richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

THE GOD HYPOTHESIS 61
non-interventionist, NOMA God, though less violent and clumsy
than an Abrahamic God, is still, when you look at him fair and
square, a scientific hypothesis. I return to the point: a universe in
which we are alone except for other slowly evolved intelligences is
a very different universe from one with an original guiding agent
whose intelligent design is responsible for its very existence. I accept
that it may not be so easy in practice to distinguish one kind of
universe from the other. Nevertheless, there is something utterly
special about the hypothesis of ultimate design, and equally special
about the only known alternative: gradual evolution in the broad
sense. They are close to being irreconcilably different. Like nothing
else, evolution really does provide an explanation for the existence
of entities whose improbability would otherwise, for practical
purposes, rule them out. And the conclusion to the argument, as I
shall show in Chapter 4, is close to being terminally fatal to the
God Hypothesis.
THE GREAT PRAYER EXPERIMENT
An amusing, if rather pathetic, case study in miracles is the Great
Prayer Experiment: does praying for patients help them recover?
Prayers are commonly offered for sick people, both privately and in
formal places of worship. Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was the
first to analyse scientifically whether praying for people is
efficacious. He noted that every Sunday, in churches throughout
Britain, entire congregations prayed publicly for the health of the
royal family. Shouldn't they, therefore, be unusually fit, compared
with the rest of us, who are prayed for only by our nearest and
dearest?* Galton looked into it, and found no statistical difference.
His intention may, in any case, have been satirical, as also when he
prayed over randomized plots of land to see if the plants would
grow any faster (they didn't).
More recently, the physicist Russell Stannard (one of Britain's
three well-known religious scientists, as we shall see) has thrown
* When my Oxford college elected the Warden whom I quoted earlier, it happened
that the Fellows publicly drank his health on three successive evenings. At the third
of these dinners, he graciously remarked in his speech of reply: 'I'm feeling better
already.'