Our first instinct is survival. God was meant to provide safety, but
only to those who were righteous and denied all their desires. History
is replete with believers who begged, fasted, and beat themselves with
sticks to implore God for protection and answers. “Is another tribe
preparing to attack us?” the oracle at Perperikon would be asked as
she poured wine over hot stone. “Who’s our greatest enemy?” It was
harder to determine North Korea’s nuclear head count back then. Now
we just type it into the search field.
Prayer
Science has looked for God, or a higher intelligence. Over the last
century, there have been numerous well-funded efforts to scan the
universe for radio emissions that might register life, for example, the
Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Carl Sagan cogently
compared this effort to a prayer: lifting your gaze to the heavens,
sending up data, and waiting for a response from a more intelligent
being. We hope that this superbeing can capture, process, and return
an answer.
In the midst of the AIDS crisis, psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ, of the
University of California San Francisco, invited psychic healers from as
far as 1,500 miles away to pray for ten subjects, each with advanced
AIDS. The control group, also ten people, received no prayers from the
healers. The results were astonishing and published in the Western
Journal of Medicine. During the six-month study four subjects died,
all from the control group. Dr. Targ did a follow-up study that also
showed a statistically significant difference in the levels of CD4+
between test and control groups.
Tragically, Dr. Targ died soon after publishing her research. She
was just forty and had been diagnosed with glioblastoma only four
months before. She died in furtherance of her research, surrounded by
chaos—a cacophony of instructions from shamans, Lakota Sun
Dancers, and Russian psychics. After her death, her research didn’t
hold up to additional scrutiny. Further examination revealed the four
patients who died in the original study were the oldest of the twenty