In Our Time - Prayer

Episode Date: December 23, 1999

Melvyn Bragg examines the purpose and effects of prayer. Why do people pray? What did prayer ever do, the cry goes up, for those millions upon millions of non-combatants, civilians, children, innocents, whose lives have been ended by a savage variety of brutality? Do we pray for the benefit of God or for our own sake? Is it a “good Christian weapon” as Martin Luther defined it and as Mahatma Gandhi put it “the most potent instrument of action”; or is prayer simply the most essential form of self analysis? Or was Ovid right to see prayer as a way of changing the mind of God, when he wrote in The Art of Love, “Even the Gods are moved by the voice of entreaty”. People have prayed since the dawn of language - but why, and has it done us any good?With Professor Russell Stannard, physicist, religious writer and author of The God Experiment; Andrew Samuels, Jungian analyst and Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, why do people pray? Is it for the benefit of God or for our own sake? Is it a good Christian weapon, as Martin Luther defined it, and as Mahatma Gandhi put it,

the most potent instrument of action? Or is prayer simply the most essential form of self-analysis? Or was Ovid right to see prayer as a way of changing the mind, of God when he wrote in the arts of love, even the gods are moved by the voice of entreating. People seem to pray since the dawn of language, but why, and has it done us any good? With me to discuss the purpose of prayer

is the physicist and religious writer Professor Russell Stanard. His latest book, The God Experiment, describes a project that involves three groups of 600 patients and will explore whether praying for the sick is effective. I'm also joined by Andrew Samuels, a leading Jungian analyst

and professor of analytical psychology at the University of Essex. Russell Stannard, old cultures seem to have had religion at some time. Do you think that religious impulse is innate? Yes, I do. I think that, you know, there have been examples where people have claimed to have found a tribe in some far-off country which shows no signs of having been religious. But when those claims have been re-examined, it's been found in every case that, you know,

when you look at their artifacts and the way that they bury their dead, it's quite clear that religion is very much a universal drive in all peoples at all times. So it's something which is very deeply rooted in the psyche. Why do you think it is rooted? I mean, do you think it comes from culture or do you think it comes from nature? I, you know, being a religious believer, believe that it's implanted there by God. It's a natural tendency that we all,

have to find our purpose in life, which I believe can only be satisfied if you have a right religious relationship with God, which doesn't mean to say that, of course, everybody finds God in that kind of way. And when that doesn't happen, then that religious drive finds itself in other outlets. We find people who devote all their energies to various causes of one kind and another, some of them very good in themselves, but they do seem to me to be so displacements of this basic religious drive. Andrew Samuels, do you see religion as being, from your studies,

something that has always been there as far as we can discover records? I think it's worth looking at religion as if it were an instinct, in fact, as fundamental as sexuality or aggression. And like all instincts, the religious instinct has a goal, and the goal is to acquire or find or construct, meaning, purpose, pattern, order, and something beyond the every day. So you can't actually discuss religion in terms of opting in or opting out on this reading of it. It's as fundamental as sex or aggression.

Why would you call it religion, though, if it's finding patterns and that sort of thing, why wouldn't you call it so learning? Well, I think there is also an instinct to learn. I mean, psychoanalysis talks of the epistemophilic instinct and a love of knowledge. but I think that the urge and the drive to be religious is somewhat different. Firstly, it's explicitly not resting itself on rationality, whereas knowledge, especially in our time, knowledge does involve some kind of embrace of rationality,

and religion explicitly does not. But I think there's something else too, which is that the beyond, the above, the trans, whatever word we want to use, this is not just something to do with knowledge. This is something to do with belief and to do with humanity's aspirations. And I don't think that knowledge quite captures it, though I see what you're getting at, of course.

What do you think of Richard Dawkins' idea, Rosal Stana, that the why question, the religious question, is in effect a non-question. We don't need to ask it and we don't need to answer it. I certainly do not go along with that. I think that Dawkins and myself are scientists. scientists are very successful in what they do but that is simply because we very carefully

delineate the kind of questions that we're prepared to answer and very roughly speaking there are questions which sort of begin with the word how how do things work how do things behave the way they are and as long as we stick to that kind of question then we are on very very firm ground and our scientific methods, methods of observation,

experimentation are exactly the right way to answer those sorts of questions. Now, there are some people like Richard Dawkins who then, I would say, make science into their god so that anything that science cannot get hold of has somehow to be discounted. So any questions to do with purpose and meaning in life of an absolute nature, Richard completely dispenses

with, knowing that science cannot answer them, he then takes the tack that, okay, well, these questions are meaningless. And I just simply don't go along with that. I think that questions to do with why are we here, how ought we to be using our life, are perfectly relevant questions to answer, and the fact that science, the scientific method, doesn't come up with answers, means you have to look somewhere else. Andrew Samuel's, Freud's account of God was, well, very, very briefly perhaps wrongly you was that he was an ideal substitute for the father

in some ways. How far does that take us? Oh, I think that kind of psychologising about religion is completely pointless and shallow and I would go along with Russell here that actually there is a psychology religion dialogue that is as important as a science religion dialogue and I think what everybody's

beginning to discover in the psychological world is that there are things that we don't understand and to reduce God to father and to reduce religious belief to transference. That's to say that God plays the same part in the adult's mind as the father played in the child's mind. I think it's really very superficial. I think there are lots and lots of other ways of reading it.

And I like the idea that Russell Beauvoir has some kind of implantation, that we are born ready to function in a religious way, ready to image things in the religious way. Oh, they like the language in a future way. Absolutely, yes, yes. And the social urges and instincts as well. I think the difficulty is to avoid getting too spurious precise about about the words we use here. If we talk about an instinct, of course,

there's lots of different ways of understanding it. And language instinct, or the innate capacity, to make use of language, is a very good parallel for the innate capacity to make use of the religious parts of ourselves. Well, let's take one aspect of religion, which is prayer. And there's many forms of prayer,

there's thanksgiving, there's worship, there's contrition and so on. But if we can talk about intercession and petition, do you think that does prayer for you, does it involve, the notion of, as it were, God talking back? Yes, it certainly does. Not, of course, as an audible voice.

Really, it's a case of, I find myself with some kind of problem which I've been wrestling with for ages, and I take it to God in prayer. And then suddenly a thought comes into my mind, which wasn't there before. It has a kind of otherness about it, as though it didn't come from my mind. It has come from some.

some other kind of source. And the way I look upon that is that God is stirring up in my mind his thoughts. It's not that he's sort of transferring them from out there into my mind. If you surrender your life or try to surrender your life to God's will, then you are inviting him to sort of take over your own mind. And that is how these thoughts start to bubble up. They're actually God's thoughts, but they're in your mind. Andrew Samu's a lot of people find it hard to

accept the fact that God can take a personal interest and he's got more to do or anyway he isn't that sort of God and why should he even some of those distinguishes Russell that's a problem to solve in physics that God can say no hold on there what's your view of that

I don't think it's so easy to to split it up into A talking to B and B talking to A I think that psychologically speaking what goes on in prayer is some sort of union or communication between the two entities involved. And in that sense, it's a dialectical thing, it's a relationship. And what I've been interested in in particular is not just what A, the human, gets out of the encounter with B, the divine,

but what B, the divine, gets out of the encounter with A, the human, because if it is a dialectical relationship, then it's reasonable to ask what's he, capital H, getting out of this, if anything. And I think that is the challenging part of... But what do you see as an analytical psychologist? What is the divine? Do you have an image, a sense, a word description of the divine? Well, I don't think it's simply a projection from within whether of a parent figure or of a sort of aspect of the psyche exactly.

I think it is a discovery, a psychic fact, that humanity has always engaged with. And it seems to have certain characteristics in common. One is that whatever is construed as divine is experienced as absolutely other with a huge capital O, it is not you, it is completely distinct from you. And here, if I could put in brackets, that's also like child development when the child has to realize that the parent is also somehow distinctly other, but perhaps not with such a large capital O, because after all, you come from the same stuff. But God is very much other. Now that's terribly frightening and also terribly

liberating because it allows humanity to stay small, to stay in a state of impotence, to stay in a state of lack, to admit to failure, and in general, to be, to use the word, we always use human. You know, it's very interesting how we use that word human. He or she is all too human. And I think it's the encounter with the divine that enables that psychological move to take place. But in the history of religions, the divine has changed from being a vengeful god, a merciful god, or a woman god. So the divine has changed in different contexts. Well, our perception of the divine has changed

and that is what I think is backing up what Andrew is saying about this otherness of God. It seems as though there is an objective reality which we call God and that as time goes on we get a better understanding of what that reality is like and so as you quite rightly say if you put the writings of the Bible

in chronological order, in the order in which they're actually written. You do start off with one God amongst many gods. He's a tribal god. He's only interested in the Israelites. He couldn't care of fig about Egyptians. He happily kills off Egyptian children. He lives up a particular mountain. It's a very different kind of God that we believe in now.

And as you trace through the Bible, you can see how that conception is gradually changing and being honed down until you eventually get to today's understanding of there being just one God. who loves everybody, a God of mercy. And I think that we would no more want to go back to earlier understandings of God than we would want to go back to earlier understandings of science,

which is not to say that we've got a perfect understanding of either at the moment, but we have a better understanding now than we originally had. We're closer to the objective reality. I'm uncomfortable with your depiction of the contemporary God in the way you just did it, because I think that's exclusive, and I think it's sort of Judeo-Christian, and I think there are lots and lots of problems with it.

I would like to describe or imagine today's God as a less than complete God, as a God who has enormous needs, who has enormous flaws, and who in a way has to survive his encounter with humanity. And I think that is what the nature of modern prayer is partly about. It is a challenge.

You know, the key issue that children come up with, for example, is if God is so powerful and so good, why is there so much evil in the world? and that's a very smart, important, fundamental question and it has to do with prayer as well. And I think that one of the reasons why God, if you like, is somehow mixed up with evil, insufficiency, lack and nasty things, is because he is not as advanced in our time as he might be

or as he could have been. And I think this, if you like, this image of God as a very much less than perfect, very much less than supreme, very much less than complete, very much less than moral being, is an exciting modern way to look at God. I must confess, I do go along with the Orthodox view, that God is all loving, all good, all perfect, and that we have to find some other understanding

for why the world itself is so flawed and why there is evil there. And I think that when you think things out, yes, you can get some pointers to where that truth might lie, that if the overwhelming principle behind our lives is love, that God's prime concern is not that we have a good time, but that we enter into a loving relationship with him. And certain consequences come from that.

We have to be given free will, otherwise love is not real, and as soon as you give free will to your creatures, then you run the risk of them abusing that. So God gives us the freedom, but it's we who make the evil. Your book's called The God Experiment, and there's this project, The God Experiment, which could you briefly tell people what you're doing there? I'm a trustee of the Templeton Foundation,

which is an American charitable organisation, devoted progress in religion, and it's simply that we have funded an experimental proposal that was put to us by Herbert Benson from Harvard. The basic idea is that people who are suffering from coronary artery diseases and are going in for bypass surgery at five hospitals there are being divided up into groups. Teams of intercessors have been set up,

and they pray for a certain batch of patients. In fact, the groups are such that 600 patients are being prayed for and 600 are not being prayed for. So they are the control group. The patients themselves don't know whether they're being prayed for or not. They've simply been told you might be prayed for or you might not be prayed for.

And then what's happening is that their case histories are being followed up over a period of three years to see whether there's any difference between the recovery rates of the two groups. In fact, there's three groups. The third group of 600 are told you will be prayed for and they are prayed for.

So that's to see whether there is any additional benefit if you're like from actually knowing that you're being prayed for. Obviously if there's a positive result that those prayed for significantly, statistically significantly do better, then

that will be an incredibly important result and will lead to lots of other kinds of research and different prayer techniques, trying out different diseases and see whether they succumb and so on. So it will be a very important result. But it's important to recognise that that

would not prove that God exists, and we are quite insistent from the very outset that this is not an experiment aiming to prove to everybody that God exists. Andrew Zemman? Yeah, look, I'm not against linking science and religion. I agree with Einstein. Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind and all that kind of thing. But I do have some trouble with this, Russell. I really do. I think it's an extraordinarily over-literal approach to everything to do with religion. And it did occur to me that, never mind telepathy, let's just say, it is really about prayer. You really need a control group of people who don't know this is going on at all, because one of the things I think is going to happen is that if prayer is effective, and I think it may well be,

then both groups are going to get better because of the praying people that you've got out there. I think it's a very, very problematic and over-literal approach to things. And I don't understand what the results will mean. I repeat, I'm not against a science-religion link, but I don't feel that what's being proposed in this experience. experiment is really very, very useful, and I don't have much confidence in it. I'm sorry to be frank, but I... Oh, no, no, no, that's perfectly okay. No, I hasten to say it's not my experiment, and quite honestly, if I had thought of it,

I wouldn't have spent my time on it, quite honestly, because my own gut reaction is that it's going to be a null result, either because God will not cooperate, and after all, it does say in the Bible, thou shalt not put the Lord thy God. to the test and there's probably some very good reasons for that. And secondly, because of what the investigators themselves called the background noise. When we say that one group is not being prayed for, all we mean is that they're not being prayed for

by these special teams of intercessors. Obviously, you can't stop people praying for themselves or their loved ones praying for them. And my own gut feeling is that when you pray for somebody you know and you love and you're agonizing about, that is likely to have far more effect than prayers for, stranger. But my scientific training says that is a gut feeling. If there's any way of testing it out, one ought to test it out. If it turns out to be a positive result, then at that stage,

everyone will say, well, what an obvious thing to do? Why didn't somebody else think of doing that long before? Well, people do it every week in church, don't they pray for the sick? And they do it in a lot of other places, and that's what's wrong probably both with church, or synagogue or mosque, and this experiment, it's actually missing the point about where prayer is at at the end of the century. Well, do you think it's private? I don't mean privatised in a that's right way.

I mean, it's become a much more... Religion as a whole, spirituality has become not only more private, but more spread out. And I think this is an interesting and healthy development, yeah. It's got to do with the way we live, the way we work, the way we organise ourselves socially, the way we make love, the way we consume, not just food, but also fashion, drugs,

these kinds of things, have got a religious charge now, and we can recognise that. In fact, they probably always did. Everyday life was probably always completely riddled with something spiritual. And if you like, everyday life was always already a kind of prayer, if you want to use that sort of evocative way of talking about it. Now, I think what's gone off in this prayer experiment and in linking prayer too much to church or too much to a benevolent God, too much traditional forms, is that the essence of what's possible

in a prayer experience is just institutionalised, and I don't like that. Because what I hear from my clients and from my friends, and I know from my own personal experience, is that prayer from within, going on within, and prayer, as it were, as an omnipresent aspect of all bits of daily life and social life and consuming, that is the modern way of experiencing these things.

But how can you describe, isn't prayer becoming so elastic, has to be loose of any bonds with any facts at all? It's difficult. There's a problem like the word politics has also, you know, gone into all aspects of life. But you yourself said that religious forms have changed enormously. And I think what we may be seeing, we may be seeing ourselves coming into a period

where the religious forms are going to be relatively formless. And I think that has terrific possibilities. It has great anxieties because it leaves the prayer and its energies very uncontained by decorous official structures. And the risk is that it just becomes a nun word, everything is a prayer. But I think the possibility is that people locate sources of authority and love within themselves,

which then become some things that they can use in their life and in their relationships. They do not depend on external sources of authority, such as organized religion, or indeed, by the way, the psychotherapy profession. Because I think the rendering private of prayer also renders private things like insight, which have stayed, if you like,

the possession of people like myself. I think the people, humanity, is taking these things back at this moment, and that's very exciting from my angle. What's your response to that, Russell? I think I go along with just about everything you said. Prayer is multifaceted. It consists of contrition, self-dedication, worship,

and Thanksgiving and things of that kind, all of which are very private, in the main, are very personal. private. So I think that prayer is one's own ongoing relationship with God of self-dedication, trying to allow God to work

through one's own life. An intercession is just an extra, if you think, an extra aspect of prayer. So, yeah. But it has been in Western organized religions, it has been a very powerful part

of them. You know, ask me, and you will get an answer. You pray and your sins will be absolved. Pray and the people who are dead will be comforted by your prayers. I mean prayer has been very, very, the intercession the petitioning aspect of prayer has been a very strong feature of it in the organised churches. Yes it is but I think that one can have a rather naive understanding as to how God's like to respond.

Ask and you shall receive that is certainly the case but what you received might be the answer, no, or it might be yes but not now, or it might be yes but not in that way. I have a better idea. So there are many different kinds of answers to intercessary prayer. I think that where it's at the moment is prayer as a dialectical or diological experience. And this goes back to something I was saying earlier about what does God want from his side. of the prayer relationship and I'm afraid that traditional approaches to prayer miss out this

dimension utterly. Jung wrote a book called Answers to Job which caused a lot of trouble in his relations to Christian people which have been very good up until then and in this book Jung argued that the way God Yahweh treats Job shows how immature,

narcissistic and irresponsible God is. I think this is a very good place from which to begin. And I want to reimagine prayer as not only all the traditional things, but in addition, a means by which humanity says to the out there, to the bigger than itself, to the trans whatever word we want to use, hey, the world is not good enough and you have a responsibility in this matter.

So I see prayer as a protest as well. And I think a lot of younger people do, because one of the noticeable things about all the environmental politics we saw in Seattle a few weeks ago at the World Trade Organization, thing, was that for many of these young people, their environmental and ecological concerns are terrifically spiritual and formed in a religious way as well? I think protesting against God and being angry with God are certainly experiences that I have had. And I think it's a very natural reaction and I'm sure that so God forgives me for having

lost my temper with him. But always at the back of my mind or at least when I've calmed down, I suspect that my frustration is simply through lack of understanding as to what God is really all about. But you're talking very confidently and admirably almost confidently about God Russell, but for a great number of people looking back just on this century at the end of this century, the idea of there being a God in human affairs on this planet for the last hundred years is something that they can't countenance. They look around and they say, no. I can only say, I can understand how that can be the case.

Of course, one can carry out a controlled experiment where you run the history of the world without a god. That might be so absolutely horrendous that we might see. It could have been a lot worse. Oh, it could have been a lot worse, absolutely. I think that the important thing in my life is that you carry out a kind of of God experiment of your own. You give prayer a try.

You say, okay, God, I'm going to give you a chance. If you're there, please talk to me. Please make your presence known to me in my prayer life. And I'm going to stick at this for a long time to give you a good chance. And let's see where we go. And I think that if you do that, if you really open up your heart in that kind of experiential way, you know, George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement, said, I came to know God experimentally.

And I think that is how it is with everybody. you'll never argued into a belief in God. You must try that experiment. You then encounter God, and the kind of presence you come into is one that is not evil. It is one that is good and loving and kind and powerful and awesome. And it's that direct relationship and understanding of God which then confronts you with other ways of trying to come to the problem of evil and suffering.

Andersson. If people look for God where they've been told to look for God, they will be disappointed and the events of the century, if you like, bear that out. If people pray in the way they're supposed to pray, they'll be disappointed as well. But what's missing around the table is the third position, a kind of anti-prayer, anti-God position, because that isn't my position. My position is that there are new forms of religion, new approaches to spirituality, which can, if allowed to, by the big institutions of religion, breathe new life into God.

New life into God, okay? That's blasphemy. But that's what's needed. and new forms of prayer will then develop. And, you know, the word that's missing from all of this is spontaneity. And I think that the adherence of organised religion are terrified of spontaneity, because it detraps them, if you like.

It takes away their vestments, and they can't live without them. I meet people all the time who say, well, of course, I'm a Christian with a small C. Or I've got sort of Jewish consciousness or sensibility, but I don't do anything. These people ought to be religion's gold dust. Well, I go to church every week. I'm a lay reader in the church of England.

I preach in the church, and I've got a sermon coming up next Sunday. So I'm very much part of organised religion. But I do empathise a great deal with what Andrew is saying, that there are times where even someone who's in the establishment of the church like myself, the old forms start to go stale. They don't speak to you as they used to. So I feel that in my own life, I do need from time to time to experiment with different ways of approaching God.

Well, thank you very much, Russell Stanard and Andrew Samuels, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.