The Science of Prayer

Do intercessory prayers work? Medical science has taken an interest in the power of prayer. One approach is to assign patients randomly to a control group that is to remain in an “unprayed” state; another randomly assigned group of patients then receives intercessory prayers over a set period of time by persons who sign on to pray for them. Unsurprisingly, most studies using this randomized controlled trial (RCT) method show no healing effects of prayer—I say “unsurprisingly” because this result cannot come as news to those with a modicum of knowledge of Christian thought and theology.

First, we cannot ever be sure that the supposed control group remains, as it were, unprayed for. Who knows whether someone isn’t praying for them in secret? Friends and family members may continue to pray for them, regardless of scientific protocols. The prayer group may not be able to control their prayers in the surgically precise manner laid down by the experimenters. In addition, there may also be an element of unknowing or unwitting prayer: Behind such studies lies the rather naïve, sterile assumption that prayer is a kind of “Dear God” epistle that we set down to write in our innermost mind, when in fact prayer can be near-automatic and more integrated with our lives: When I am saddened by the news that my friend has fallen ill, this emotional response is itself a kind of prayer; my emotional state is a call for help. The heartbreak we feel upon sensing the plight of our neighbor is in a certain sense a kind of prayer, a plea that things might be set right. These studies fail to acknowledge the corporeal and quotidian nature of prayer: Life lived right is one long prayer.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, there is a strange hubris at the core of scientific prayer studies. “The arrogance that would make God an object and impose our laboratory conditions upon him is incapable of finding him,” Pope Benedict argues in Jesus of Nazareth. For who are we to play empiricist tricks with God? Einstein once quipped that “God doesn’t play dice,” to which Niels Bohr provided the perfect reply: “Who are you to tell God what to do with his dice?” There is room for a similar response to these studies. If God is omniscient, capable of knowing all things, he would certainly be able to see through schemes and stratagems like randomly-controlled trials, whose aim, it would seem, is to pin down his real existence and test his efficacy. But how could we mere mortals issue commands to God? When the Devil tempts Jesus to prove God’s saving powers, his reply is simply, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” The Christian view is that we must put our trust in the Lord, but we cannot therefore throw ourselves off the top of a building and expect his saving grace to swoop in and keep us from hitting the ground, because that would be akin to issuing an order to God—exploiting his omnibenevolence, and therefore disrupting the rightly-ordered relationship between creator and creature.

What these studies also neglect is that what we hold to be good does not always coincide with the good that God wills. We may fervently desire good health and long life. But the Christian life means resigning oneself to the idea that one does not always get what one wants. The Cross, that “terrible cross,” as Robert Barron puts it, teaches that through suffering, the good may also be brought about, hard as that may be to stomach.

Furthermore, there is an axiomatic assumption at the core of such studies that is deeply inimical to the Christian worldview, namely the idea that God is somehow absent from the “scientific” treatment of medical ills. Medical science is the work of human beings, these studies suggest, while prayer is a kind of afterthought, a distinct appeal to God. But whatever this is, it is not the Biblical view of the world. Hegel’s notion of Spirit marching through history, racking up all manner of scientific and technological breakthroughs along the way—from the discovery of hygiene to penicillin and modern cancer treatments—could be read in an overtly Christian-theological manner, showing that God is already working to help us by way of (supposedly secular) scientific interventions. A competent surgeon who removes a cancerous tumor or a lab researcher on the cusp of discovering a new drug are both examples of a divine power working through them to bring about the good on Earth. “Now we have this treasure in clay jars, so that this extraordinary power may be from God and not from us,” Paul tells us (2 Cor. 4:7). Secular scientists can be instruments of God, whether they like it or not, like “clay jars” freighting the divine life into the world.

Christianity is not anti-empirical or anti-science. The Gospel of John emphasizes that Christ has a deep respect for the innate human desire for empirical knowledge and sensate proof: Our reason makes us creatures enamored with ratiocination. This is why the resurrected Christ allows Thomas to view and touch his wounds: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side” (John 20: 27). If God made us in his own image, this means that he equipped us with a certain basic empiricist orientation to the world around us—and he respects this human predilection. But it is more pleasing to him that we trust in him: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).

Finally, prayers do not stack up like quantitatively additive interventions. More prayer does not necessarily make for better prayer. (And more medical treatment is not always better than less treatment: Combining prescription drugs can do more harm than good.) To think that two prayers are twice as powerful as one prayer, or that two hundred praying persons are two hundred times more powerful than one person’s prayers, runs counter to the notion that prayers are only ever supplications to the One who wields authority (ἐξουσία). To think in these former terms is to move away from religion and into the realm of magic: If two of my prayers are automatically better than one of them, then I have become a sorcerer, capable of controlling God himself. As noted above, this approach is antithetical to Christian thought.

We have, however, been given good reason to believe that the divine standing of the one who prays plays some role in the efficacy of prayer: “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16). But scientific trials cannot as a matter of principle take such differences into account—how could they? We mere creatures cannot guess the true will of the creator. It is only for him to decide whether a person is righteous or not—or whether a prayer will be heard.

The proper course of action in the Christian life is to believe without seeing. This is what is called faith—real faith. As the Incredulity of Thomas in the Gospel of John shows, only authentic faith is truly pleasing to God, even though he sometimes meets us midway, given our all-too-human longing for empirical evidence. But randomized controlled trials will never give rise to real belief. God is unlikely to allow us to pin him down quite so easily. The one who prays without second-guessing the Almighty, prays best.

Capital's Necessary Surplus Populations

We seem to live in a new machine age, a world in which automation, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and the “robotization” of the economy are causing machines to gradually displace human laborers. Where will those millions of menial workers go after our economies have been thoroughly digitized, more completely embedded in what Benjamin Bratton (2015) terms “the Stack,” that is, a planetary-wide matrix of computing power? But just as we begin to think about this terrifying prospect, Marx is already there, waiting for us, as Foucault once said of Hegel, ready to puncture the notion of total capitalist mechanization. Marx is ready to stop us in our tracks, when he writes in Capital concerning the limits to how machines replace human labor. In some particularly advanced industrialized countries, Marx writes, machines are adopted on a sufficiently large scale that they end up “creat[ing] such a superfluity of labour” that wages end up depreciating by the traditional laws of supply and demand. But when machines replace human hands and minds, wages are lowered to such an extent that it no longer becomes profitable for capitalists to replace human labor with machines; it would be more inexpensive to pay for wage-labor than to invest in automation (Marx 1976: 516). Thus, by their very actions—introducing machinery that cheapens labor below the price of those very machines—capitalists tend to generate social circumstances that undermine those selfsame actions: Machines undermine the adoption of machines by way of a social mechanism – the wage. In fact, this might be the central methodological thrust of Marx’s Capital: All things turn into their own opposite.

In Marx’s account, the consequences of this relationship between machine power and human labor are viscerally jarring. Even where machines could reasonably be used to replace raw labor-power, including in unpleasant menial work, the abundance and resultant cheapness of labor prevents the adoption of even relatively simple technology. “Before the Iabour of women and children under 10 years old was forbidden in mines,” Marx (1976: 516) writes, “the capitalists considered the employment of naked women and girls, often in company with men, so far sanctioned by their moral code…that it was only after the passing of the [Factory] Act that they had recourse to machinery.” Marx remarks scathingly that machines for breaking stones had been invented in the United States but had not been employed in England “because the ‘wretch’ who does this work gets paid for such a small portion of his labour that machinery would increase the cost of production to the capitalist” (Marx 1976: 517). In some places, instead of horses, women are employed “hauling barges,” because the capitalist can accurately calculate the costs of employing horses and machines, while the cost of keeping “the women of the surplus population is beneath all calculation” (Marx 1976: 517). In other words, cheap and docile human laborers are preferred to machines, at least in so far as they remain docile and (consequently) cheaper than machines.

The fact that these conditions no longer typically obtain in the Western world does not mean that capitalism has somehow transcended this mechanism. Rather, it suggests the enormously important role of spatial dislocation and what later Marxists termed “uneven development.” The naked, hysterical “wretches” of the Global North no longer toil in physically grueling, gruesome circumstances—they are more likely to be warehoused in a psychiatric ward or jailhouse, or work in a call center at the bottom of the “service” sector—but that is largely because capitalism has transported these forms of production elsewhere. The Norwegian writer Kjartan Fløgstad has pointed out that the industrial working class is still very much with us, contra those who have proclaimed a postindustrial age; only they are not here, they are there, out of sight of Western eyes—but one wonders if this does not “misunderestimate” the real presence of working bodies even in the capitalist core. Is not the deadening monotony of an Amazon warehouse worker, such as the English journalist James Bloodworth has studied, proof that we are still caught up in a world of proletarian labor, even in the seemingly sanitized North? Behind every smart algorithm stands a sweating, laboring body. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

This incisive analysis of the relationship between machines, wages, and human labor is typical of Marx’s method in Capital. It combines structural insights with a clear moral argument. Marx’s prophetic rage and his anger at deplorable working conditions are fueled by a moral vision about the nature of (in)justice. It is part of the general insanity of capitalism, Marx suggests, that it would prefer to work human beings to indignity, exhaustion, near-death, or even to the very end of life’s tether, rather than employ the ingenious fruits of the human mind—various labor-saving technologies—because of structural conditions that obtain under the capitalist process of production. To make this argument, of course, requires that Marx mobilizes a series of implicit moral axioms, such as the valuation of human life for its own sake and the ethical obligation to uphold human dignity. Far from being the cold, calculating menace that his detractors have sometimes made him out to be, Marx is a deeply ethical writer.

Nowhere is this more clearly on display, arguably, than in the sections of Capital that deal directly with what Marx terms surplus populations: 

[I]t is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital's average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population. (Marx 1976: 782) 

Surplus populations are those groups in society that are not necessary to capital as it seeks to multiply itself. The figure of the surplus population hovers over nearly all of Capital, but it is in the latter stages of the first volume, in chapter twenty-five, that Marx fleshes out the term more comprehensively. But as some Marxist observers have noted, the notion of surplus populations in some ways lies much deeper in the conceptual underpinnings of Capital. Indeed, as Benanav and Clegg (2014) point out, surplus populations penetrate to the very core of Marx’s understanding of what it means to be a proletarian, this most crucial figure in Marxist political theory.

Typically, the figure of the proletarian has been understood as a person who must sell their wage-labor in order to survive: an individual who can find ways of earning a living other than through wage-labor is no longer, sensu stricto, a proletarian, so the story goes. This is the hard lesson learned by the unfortunate English capitalist described by Marx in the closing chapters of Capital, Mr. Peel, who who travels to the Swan River district of Australia with his capital (with “means of subsistence and production to the amount of £50,000” [Marx 1976: 932-933]) as well as three thousand workers (“working class men, women, and children”), only to discover upon arrival that most of his workers are able to survive off the abundance of the land they found readily on hand. Simply put, Mr. Peel’s workers discover that they no longer need him, thereby exploding their membership in the very category of the proletarian: “Unhappy Mr Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English relations of production to Swan River!” writes Marx (1976: 933). Why labor in exchange for wages to sustain life if life can be sustained through independent work on bountiful land? The men, women, and children of Marx’s story were proletarians by dint of sheer necessity; now that the conditions of necessity no longer obtain, they cease to be proletarians. But notice how this also causes Mr. Peel to cease to be a capitalist: without wage-laboring proletarians, no capitalist. The force of existential insecurity as the condition sine qua non for membership in the category of the proletarian also sustains the capitalist; once this existential insecurity is removed, the whole house of cards that is “English relations of production,” as Marx terms nineteenth-century Mancunian industrial capitalism, comes tumbling down.

To be a proletarian would seem to mean being beholden to the needs of the capitalist. A proletarian is one who is unfree, fettered to the imperative of selling labor-power in exchange for the only means of subsistence available, namely wages.But a close reading of Marx’s definition reveals that this understanding of the term is not entirely accurate. Interestingly, already at the level of definition, the proletarian figure is in some sense “always already” superfluous to the needs of capital. This is what makes Capital such an astonishing work: It’s dialectic all the way down, so to speak. Peel back the onion layers of the dense writing, and where one might expect to find a beating, pulsating heart, instead one finds contradiction, and yet more contradiction. There is no core; there is only a kind of undecided quantum state of negation heaped upon negation. Thus Marx (1976: 764n1) writes: 

‘Proletarian’ must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing other than ‘wage-labourer’, the man who produces and valorizes ‘capital’, and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for valorization possessed by ‘Monsieur Capital’, as Pecquer calls this person.

Because superfluity of labor is built into the very rhythms of capitalist accumulation, it follows that the proletarian is not just someone who is potentially “thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous,” but someone who is actually subjected to this treatment. If we accept the premise that superfluity is an integral part of the mechanism of capital accumulation, the figure of the proletarian, on the one hand, and the mass of surplus populations, on the other, are really interchangeable terms. The proletarian is a surplus population only waiting to be actualized. “The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous,” writes Marx (1976: 783), “and it does this to an extent which is always increasing.” The proletarian who works diligently at their assembly line is not merely producing another commodity, and not just value, but also their very non-being—their nihilation. Strangely, this means that superfluity, which would seem to be an excess to a necessary kernel or core, is in fact brought back into the very core and integrated into it. This surely violates our common-sense notion of what an excess even constitutes: to be an excess is precisely to be outside an interiority. But here we are dealing with a very strange sort of excess, one that is integral to the whole: It is both beyond and within. The proletarian, then, is the schizoid subject par excellence, the one who produces all of value, and therefore carries the entire social pyramid upon their shoulders—for where would the whole world of glittering commodities be without the toil of the proletarian?—but simultaneously produces the condition of their own undoing. The proletarian makes commodities and unmakes their categorial belonging. The proletarian produces goods for exchange and use, but also produces their own non-being. This is what Marx means by the industrial reserve army. But it is a reserve that is itself integral to the army and so stands in a strangely paradoxical, tense relationship with the social whole. To understand surplus populations, it is crucial to recognize that as soon as we take up wage-labor, which means as soon as we begin to receive wages, we are also enlisting in the ranks of an industrial reserve army. We are all reservists in the wars of capital.

References

Benanay, A. and Clegg, J. (2014) Misery and debt. In: Contemporary Marxist Theory: An Anthology. London: Bloomsbury.

Bratton, B. (2015) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Marx, K. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume One). London: Penguin.

Afterlife Theodicy and the Problem of Evil

One of the most attractive theological solutions to the problem of evil is what has been termed afterlife theodicy, revolving around the extreme disjunction we may presume to exist between the scale and scope of suffering on Earth and the scale and scope of joy in Heaven. By ‘scale’ I mean the quantity of suffering and joy, respectively, and by ‘scope’ I mean the quality and duration of suffering and joy. The problem of evil withers away once we frame earthly evils, plentiful as they may appear, within their proper context of a potentially limitless, eternal bliss in Heaven. Thus, I do not mind the momentary pain of the dentist’s drill when I know that it will rid me of the toothache that has been plaguing me for weeks. More to it, I do not mind very much the toil of an eight-hour working day on Friday morning when I know that a two-day weekend is right around the corner.

Now multiply this disjunction between suffering and rewards up by an infinite degree; of course, we cannot fully perform this mental operation, perhaps not even adequately, given our limited capacity for imagining infinity, properly speaking, but we should by an act of concentrated imagination try to see before our mind’s eye what eternal joy would look like. Would I be willing to suffer a day’s worth of excruciating (ex cruce, ‘from the cross’) pain if I knew that a three-month summer vacation were waiting for me at the end of it? How about an hour’s pain and a six-month stretch of time to do with as I please – spending time with loved ones, reading, writing, traveling? Or just one minute of pain and a year’s vacation? A second of pain – and a decade of holidays? Multiply up the joy by an infinite degree, and divide the pain infinitely, too, and you will have arrived at the radical disconnection between earthly suffering and heavenly joy made available to us by God, according to the Christian worldview.

In this light, the problem of evil appears in its proper dimensions as something of a non-problem, practically speaking, a sort of optical illusion, a deceptive sleight of hand forced upon us by sensuous earthly reality and our corporeal state of being. We are embodied creatures—sentient, sensate, and suffering—and so perceive most readily the pain of our own bodies. As embodied creatures, we can only with great effort, and perhaps not even then, force ourselves to contemplate the possibility of eternal bliss (but we cannot really feel it). But if the disjunction between earth-bound suffering and heaven-sent joy is greater than that difference that obtains between a grain of sand and the vast expanse of the Sahara desert, we should, by an act of the intellect and will, force ourselves to ignore present pains and focus ourselves squarely on the possibility of our participation in Heaven’s joy. The so-called problem of evil only appears to us as a problem because we have not fully appreciated what possibilities lies in wait for us in the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Now, some thinkers do not accept this line of reasoning. The philosopher Stephen Maitzen calls this account the “Heaven Swamps Everything” theodicy (2009: 122), which is not a bad turn of phrase; but he thinks it fails to stand up to scrutiny because he believes it conflates justification and compensation. How can even a very large compensation for a relatively minor wrong meaningfully justify this wrong? It cannot, Maitzen thinks, and so the theodicy collapses. God’s allowing for evil on Earth is not justified by Heaven’s bliss; rather, the sufferings of Earth are compensated for by the joys of Heaven. But compensation implies an offense, and an offense an offender; thus, under the “Heaven Swamps Everything” theodicy, God appears to us as an offender willing to redress the injuries he has imposed on us. He is not justified, and so this account is not, sensu stricto, a theodicy in Leibniz’s terms (from Theos, “God,” and dike, “justice”). “Even if heaven swamps everything, it doesn’t thereby justify everything,” Maitzen (2009: 123) writes.

But this way of framing things falls down in its failure to apprehend what eternal bliss really entails in all its vastness: its true enormity. Our measure of things remains narrow and earthly. To be terrestrial is to be pedestrian. But Heaven is anything but pedestrian. Notions of justification, of balancing the scales, are so entirely bound up in this terrestrial realm: Who can say whether we will not feel that everything was worth it, yes, was in fact justified, by a very great reward in the end? In fact, we may not need to engage in complex mental acrobatics to see this. A woman suffering through childbirth may feel that this pain is worthwhile in light of the joy of having a child. But it is surely strange to call this child a kind of “compensation” for the trauma of birth – this word has too cool and commercial a ring to it. Why, precisely, can we not say that the pain of childbirth is “justified” by the child, when just is that which we can live with? Justice is a settlement, a settling-in, a coming-to-peace: in short, a (Hegelian) reconciliation. To justify God is to reconcile oneself with the world as it has been revealed to us by Him. The mother accepts the trauma of childbirth in the retroactive light of the joy of having the child. Similarly, Heaven’s community of saints may be able to live with the knowledge of their past sufferings in light of eternal bliss, precisely because eternity’s weightiness is capable of tipping even the heaviest of scales: eternity is a machine that fuels reconciliation; it makes the limited suffering of earthly life appear like a pinprick prior to an endless feast. 

To those who think that this introduces an intolerable subjective dimension to notions of justice, one might respond by showing that one part of the problem of justice lies precisely in its ability to make itself acceptable to our minds. In the Anonymous Sayings of the Desert Fathers, we learn of one elder [γέρων], Abraham, who recognized the validity of the afterlife theodicy in his own monastic practice: 

“The brothers begged one of the elders to refrain from his excessive labour. He answered them: “I am telling you, children, Abraham is going to be sorry that he did not strive harder when he sees the great gifts of God.” 

[Τινὰ τῶν γερόντων παρεκάλουν οἱ δελφοὶ παύσασθαι τῶν μεγάλων πόνων. Ὁ δὲ πεκρίθη αὐτοῖς· Λέγω ὑμῖν, τέκνα, ὅτι Ἀβραὰμ ἔχει μετανοῆσαι ὁρῶν τὰς δωρεὰς τοῦ Θεοῦ τὰς μεγάλας, διότι μὴ πλέον ἠγωνίσατο. (Wortley 2013, N.197)]

The original word that has been translated as “strive harder” here is a conjugated form of the verb αγωνιζομαι (agōnizomai), meaning, inter alia, to “enter a contest” (NAS New Testament Greek Lexicon); it is related to the word agonize in English and ἀγών (agōn) in Greek, which means “contest” or “competition.” If we read the Desert Father in light of this etymological connection, can we not view this terrestrial life as an agonizing contest whose potentially limitless prize at the end finally redeems the race? This was the apostle Paul’s view. As he writes, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:7). The original Greek is instructive here: “τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα ἠγώνισμαι,” or “The good competition has been competed in,” translated more literally. If Paul has competed well, he can expect the sportsman’s “crown of righteousness” (ὁ τῆς δικαιοσύνης στέφανος) (2 Tim 4:8), a reference to the laurel wreaths bestowed upon victorious Olympic contestants.

The theodical project risks placing us in an overly juridical frame, suggesting that the proper logic is that of the courtroom trial rather than the heroic contest. Life is not a legal trial but a kind of game that demands good sportsmanship. And the prize is not so much a (juridico-commercial) restitutionary compensation but a freely given prize or gift, which cancels all suffering by its very magnitude. This must remain obscure in so far as one apprehends these issues legalistically, without an appreciation of how this gift is given lovingly: God is not an insurance agent but a loving parent. And it is in this light that the Desert Father’s words bear repeating: “I am telling you children, Abraham is going to be sorry he did not strive harder when he sees the great gifts of God.” It is we who must justify ourselves in the face of these “great gifts,” not God who must justify himself in the light of earthly suffering. In this sense, a proper afterlife theodicy approaches a kind of anthropodicy: a justification of earthly life in the life that lies beyond this realm.

The problem of evil depends for its subjectively felt efficacy on a distortion of scale. We misapprehend present sufferings to the degree that we fail to measure them in view of a state of eternal bliss. In the light of this everlasting joy, earthly suffering shrivels up into near-nothingness or next-to-nothingness. It is the recalibration of our distorted apprehension of the scale and scope of suffering that brings God’s goodness back into its properly excessive, superabundant form.

References

Maitzen, S. (2009) Ordinary morality implies atheism. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2, 107-126. 

Wortley, J. (ed.) (2013) The Anonymous Sayings of the Desert Fathers: A Select Edition and Complete English Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.