The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [135]
[* This was no dilemma for many others. ‘I believe; therefore I understand’ said St Anselm in the eleventh century.]
But tenets at the heart of religion can be tested scientifically. This in itself makes some religious bureaucrats and believers wary of science. Is the Eucharist, as the Church teaches, in fact and not just as productive metaphor, the flesh of Jesus Christ, or is it, chemically, microscopically and in other ways, just a wafer handed to you by a priest?* Will the world be destroyed at the end of the 52-year Venus cycle unless humans are sacrificed to the gods?** Does the occasional uncircumcised Jewish man fare worse than his co-religionists who abide by the ancient covenant in which God demands a piece of foreskin from every male worshipper? Are there humans populating innumerable other planets, as the Latter Day Saints teach? Were whites created from blacks by a mad scientist, as the Nation of Islam asserts? Would the Sun indeed not rise if the Hindu sacrificial rite is omitted (as we are assured would be the case in the Satapatha Brahmand)!
[* There was a time when the answer to this question was a matter of life or death. Miles Phillips was an English sailor, stranded in Spanish Mexico. He and his fellows were brought up before the Inquisition in the year 1574. They were asked ‘Whether we did not believe that the Host of bread which the priest did hold up over his head, and the wine that was in the chalice, was the very true and perfect body and blood of our Saviour Christ, Yea or No? To which,’ Phillips adds, ‘if we answered not “Yea!” then there was no way but death.’]
[** Since this Mesoamerican ritual has not really been practised for five centuries, we have the perspective to reflect on the tens of thousands of willing and unwilling sacrifices to the Aztec and Mayan gods who reconciled themselves to their fates with the confident faith that they were dying to save the Universe.]
We can gain some insight into the human roots of prayer by examining those of unfamiliar religions and cultures. Here, for example, is what is written in a cuneiform inscription on a Babylonian cylinder seal from the Second Millennium BC:
Oh, Ninlil, Lady of the Lands, in your marriage bed, in the abode of your delight, intercede for me with Enlil, your beloved. [Signed] Mili-Shipak, Shatammu of Ninmah.
It’s been a long time since there’s been a Shatammu in Ninmah, or even a Ninmah. Despite the fact that Enlil and Ninlil were major gods - people all over the civilized western world had prayed to them for two thousand years - was poor Mili-Shipak in fact praying to a phantom, to a societally condoned product of his imagination? And if so, what about us? Or is this blasphemy, a forbidden question, as doubtless it was among the worshippers of Enlil?
Does prayer work at all? Which ones?
There’s a category of prayer in which God is begged to intervene in human history or just to right some real or imagined injustice or natural calamity - for example, when a bishop from the American West prays for God to intervene and end a devastating dry spell. Why is the prayer needed? Didn’t God know of the drought? Was he unaware that it threatened the bishop’s parishioners? What is implied here about the limitations of a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient deity? The bishop asked his followers to pray as well. Is God more likely to intervene when many pray for mercy or justice than when only a few do? Or consider the following request, printed in 1994 in The Prayer and Action Weekly News: Iowa’s Weekly Christian Information Source:
Can you join me in praying that God will burn down the Planned Parenthood in Des Moines in a manner no one can mistake for any human torching, which impartial investigators will have to attribute to miraculous (unexplainable) causes, and which Christians will have to attribute to the Hand of God?
We’ve discussed faith-healing. What about longevity