make the prayers irrelevant. To paraphrase the great Robert Green Ingersoll, hands that help are far better than lips that pray.

I have no problem with “prayer” as an act of meditation. In fact, many atheists can tell you the benefit of silent self-reflection. The delusion occurs when you think someone else is hearing your thoughts and acting on them.

When it comes down to it, prayer is illogical, even in religious terms. If God has a plan, why try to thwart it? If God can be swayed by prayers, what kind of God would allow the horrors we see in the world? And if two devout believers pray for different things, how does God choose the winner? (I’m sure the San Antonio Spurs would love to know the answer to that.)

Prayer is nothing but a powerful placebo. We’d all be better off accepting that.

Save Hemant’s fusillade against prayer, the whole NYT dialogue was a useless exercise. The only rational answer to the question asked, ‘Should atheists pray?” is “No, because they don’t believe in God, but they may get some benefits from meditation.”  All else is deepity.

h/t: Diane G.