The Eternal Wall of Answered prayer

Unanswered prayer is conspicuous by its absence!

The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer

I was recently in discussion with someone about the building of the above huge 51 metre high monument costing £9.3m and called "The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer". This is what the Guardian says of it: 

An enormous Christian monument, more than twice the size of the Angel of the North, is to be built on the outskirts of Birmingham, fulfilling a vision its instigator says came from God.

The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer will be constructed using a million bricks, each representing a prayer from a member of the public and its outcome. The aim is to “encourage and inspire people going through the storms of life”, said Richard Gamble, the project’s chief executive and a former chaplain of Leicester City football club.

The monument, which has been granted planning permission with work to begin next year, has three goals: to “preserve the Christian heritage of the nation”; encourage prayer; and “proclaim Jesus for the country”.

More information can be found here: 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-54123035

My friend, although a Christian, was clearly troubled by the thought that the money to build this monument could be more usefully spent elsewhere. (The money, according to the Guardian, is being donated by Lord Edmiston, a billionaire businessman, Conservative party donor and evangelical Christian). Although I was quite fascinated by the idea of a monumental Mobius strip my first reaction was surprise at the go ahead by North Warwickshire borough council’s planning committee who unanimously endorsed the scheme; after all, the UK appears to be a relatively secularised country, so how well does this huge Christian monument express British civic values? Below I present part of our conversation (I've called my friend "Bert"):

***

ME: At first sight it sounds a good idea to me. Love the symbolism of a giant mobius strip. Perhaps the country is not as secularised as I thought (Covid 19 anything to do with it?). However, weighing the incommensurables of the benefits of heritage (e.g. the moon landings) against more consumable benefits is not a straightforward comparison.

A good post though Bert: Got me thinking about balancing the monumental, which often serves community, kudos and status quo values, group identification and even hubris (e.g. Avebury, Silbury, Cathedrals etc...), against the more basic needs of just living satisfactorily. But I'm still puzzled and gob smacked that this project has got the go-ahead (unless it's a provocative troll article?). What's happening out there?

BERT:  I’m actually shocked it went ahead. Shouldn’t we give our money to the poor? Think of amount of meals that could feed those in poverty?

ME: Well yes, dire need should trump flights of monumental vanity, but when you've got a big economic surplus, human beings start to go monumental as we see in history. I assume your shock is about misplaced resources. My grasp of the economics here isn't great enough to contradict that, but I'm also shocked that what is basically a huge celebration of theism should get the go-ahead in the secularised UK. What in God's name is going on?

BERT:  Reminds me of Super/mega churches

ME: Not too keen on those myself! Shades of Nuremberg where you become one small cell in a frighteningly large organism run amok. Perhaps the funds are better spent on food banks and even covid19 research. But trying to put the balancing act here aside, as a monument I quite like the mobius strip. Although somebody did raise the question of "What about all those unanswered prayers?" Like all monuments it makes you reflect!

***

So, what about all those unanswered prayers then? How big a mobius strip would that require? Are there even enough bricks? Well, a few days later, independently and in an entirely different Christian connection, another Christian friend (whom I shall call "Josh") opened up a short email correspondence with me. The following is based on the first two email shots of that correspondence:

JOSH: I had a thought I wanted to run by you. It’s to do with prayer and when we request things – a bit of healing, a repair job, a decision going our way, a job interview, etc – it’s clear to me that although all our good prayers are answered by God at a general level in terms of our Christian progression, in terms of prayer requests for day to day things, the pattern of hits and misses often appears to me to be no more prominent in favour of hits than a random coin toss pattern.

What are your thoughts on this from a mathematician’s perspective?

ME: I think you may be talking about confirmation bias here? That is, is the concept of answered prayer just a myth which arises out of a natural human confirmation bias?

A few days ago I was discussing The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer with someone else. I don't think I'm the first to remark: "What about all those unanswered prayers?" So the question is: Do the answered vs unanswered statistics give us a result that is statistically significant in favour of "answered"? Trouble is, stats doesn't work here.

The question of answered prayer is reminiscent of the statistical research into telepathy & precognition: Telepathy and precognition guesses which yield simple and clear cut "yes" or "no" answers can be mathematically checked for statistical significance but when the message received is composed of highly complex pictures & relationships, judgements about whether telepathy and precognition work are much more difficult to evaluate. With these complex revelations it is very difficult if not impossible to define clear cut and precisely defined mathematical probability spaces of cases (prob of event = cases favourable to the event divided by all cases). Answers to prayer are often more akin to these complex precognition and telepathy models; they are like the intermittent transmissions received by a radio receiver: That receiver may only occasionally splutter into life and deliver a clear cut message for a short while: But just a single event like that is so improbable as a spontaneous random event that you just can't help the feeling that this single remarkable event wouldn't happen by chance! Clear messages very seldom emerge from a sea of random noise.

I'm not a great prayer warrior myself although we do pray briefly for the family every night. I can only make sense of this area using the metaphor of the parent-child relation: The child asks for things and the parent responds either affirmatively or negatively within that relationship and according to the boundless wisdom (and love) of the parent (boundless as far as a young child is concerned!). Given the parent's much wider perspective the child is simply not going to understand why some petitions are answered and others aren't. In fact the parent may say "no" more often than "yes"! But let's remember this: A radio need only crackle into life once or twice on your desert island for you know that someone is out there!

***

Epistemic Note

Our epistemology works best with regular, highly ordered, stable, accessible and relatively simple objects: If there are aspects of reality that don't conform to this pattern then our epistemic endeavors start to struggle; witness sociology, evolutionary psychology, economics, history and UFOs. 

If epistemically speaking we are going to be bowled the curve balls of an erratic and complex reality then don't expect authoritative certainty to emerge and instead differing opinions will have to be tolerated; interpretation of these difficult to evaluate connections will be very (cultural) context dependent. (Meaning = text + context!). Here epistemic humility is advised. It is likely that the subject of answered prayer and the paranormal in general will fall into this category. Prejudiced dogmaticism either way is unjustified; but really, given the polarisation and passion that pervades some of these more debatable epistemic connections I suppose that's just too much to hope! See below for some of my links on the subject of epistemology. 

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/04/forget-epistemic-demarcation-problem.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/03/evolutionary-psychology-under-fire.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/evidence-not-proof.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/yes-its-all-science-larry-but-not-as.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/epistemic-notes.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/its-science-larry-but-not-as-you-know-it.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/evidence-guide-lines-but-not-tram-lines.html

ADDENDUM 7/11/20

An article very relevant to the above material can be found in the September 2020 edition of Christianity magazine. In the article, which is entitled Triumphalism, prayer warrior Pete Greig, initiator & leader of the 24-7 prayer movement talks about..... 

...the embarrassing swagger of my early faith.....Throughout the first year or so of the 24-7 prayer movement we were probably pretty unbearable....[we] genuinely thought we had found the big red switch called 'Revival'.....If everyone would just pray the way we were praying, Jesus would be back by breakfast time on Thursday...I'm ashamed to admit that I was often inconsiderate and uncompassionate towards those who were finding life really tough. 

But then,

Sammy [Greig's wife] got sick. I watched her slip into seizure after seizure, and no matter how much I cried out to God to make them stop - even claiming the scriptures - it simply didn't work.  I went from believing my prayers could save the world to questioning whether they could save my wife. 

Greig's attitude has improved no-end:

I still believe in miracles. I continue to pray for revival. But as C S Lewis said, miracles must almost by definition be rare. The creator is not a cosmic slot machine.... I hope I'm more compassionate these days. I'm certainly more comfortable with the sovereignty of God and the many paradoxes of life.

Greig puts a lot of his initial triumphalism down to his youth. But youth doesn't always explain it. 

Analysing UK Church Statistics: Logos vs Pneuma

From https://faithsurvey.co.uk/uk-christianity.html

(click to enlarge)

The above chart shows how church attendance in the UK, for a variety of denominations, has changed in 35 years since 1980. The general trend is obviously downwards, although it will be noted that the Pentecostal denominations and what are termed "New Churches" have increased their numbers as have the Eastern Orthodox church. Some of these church groupings may be clusters  of church cultures with only marginal commonalities: For example, "Baptist" covers churches affiliated with the Baptist Union and also the Strict and Particular Baptists. "Independents" may cover Brethren,  FIEC and various independent evangelical and reformed leaning "Free churches" (Indeed "Brethren" itself breaks down into further sub-groupings). The so-called "New Churches" probably cover various "charismatic" leaning churches such as New Frontiers, Hillsong, Vineyard, Calvary Chapel, Bethel, Potters House, Jesus Army etc.

On a couple of occasions now I have heard some church goers lauding the "New Churches" as perhaps having found the holy grail of church life, namely the spiritual secret of church growth, in so far as they seem to have bucked the trend of decaying church population. But in the absence of more information this is a long shot.  Let me explain:

 If one of the components effecting church population is an exponential decay then we will have:

Rate of decay = a constant x church population

This means that the bigger a church population is the faster it decays. If this is one of the components at work it would explain the huge drop in the large traditional church populations of Anglican, Catholic and Methodists and the relatively smaller drop in other smaller traditional churches like baptists and evangelical independents.

However, exponential decay is clearly not the only component involved: Pentecostal churches, which are of a similar size to Baptists, have increased their population whereas Baptists have dropped. Also, the "New Churches" have increased. This might suggest that they've cracked the problem of church growth were it not for the fact that they are relatively small and therefore more resilient to decay; they only need a small "trickle-in" component to more than cancel their slow rate of decay. For example, if just some people coming out of the jaded traditional churches are looking for a new exciting church scene and in consequence turn to the lower end population New Churches that may explain the growth among these churches; after all these churches tend to address today's Christian existential crises by offering the security of "spiritual intimacy" and personal epiphany, not to mention the simplicity and certainties found in their style. But even so the New Church growth is not spectacular: It's taken 35 years for this relatively small population to grow by over 100% to 160k - that's  about 2.6k per year..

It's worth noting that the tiny orthodox church (and therefore with a small decay rate) doesn't need much input from the Eastern European immigrants to buck the trend and grow by 160% in 35 years. (that equates to a mere 0.5k per year growth!)

The Pentecostals have grown by 36%; that is, by about 2.2k per year; that's lower than the per yearly growth of the New Churches. That may be a bad sign: Pentecostal traditionality may be part of the reason, but the Pentecostals are quite a bit bigger than the New Churches and so their lower growth rate may, ominously, be evidence that their greater size means that they are starting to show the underlying exponential decay component at work. If this is correct and the decay component is actually there all along in both the Pentecostal & New Churches and that they are actually partly being fed by the decay of traditional church it follows that their growth will slow down as their populations get bigger and become more vulnerable to the decay component.

This foregoing analysis is rather precarious. After all, it's a case of looking at the data and attempting to resolve out a superposition of growth/decay components in a background of a lot of random noise. But then to my mind this is no less precarious an analysis than those who look at the data and conclude that the New Churches have cracked the problem of church growth by waiting on the "spiritual revolution" and therefore the traditional churches only need drum up the same enthusiasm for this new dawn to solve their population problem. Moreover, I think we need to factor in here the pattern often shown when the church feels culturally marginalised; namely, that it tends to become more spiritually internalized and shifts from an emphasis on the articulations of "logos" to the intimacy of "pneuma"! Sometimes the latter starts to skirt the boundaries of fideism and gnositicism

My best guess is that the real problem is what that background component of exponential decay really means; that's likely to be societally systemic and there is not much we can do about it. The nub of the problem is in the culture beyond, in society at large: The spiritual revolution needs to grab the outside culture (and not just the church) and turn its nihilistic malaise on its head! When that happens churches of all sorts may be left wondering why at one time it all seemed so hard!