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CASE 4
Dr. Tom Morris, former professor of philosophy, Ph.D., who taught for fifteen years at the University of Notre Dame, wrote Philosophy for Dummies (1999), which sold millions of copies in the U.S. In his bestselling book he writes: It was a sunny and unusually warm early spring day in the north Midwest. Desperate for some sun after a long gray and bitterly cold winter, I had taken my family to Warren Dunes State Park on Lake Michigan, to sit in beach chairs, enjoy the sunshine, and watch the waves roll in. My daughter Sara was about six, and Matt was only four. The very few other vacationers who were also silly enough to think that the lakefront would be sufficiently warm for a first day at the beach, scattered along the shore, staying out of the frigid water, and trying to keep the wind from blowing their possessions away. Matt had brought a brand new, multicolored beach ball, a little bigger than a standard basketball. He was standing at the edge of the water tossing it just a few inches up in the air. I said, ‘Matt, be careful with your ball. The wind is blowing toward the water, and if you’re not careful, you’ll lose it.’ He said, ‘Okay, Dad.’ I lay down in my beach chair and closed my eyes. ‘Dad! The ball!’ I opened my eyes just in time to see the beach ball 30 feet out in the water, being blown farther away every second. The wind was lifting it up and dropping it down. I jumped off the chair and stood with Matt while we watched it literally disappear across the lake for Milwaukee. ‘Well, it’s gone now,’ I announced. Matt looked up to me, and with the most angelic look on his face, said, ‘Dad, if we pray to God, he’ll give us our ball back.’ The first reaction I had to Matt’s remark was to say to myself, silently, in the most cynically sarcastic way possible, ‘Right.’ Out loud, I said, ‘Well, let’s just be more careful with our stuff now.’ Inwardly I was thinking, ‘Poor Matt, he just doesn’t understand yet the way the world works.’ As I walked back to my chair, Matt’s words echoed in my head: ‘Dad, if we pray to God, he’ll give us our ball back.’ The childlike innocence. The simple faith. I sighed. I was a philosopher of religion. I had already written ten books focusing on the philosophical side of theological matters. I had written powerful defenses of classical religious beliefs. Yet I was being inwardly dismissive about my son’s simple faith. I was a little disgusted with myself. I was writing books like a religious believer but living day to day in a thoroughly secular way. I lay down in the beach chair and closed my eyes. I felt a burning sensation in my face. A sense of compulsion I could not resist. I said, silently, and with complete sincerity, ‘Okay, God, give us our ball back.’ I thought to myself, this is a test. ‘God, I ask you to honor this little boy and give us that ball back.’ I relaxed and nodded off. 45 minutes later, I was eased into consciousness by the faint sound of a boat motor and opened my eyes to see on the horizon the small speck of a very large boat in the distance. It was the only boat we saw all day. The boat was so far away that I could barely see a bright red cap on one of the boaters. The boat turned and slowly disappeared from view across the horizon. An hour passed. Again, I heard the faint distant sounds of a motor. I looked up, and there was another speck in the distance coming in. Could it be the same boat? I felt strange and stood up. It was a very big boat. When it was about 30 yards out, I waded out into the freezing water. There were two young men on it. One bent down and came up with the beach ball in his hand! ‘Is this yours?’ one asked. I called out, ‘Yes, thanks a lot, how did you get it?’ He yelled out that, earlier, they had pulled up and used binoculars to see if there were any girls on the beach. Not seeing any likely prospects, they turned the boat and headed out. Half an hour later, they happened to catch sight of a brightly colored beach ball bobbing on the water. They managed to get a hold of it. They decided to turn around and scope out the beach one more time. The binoculars this time revealed a few girls on the shore, not far from where we were sitting. So now, 30 minutes later, here they were. They were not even planning to be out on the water that day. It was too rough. No other boats were out. When I told other philosophers of the miracle, they scoffed: ‘It would have been better if the ball had floated back to you three feet above the water.’ Undaunted, I replied: ‘Yes, but that’s not what I asked for: God returned my son’s ball. I am attuned to the miracle God has granted us.’
PROMPTS:
(a) Which is it more logical to believe: God returned Professor Morris’ son Matt’s beach ball by making sure the young men saw it sailing across the water’s surface, e.g. God made a firecracker pop next to the ball, so that the young men saw it. Second hypothesis: God didn’t respond to the philosophy professor’s prayer. The young man saw the ball on their own and took it back to shore on their own. Explain.
(b) Using inference to the best explanation, which explanation is more likely why the ball was returned: God or girls? Explain.
(c) The Bible says: “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” “A decade-long religious-funded study at Harvard University (2006) showed that prayer has no positive effect on hospital patients.” Does prayer work—does it cause results to occur? The Bible: “And Abraham prayed unto God: and God healed Abimelaech and his wife, and his maidservants” (Genesis: 20). In 2006 Herbert Benson reported (in The American Heart Journal) the enormous STEP project (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer) with 1,802 coronary artery bypass patients. They were divided randomly into three groups: Group A (604 patients) were told that they might or might not be prayed for – and in fact they were prayed for. (Each individual in the Church groups praying were given the patient’s first name, a photo of the patient, and his or her diagnosis and general condition. The prayer was done outside the hospital every day beginning the day before the operation and continuing for 14 days after the operation. Each “intercessor” was asked to pray daily “for a rapid recovery” and for prevention of complications and death.) Group B (597 patients) were also told that they might or might not be prayed for – and in fact were not prayed for. Group C (601 patients) were told that they would be prayed for, and were. Benson found that within a month, major complications and sometimes death happened to 52% of Group A, 51% of Group B, and 59% of Group C. In other words, people who knew that prayers were being said for them actually came off slightly worse than the others, in this particular event.
