Some of you may have seen this before. Credit for it goes to Adeodatus and his highly effective thrift store shopping. The text is taken from the back of a cheap, plastic pinball game called “Lucky Marbles.” The marbles appear to have been lost. Read:

Marble is a kind of game that is very mordern now. It collects excitement, entertairment, fasciration. It’s a very interesting game. It can not only trains lover’s skill and intelligence but also is a best way for lover to make friends. It’s an intelligent game for a family to be a happy field.

You’ll surpass yourself intelligence and skill through a sernies of intelligent competition actions, competite your intelligence and your skill, participate in together. The regular or competition is folloming:

1. The two parties of intlligent competition must own themselves “Lucky marble.” within the fixed time, if you can shoot the five provided plastic teased pearl at “650, 1,000, 2,500, 3,000, 1,850 fen’s” “U” form trough early or late. You’ll get the seat for the lucky diamond winner.
2. If you can shoot the five provided plastic marble at the place of 100, 50, 10, 35, 25 fen, form “Ground Level.” This will make you own a foundation shon on life and study. Then you’ll get a beautiful “The jadeite seat.”
3. Others, the two parties will judge winning or losing according to the best results 10,000 fen is “Gold Seat.” 8,000-10,000 fen is “Silver Seat,” 5,000-8,000 fen is “Copper Seat.”

Where there is a will, there is a way. The training of will, intelligence, skill will be your best ladder of success. It is your best training way of defeating everything.

If you don’t believe me, check out the scanned image. This will make you own a foundation shon on life and study:

Biology professor Dr. Paul Myers (scroll down) has weighed in on the prayer debate. Dr. Myers’ rhetorical style seems more closely to resemble mockery than debate, but maybe I just need to get to know him better. Also, although he holds a Ph.D. and enjoys an bona fide academic appointment, presumptive amateur Raving Atheist ironically did a better job of confronting the ideas in the original post than he did. I suspect this is just due to impatience with theists rather than lack of ability.

I’m judging from his post that he thinks its real substance lies in his treatment of my methodological criticisms of the original study. This would be understandable, since he is a bona fide scientist who applies scrupulously designed methods to tests things, all day, every day (in an idealized world with no undergraduates and no need for grant applications). Actually, I’m not terribly interested in discussing my first two objections further, since they were offered merely as a reductio (informally, “crazy talk”) in the first place. I could respond to his suggestions that I have made “childish excuses,” that I suggested a “ridiculous experiment,” or that I am hypocritically suggesting better tests when I generally denying the propriety of scientific testing of prayer in the first place, but space and time are at a premium, and it would be better to pick our issues more strategically.

Cutting through his overly-lively rhetoric, he does raise a helpful point that could use some clarification:

The idea that the efficacy of god cannot be evaluated simply doesn’t hold up. When you read the testimonials of the religious, they are full of praises for the power and wonder and glory of god. Some estimation of his performance is implicit in such descriptions. I don’t think people actually mean, “God seems to be great, although I can’t really see any difference between the results of his actions and random chance…” Is it just that god is mathophobic, and gets all queasy when people start measuring and calculating and doing statistics?

To clarify: if I have said that all effects God causes are un-testable and unobservable, then I retract the statement forthwith. My point was that we have reason to believe that prayer ought not to be testable in this way, nor indeed in any formal way that I can think of. I am not undertaking the task of trying to design a theologically valid prayer experiment, nor to circumscribe the whole boundary between what can and cannot be known about the being and activity of God, and how we should go about learning it. I would like to leave the door open to all kinds of theologically meaningful tests, just not on prayer, at least not like this, and probably not at all. Anyone trying to extend my remarks beyond those modest boundaries is simply wrong.

Dr. Myers describes my proposed theology of prayer as “long-winded,” “bizarre,” and “six mostly incoherent paragraphs.” I regret that when we get to the meat of the argument, he apparently runs out of enthusiasm for the discussion. I would point out again that Raving Atheist seemed to be able to wade through my putatively impenetrable prose fairly well, even going so far as to identify what will probably turn out to be a key assumption in the debate (the nature of freedom) that will keep him and me from being able to reach any consensus. Now, I don’t mean to convey that I was extremely pleased with R.A.’s response, but at least he was able to interact with the more complicated theological and philosophical ideas and offer a response that was on balance intelligible.

Exasperated with me but still willing to take a stab at it, Professor Myers says:

[The description of the relational dimension of prayer] is just a variation on his excuse #1, that the scientists didn’t do the experiment correctly, but prayer really does have an effect. All he’s doing here is adding additional, baseless conditions (postulating a vague “relationship” with invisible, unobserved entities is nothing but an ad hoc complication) to shoo away a result he doesn’t like.

If “prayer” means something like what I have suggested it means, then the relationship with the invisible entity is central to the question at hand. Considering prayer without considering how the faithful relate to God seems much like taking fish eggs out of water. It would be silly to label Dr. Myers’ criticism that “These Danio embryos were dried out” as an ad hoc complication, even if the experiment was not intended to test anything about water itself.

Most tellingly, he says:

Either prayer has a measurable, material effect, or it doesn’t.

Actually, I see a glimmer of hope here. Just as Raving Atheist touched on the question of freedom, Dr. Myers may have touched on a just as consequential an axiom. My original question might fairly be rephrased, “Should prayer have measurable effects in the way that the laws of physics and chemistry do?” which clearly would disqualify his statement from being offered as a premise in any counterargument. I suspect that a commitment to metaphysical naturalism (which commitment Dr. Myers would have to express; I am not intending to make one for him) would require that one view prayer in the way he does. A commitment to theism (or any compatible metaphysical system that is reasonably distinct from naturalism) wouldn’t necessarily predicate a property of “testability” to prayer, and indeed might recommend against it, as I have attempted to explain.

If Professor Myers wants to say, “Yes, I’m a metaphysical naturalist, and I insist that anything that has being is testable in any way I can think of testing it, subject to engineering limitations,” then I’ll be perfectly satisfied. We’ll disagree, but I’ll understand why. If he wants to call me long-winded, bizarre, or other pejoratives again, I’ll be disappointed.

UPDATE: Dr. Myers strikes back; I judge life to be too short to continue this.

Everybody loves these posts, so I’m again pleased to bring you a few links from the ever-helpful Woodstock Wire:

• A lengthy and somewhat technical article from The Street argues that the tech recovery is already well underway.
• EBN tells us that the perennially cyclical semiconductor industry is undeniably on the upswing.
• The San Jose Mercury News talks about excitement among Indian software companies in the face of last week’s economic reports here. As discussed last week, this is not necessarily a bad thing for us.

“It’s not as bad as you think,” is rapidly becoming yesterday’s news. Here’s to hoping it stays that way.

My good friend Pentamom contributed some more thoughts (hastily composed, she cautioned) on prayer in response to the Not A Talisman post:

Your analysis is certainly sufficient on its own, but it occurs to that there are other reasons why, within the context of Christian theology, this model should not be reliable.

Here’s another one: physical healing from a given condition is not presumptively the highest good in every situation. Maybe that’s just another example of the vending-machine analogy, but I’m thinking of it in a slightly different way from Tom Wright’s usage (though I agree with his application also).

It seems to me that Wright is saying you can’t merely ask for something and expect to get it, as though God had no will of His own. True enough. But there’s also the flip side: Christian theology teaches that God is both loving (He loves His children the way a good father loves his children) and all-wise. Christian theology says, “Maybe God will give you something BETTER than you pray for. He knows better than you do what the best outcome would be.”

Now I want to be careful here: suffering and death are the effect of the fall, and I want to stay away from the glories of a failed angioplasty. Nonetheless, God uses the difficult things to bring about the better things. A failed angioplasty or post-op complications that do not lead rapidly to death may cause some experience of suffering that brings about greater good for the patient and/or his loved ones. Beyond that, from the Christian POV, a failed angioplasty or post-op complications that lead rapidly to death result in a permanent end to suffering and the beginning of an untroubled, unending existence in perfect peace, eventually to be joined by many of those you love best, never again to be separated, in the uninterrupted presence of the God a Christian professes to love. That doesn’t automatically chalk up to “bad outcome,” now does it?

Now, the atheist response I see coming is that this is just an apologetic trick to explain the ineffectiveness of prayer to the ceiling of one’s bedroom. The reason, though, that I don’t think the atheist has a lot of ground to stand on here is that the theology of suffering and the hope of the resurrection aren’t tacked onto Christian theology the way an apologetic “out” would be, but the theology of suffering is is woven very deep into the Christian faith itself, and one might say that the hope of the resurrection is the POINT of the Christian faith. Take away the theology of suffering and the hope of the resurrection from the Christian faith, and you have a very different religion altogether. You have to do more than say “that’s just a trick”–you actually have to disprove the theology of suffering and the hope of the resurrection in order to demonstrate that the atheist’s objection holds water. Only IF those things are not true, is the argument that “a failed angioplasty is not the end of the world” silly on its face.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another similar principle that guts the study, but in a certain sense, everything about Christian theology that makes it Christian theology causes the study to make no sense. You’ve hit on the broad principles — my intuitive sense is that there are about a hundred corollaries that independently demonstrate it as well.

The first question that occurred to me when I saw this picture was whether the building would be built on concrete footings:

Artist’s rendition of the proposed Frederic C. Hamilton addition to the Denver Art Museum.
Drawing by M.A. Mortenson Co.
Image courtesy of The Denver Post

Now, if I ever refer to myself as an architect, you should understand that I mean software architect. My brother-in-law–who is actually an architect who designs primarily liturgical churches–happens to hate this use of the term, and to his point, I really don’t have much of an idea how buildings are put together.

I don’t have much of an idea, but I do know that buildings are not supposed to crumble to the ground unpredictably, and I know there are established design patterns (concrete footings and foundations, framed walls, etc.) that architects–the real kind, not the software kind–can apply to building design problems with a reasonable expectation of success. Things that have been done before, that are transmitted from one generation of architects to the next as a kind of received, though perhaps evolving, orthodoxy. Things that pass inspection. Things that comport with the laws of physics. In short: there is a Way One Builds A Building such that the Building Does Not Collapse On People.

After chuckling about the picture for a moment (and feeling a bit of anxiety that this monstrosity was going to be imposed on downtown Denver), I read the full article in the Sunday Post. It was better than I had expected.

It turns out that it’s very difficult to build a postmodernist temper tantrum like this. It’s easy to draw them on paper (well, at least no laws of physics, logic, or county inspectors will prevent you), and it’s easy to write about the related concepts with a word processor, but actually making physical instances of these ideas turns out to involve huge and delightfully ironic helpings of very moderist technology. Now, you’ll never hear me heaping unqualified praise on modernism, but the borrowing of capital here is just too obvious to pass it up. Read:

“If we didn’t have this technology, we wouldn’t be doing this project,” site supervisor Jopy Willis said.

…

Another issue is that each [carefully designed steel] beam plays a role in holding up the rest of the building.

If one beam moves or unexpectedly bends the wrong way, it creates problems throughout the structure. If not fixed in time, the whole thing could come crashing down.

“It needs to be fully up before it can stand on its own,” said Dave Sandlin, Mortenson’s senior project manager.

…

Willis and his colleagues aren’t just keeping an eye on the building, though - they are using technology to pinpoint the exact location of each beam.

There are four people at Mortenson charged solely with watching the building to make sure it doesn’t unexpectedly move. They walk around the structure all day shooting survey guns, which use laser technology to pinpoint the exact location of the beams.

…

Keeping the whole thing together is an $18,000 computer program designed by Marietta, Ga.-based Construction System Associates Inc.

The program takes a 3-D computer model of the building, which details everything down to the size of each of the thousands of bolts used to secure each beam…

I can think of no more apt metaphor for what goes on under the label of “postmodern thought” than this exercise. I’ll leave you with this quote, the at least last clause of which is true:

“It will be a landmark building,” Willis said. “Like the (Sydney) Opera House in Australia, it will be on postcards, and people around the world will notice it.”