On the topic of evidential support for religious belief (answered prayers, etc.)

After yesterday’s discussion, I've been really curious about what precisely Christians believe about what practical difference the fact of God's existence makes in this world. As Shawn pointed out, it seems that Christians do, at least in unguarded moments, refer to empirical evidence to support their belief in God, e.g., apparent answers to prayer, etc.

Even if we disagree with some of the particular ways in which Christians tend to employ prayer, there’s no question that the Bible affirms the practice within the appropriate boundaries. James 5:16, for example, encourages Christians to “confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”

But can anyone offer any insight into what actual hypothesis is supposed to be receiving confirmation in these situations?

Is it something like “If God exists, and I pray for x to happen, then the probability that x will happen will be increased to some nonnegligible degree above statistical randomness”?

…Or, recognizing that even the placebo effect can explain nonnegligible increases of a thing’s probability above statistical randomness (at least in the appropriate contexts, like prayers concerning someone’s health), do they hypothesize that “If God exists, and I pray for x to happen, then the probability that x will happen will be increased to some nonnegligible degree above what the placebo effect could reasonably account for”?

Although I’m confident that many Christians actually do approach prayer in these ways (probably the former more so than the latter), I don’t think either of the above are hypotheses that serious Christians should endorse. So what other possibilities are there?

Presumably, if Christianity is true, we should only expect a positive statistical correlation to obtain between certain prayers aimed at certain targets. On this view, it’s not just the probabilities that are significant to confirming hypotheses regarding the effectiveness of prayer, but also the broader context in which the prayer was offered.

In other words, the truth of Christianity is in principle compatible with a situation in which there were no significant statistical correlation between prayers for x and occurrences of x, at least as long as the entire set of prayers offered was taken into consideration. This could happen, for instance, if the total sample contained more of the wrong sorts of prayers than the right ones, so many more that it masked whatever effect the right sort of prayers might have otherwise had. Presumably, though, if we removed all the wrong sorts of prayers from the sample, the truth of verses like James 5:16 predicts that we should be able to detect some nonnegligible statistical correlation between prayers for x and occurrences of x.

So then, which sorts of prayers should we expect to be effective, i.e., to produce an empirical effect? Here are a few options, which are not taken to be mutually exclusive from one another:

• Those offered in unusually high stakes situations (when we really need God)
• Those that play some especially significant role in the furthering of God’s kingdom (when God really needs us, so to speak)
• Those that correspond to some promise made in scripture (which may serve no other function than to facilitate relationship between man and God)

Does anyone else have any other suggestions?...

Since we're on an off week this week, I thought I'd go ahead and suggest some discussion questions to give us something to talk about in the interim. No pressure for anyone to respond, but they're here if the topic interests you.

Q1: Do you agree with my statement above, that if we removed all the wrong sorts of prayers from our sample, then the truth of verses like James 5:16 predicts that we should be able to detect some nonnegligible statistical correlation between prayers for x and occurrences of x? Why or why not?

Q2: If you don’t think that James 5:16 makes any empirical predictions, do you think that there may be other scriptures that do? If so, could you suggest one? For any passage you suggest, could you speculate concerning the nature of the prediction(s) it makes, and what its verification conditions might be?

Q3: If you don’t think there are any scriptures that make empirical predictions, what do you think of the practice often observed among Christians of referring to empirical evidences to justify their belief in God? Should they give it up? Why or why not?

Q4: If you don’t think there are any scriptures that make empirical predictions, how else might religious belief be epistemically justified?

Q5: Finally, does this new standard of epistemic justification impose any additional constraints on what kinds of beliefs might be justified, e.g., does it rule out the possibility of having justified beliefs about empirically fine-grained facts, such as God was incarnated in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, born of a virgin, etc., etc.? If not, why not? If so, how useful do you think the beliefs it permits (being empirically thin, or even vacuous) would be in guiding our practical affairs?