God Flights

USA Today reports on the efforts of “prayer warriors” who have taken to the sky for the spiritual benefit of the people of Ohio.

CINCINNATI — Ten small single-engine airplanes circling over Ohio on Friday afternoon will be on a special mission. They’ll be taking part in PrayerFlight, airplanes filled with people praying for the health and welfare of the state’s 11 million residents. […]

The prayer warriors, from all religious affiliations, pray silently and aloud while aloft. They ask God to guide leaders, pray for people in schools and hospitals, and ask for salvation. […]

The second flight had eight planes with 26 people, including six youths from Teens for Christ, a ministry of teenagers from 22 high schools. This time the group prayed over seven Ohio counties.

Samantha Ciminillo, 18, of Lima, a member of Teens for Christ, took one of the December flights. It was her first airplane ride. “You see rows and rows of houses, and you know they are full of people you are praying for,” she said. […]

For now, Ciminillo is looking forward to Friday. “God works through the power of prayer,” she said. “I’m expecting big things to happen.”

Now, as a connoisseur of sophisticated theology, I am well aware that the vast majority of religious believers share a philosophically nuanced image of the divine, such as one might read about in the London Review of Books. God is viewed as a manifestation of immanent transcendence (some tension there, to be deliciously savored!), a precondition of the universe’s existence, standing outside our ordinary categories of substance and imagination. Happy times they are, as these typically devout folks chat away over dinner about the progress of our understanding from Tertullian to Levinas, relaxing over dessert with anecdotes about Ricoeur’s hermeneutic speculations.

But, in the interests of complete honesty, we must admit that there are still a few folks out there — one or two, scattered about the landscape — who indulge in a somewhat more literal vision of the traditional religious stories. People who believe that God is some kind of person, sitting up there in the sky, looking down on us and passing judgment. A being quite frightfully anthropomorphic, whose omniscience and omnipotence correspond roughly to those associated with the beard of Gandalf and the strength of Superman, respectively.

It’s a funny kind of philosophy, and I do wonder how carefully people examine their own beliefs. If a human being were to manifest the kind of need for constant worship and gratitude that this God exhibits, we would call them pathological (or perhaps “Mr. President,” but that’s another topic). It’s a scary idea, that God has the power to exert great influence over what happens in our daily lives, but chooses to do so or not on the basis of a handful of people flying around in airplanes, praying their hearts out. (“Sorry, Kentucky; I’d love to help out, but the flightplan didn’t quite take the prayer team over your airspace.”) Subtle interventions to be sure; maybe this person’s cold won’t evolve into pneumonia, that one will get cancer but it won’t be very painful. And if it weren’t for the praying, those unsuspecting folks below would be out of luck; one imagines God doing a weary shrug, in a “Don’t look at me, I’m just enforcing the Cosmic Rules, which, yeah, I’m sort of responsible for in the first place, but still, rules are rules, you know?” kind of way.

And then there are people who believe that things don’t happen for a reason, nor are events influenced by anyone looking at us from on high. The creation of good and evil, justice and mercy, beauty and terror, are all in our hands, as complicated conglomerations of particles obeying the laws of Nature. I kind of like it that way.

73 Comments

73 thoughts on “God Flights”

  1. “And then there are people who believe that things don’t happen for a reason, nor are events influenced by anyone looking at us from on high. The creation of good and evil, justice and mercy, beauty and terror, are all in our hands, as complicated conglomerations of particles obeying the laws of Nature. I kind of like it that way.”

    But what about miracles? 🙂 You know, like what supposedly happened to that French nun.

  2. Hi Sean,

    I always follow you, but sometimes I don’t believe you. For example, I don’t believe the last sentence.

    -Sam

  3. “..we would call them pathological (or perhaps “Mr. President,” but that’s another topic).”

    Thanks for that line, as it was the direct cause of water spewing everywhere! A good laugh, to be sure.

  4. One of the best works about God in that higher philosophical sense, was _The Mind of God_ by Paul Davies. He focused mostly on things like the anthropic principle, in the sense of it being interesting that our universe has just the right physical values for life to exist within a very narrow range. For those who escape to multiple universes, pehaps via modal realism: I hope you are aware of the irony of believing or even supposing such things, given:
    (1.) Our near-complete lack of theoretical justification for any other universes with other properties, and
    (2.) The history of logical positivism, which used operational definitions of empirical proof requirements against ideas of God etc. It would be rather hypocritical to toss aside such concepts just because it becomes “politically” convenient to use them now.

  5. Sean,

    if you believe that “things don’t happen for a reason” (and I would to some extent agree with you) then why do you really care about the “complicated conglomerations of particles”, which USAtoday identified as people praying in airplanes, when all they did was “obeying the laws of Nature” ?

  6. Janet Leslie Blumberg

    Okay, Sean, you are very, very droll and witty. I loved reading your post! In fact, I felt quite flattered! And I was thinking after my reply to The God Conundrum that you pysicists and biologists really do have to take a lot of pressure from the religious right, and I should understand that and make allowances.
    However, I still have to say that you are side-stepping my point — or my question, I guess. Do you think your views of what is “reasonable” are conditioned by your way of knowing, and perhaps even by a Newtonian-Cartesian version of your way of knowing that physics has perhaps left behind? Okay, that’s leading the witness….
    Do you think that your views on metaphysical questions are NOT conditioned by the basic pre-suppositions of your discipline? Physics began by ruling out teleology and practising an extreme reductionism, focusing on physical bodies in motion and a brilliant mathematicial formalization of “what’s happening” in terms of mechanics.
    Given that, it seems to me highly likely that trained in such a discipline and dealing daily with the incredible adventure it is, pushing back the frontiers of what we know about these things, such a person MIGHT tend to view everything in the universe and in human experience as though the mechanics were “explanatory” in every sense of that term? Might — to use the buzzword — tend to “totalize” that approach into an exclusionary worldview?
    I was haunted by the email that talked about the wonder of looking at rocks and seeing the depth and beauty of mindless physical mechanism in itself. Yes, yes, yes! But to say the natural mechanism is “mindless” relies on the Cartesian definition of “mind” as something separate from nature. The same respondent said that matter is inherently in motion. Yes! But for Aristotle, motion and design were how “mind” was defined…. So I guess today it’s sufficiently “scientific” to feel awe and wonder, as long as we specify that it is “mindless” mechanism we are feeling these responses about?
    I remember watching a lunar eclipse with an honors seminar of students drawn from all the disciplines. We sat together in the dark for over an hour. When it was over, I said: “Does anyone else besides me feel really moved and awestruck?” I could hear the lit major-and-poet sitting beside me (a young woman) going “yeah….” Then a science major (a young man) said, almost angrily: “No, not at all. Because we can explain exactly how that is happening.”
    Now I gotta tell you that while I could see that made perfect sense to him, it made no sense at all to me. I understood how it was happening when I was pregnant, too, but I still felt the utter awe of all those mechanisms over which I had absolutely no control turning on one after another and carrying me through the entire process based on eons of encoding that came down to me going back to the condensation of the first hydrogen molecules after the big bang. I’m sure that the artists in the room and the musicians were having their own responses. And every year in that seminar, in free-wheeling discussions, the two or three biologists always brought up the same pespectives, at the same points, as the biologists in previous years had done. Not because they were brainwashed, but because they were really good in their discipine and so they saw certain aspects of any problem with an amazing clarity derived from their discipline. And perhaps they didn’t see other aspects as well….
    We self-select into our own disciplines, after all, and then we are arduously trained and conditioned. The responders to The God Conundrum by and large kept saying where’s the evidence for God? “God could settle the argument this afternoon by showing up.” Can you see that for many people God has shown up — that is the point to which their training and life journey has brought them. For them, the evidence is everywhere, at the same time someone else is saying, “Where? Where?”
    Now I know in your mind this may simply sound like an appeal to irrational stuff that isn’t evidence. (Sometimes you’re right.) But this is my question. Do you think that if it isn’t scientifically-generated evidence, in the physical-science sense, then it couldn’t be valid evidence at all? Science after all has been from the get-go a reductive way of knowing. Actually, all ways of knowing are reductive in their own ways. There’s just more “out there” than we can ever get into focus. But I want to say that other ways of knowing have their own methodologies and validy-testing and highly-developed acquired sense of what is evidentiary.
    You seem to imply well, that okay, that’s all very well and good, for you Levinas and toast types, but we scientists have to deal with this utterly stupid phenomenon of blind and ignorant “faith” trying to get creation science taught in schools! Well, I sympathize, I really do. But that’s no excuse for acting as though scientists have a right to teach scientific explanations as though they answer all questions except “meaningless” ones. This is an issue that will outlast ephemeral but highly-politicized conflicts because it goes to the core of all disicplined intellectual endeavor. We have to accept the limitations of our disciplines as well as their incredible power for coming to know. And we have to be aware that our own desires to know in certain ways, about certain kinds of things, exercise a strong determinism in what we discover to be the case.
    I guess the big lesson of late twentieth-century thought for me is that we have to be willing to risk listening to otherness, or we’re repressing a part of being human that is inside of ourselves, too. The same Cartesian structures of thought that lead scientists to ridicule believers also lead scientists to ridicule women. Women seem to have made it into scientific respectabilty, hurray! (As seen in the shock and horror inspired by the “Male-ness” post.) But not theists…. I wonder why that is? Both have been great scientists.
    P.S. I haven’t studied Eurigena, but the Aquinas-Scotus debate does have a lot to do with the issues Dawkins tries to address, though I’d never go so far as to say Terry Eagleton isn’t irritating! (He is brilliant, though.) And who said a Marxist couldn’t be a Christian?

  7. Maybe they should conduct carefully-controlled scientific tests measuring the effectiveness of airborne praying vs. old-fashioned ground-based praying. Hey, you never know what the universe is capable of until you actually test.

  8. Janet: I’m not a scientist, but I agree with the folks here as far as the supernatural. I think your views are based upon a misunderstanding of what science is, eg “conditioned… way of knowing”, “pre-suppositions” and “exclusionary world view”.

  9. I wonder what the public response would have been had a Muslim group announced they were going to charter ten small airplanes and fill them with “prayer warriors” who would fly around Chicago praying for the residents.

  10. Uumm, just curious here. Do you suppose they might have prayed for improved quality and honesty in future Ohio elections? But by doing so, wouldn’t they have been in some way praying against their theocratically inclined political desires?? It is so confusing. Praying for what, and for whom; the “health and welfare” of the state’s citizens as it is abused by the GOP leadership that has failed to avoid massive corruptions and illegal elections? mmmmmm… pondering the imponderable.
    I am sure this must be gd’s answering the prayers Two BOE workers have been given 18-month prison sentences for felony convictions stemming from what a government prosecutor called the “rigging” of an officially mandated recount for the 2004 presidential election.

  11. I often find it rather amusing how so many people don’t understand just how comforting it can be to believe that there is no reason behind the terrible things that happen in the world around us. Think about this for just one second: the typical theist line is that the specific deity in which they believe is all-powerful and all-knowing. This means that every single bad thing that happens was planned to happen by God from the start, but it also means that God could have found a way to accomplish the same goal that would not have involved any suffering. This directly leads to the conclusion that any all-powerful, all-knowing creator deity is a sadistic bastard indeed.

    I find it vastly more comforting to understand that there is no creator, that there is no purpose imparted to us and our lives by some external source. I find this comforting because it means that we can make our own purpose. It means that we can help those who are suffering, those in need of help. It is in credibly uplifting that we humans are finally to the point where we can actually reduce the impact that hurricanes have upon human lives. We can build structures that are resistant to earthquake damage, and are even making strides in predicting earthquake activity. It means we are no longer subject to the whims of volcanic eruptions, but can actually detect when they will occur with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

    No, the idea that suffering is something that just happens, and that we humans have the capacity to reduce it, is, to me, incredibly appealing. I would much rather believe this than in a deity who could achieve the same goals without suffering, but instead chooses to impart suffering.

  12. Sam — you should believe me. I vastly prefer a world in which the hard work of developing values is squarely in our hands, rather than one in which they are imposed from outside.

    Janet — thanks for the thoughtful reply. Of course I am conditioned by everything that I’ve thought about and everything that has happened to me (just like everybody else). Taking those influences into account, I try to be as honest about how the world works as I can.

    Now I’m about to catch a plane, so more thoughtfulness will have to come later!

  13. I wonder what the public response would have been had a Muslim group announced they were going to charter ten small airplanes and fill them with “prayer warriors” who would fly around Chicago praying for the residents.

    LOL!

  14. Janet wrote:

    “The same Cartesian structures of thought that lead scientists to ridicule believers also lead scientists to ridicule women.”

    At the risk of taking one sentence out of context this statement is puzzling and clearly contradicted by the evidence….Sean….who clearly supports women in science but does not support theism. The ability to see the world from different viewpoints is also a critical skill in being an effective problem solver in the physical sciences as well as many other fields.

    My point Janet is that physicists are not much different than the rest of the world and Sean is only one data point.

    Everyone can have an opinion or belief structure and if that causes no harm to others so be it. But describing physical reality frankly is not open to non-scientific approaches. To suggest that other ways of “knowing” are subjective, permitted and maybe even should be encouraged is fine as long as you are not trying to describe objective reality. That is the realm of science.

    Regards,

    Elliot

  15. Pingback: pligg.com

  16. I must admit that you’ve left me “peevish”, so I’ll try to ask respectfully. Did you have to post this on Good Friday of all days?

    And I thought Good Friday was all about being crucified for your beliefs.

    I wonder what the public response would have been had a Muslim group announced they were going to charter ten small airplanes and fill them with “prayer warriors” who would fly around Chicago praying for the residents.

    All my moderate Muslim friends would have also been praying to God/Allah for “to guide leaders, pray for people in schools and hospitals, and ask for salvation”.

    Whereas I would question their use of money and unnecessary carbon emissions, whereas a bus ride around Ohio, or even staying in their church and using their imagination, would have served just as well at least their intentions were well meaning and not destructive.

  17. “Now I’m about to catch a plane, so more thoughtfulness will have to come later!”

    Are you in Ohio? 😉

    God bless America …and f*ck the rest of the world 🙂

  18. I remember a Nova episode way back around 1980, called “The Green Machine”, about plants. They did an experiment in which a fellow prayed to one enclosed box of plants, and not to a control group. The former did better. Just saying, that’s what I saw…

  19. Did you have to post this on Good Friday of all days?

    Uhm, if you aren’t Christian, then “Good Friday” really is just like any other Friday … it’s not like Sean saves all of his anti-religious posts for religious holidays, which is because—just a guess here—he really couldn’t care less when said holidays are.

    But what we really want to know, Sean, is whether or not you were praying for Ohio on that flight…

  20. “No, the idea that suffering is something that just happens, and that we humans have the capacity to reduce it, is, to me, incredibly appealing. I would much rather believe this than in a deity who could achieve the same goals without suffering, but instead chooses to impart suffering.”

    How does a deity/God impart suffering. Take a look at C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain. Good book.

  21. Janet Leslie Blumberg

    “Everyone can have an opinion or belief structure and if that causes no harm to others so be it. But describing physical reality frankly is not open to non-scientific approaches. To suggest that other ways of “knowing” are subjective, permitted and maybe even should be encouraged is fine as long as you are not trying to describe objective reality. That is the realm of science.”

    This response by Elliott beautifully sets the problem. And I mean no disrespect at all toward Elliott, who speaks for many, and speaks clearly, but I still do think there is a problem.

    If Elliott simply claimed that science is the only way to describe the workings of the physical world (which it is — well, except for art and music and photography and…). But then Elliott equates that fact with the claim that science is the only way to know “objective reality.” There’s the problem.

    I don’t think that science does claim to know objective reality anymore. And that doesn’t mean that physics introduced “subjectivity” either, or that there isn’t a “physical world” out there, or that “reality” is only “socially constructed.” But Einstein did bring in the intentional observer, and QM did cut the simple deterministic link between a mathematical model and “objective reality” in the view of Copenhagen thinkers. This is really complex and I’m not an expert, but Einstein and Copenhagen did see that the old claims about what physics “knows” no longer could be asserted as before. (As Bronowski knew, for instance.)

    Please, it is so important NOT to make the instinctive move that if we cast doubt upon claims about “objective reality” then we are saying everything is just “subjective” and anything goes. That merely puts us right back into the old Cartesian “objective-subjective” bind, just like sexism does. (hence my remark about women in science)

    Science has intellectually moved beyond classical scientific “objectivism” and the Brownoski episode Joe recommends is a very powerful way to go about pondering this. Bronowski was a world-class physicist and a humanist who had a strong appreciation for the validity of scientific knowledge but who still says that it is imperfect and partial, relative to “reality.” (I think he is standing in the mud at Auschwitz at the end of that episode….)

    I am fine with saying that science is THE way of knowing we must turn to EXCLUSIVELY for the results that come from setting out to use the scientific method to chart the physical world — actually some specific selected aspects of the physical world, since chemistry and biology and so on are busy with things branching out from that. Great. And that’s it.

    So can’t we ever discuss the big topics like God? Yes, but only as what we are — individuals with personal life journeys who are trained in a discipline that gives us insights but no absolute lock on reality. That’s what I think Dawkins should do — go out and crusade, that’s fine. But when he says science demonstrates or even predicts there isn’t a God, he is waaay out of line, just as far out of line as a Fundamentalist saying the Bible demonstrates that the universe was created in six days. They are both out of their fields and neither has studied the history of their own tradition!

    In The God Conundrum thread on this site, someone noted how “ahistorical” the scientific community currently tends to be, by and large. The same is just as true of Fundamentalist Christians, and with the same result. Epistemological arrogance. And political-social warfare!
    Fundamentalism has borrowed the intellectual assumptions of Newtonian scientism and tries to fight it on its own ground. It’d be ironic if it weren’t so tragic.

    This lack of historical perspective is why scientists think that science reports back to us (and definitively, for heavens sake) on God, and why Fundamentalists think that Genesis reports back to us (and definitively for heavens sake) on science!

    From history, Fundamentalists would learn that the Bible has been read in many other ways by deeply spiritual believers and scientists would learn how much physics has revised its original assumptions and changed its methodologies, to the point that the original belief-structure supporting the objective-subjective split is pretty much long gone and probably never had much to do with scientific process in the first place. (Do we know?)

    At our point in the history of thought, to say “my discipline tells the truth about reality” is not intellectually defensible. It’s wishful thinking, at best. Sean, for instance, never said that, I don’t think…. He said “it drives him crazy” that other people don’t see how unscientific it is to believe in God. And I said “it really surprises me” that he feels that way. But we aren’t hurling our respective disciplines at each other, I hope. People have to venture out of their own ways of knowing, to talk openly as human beings and citizens about issues that transcend any one of the arts and sciences. Academia gives us few enough such opportunities, so thank God for the internet!

    I’m sorry to be up on my soapbox about all this. I’m a retired educator who is doing almost nothing except pondering how education could be better. It’s not like the world isn’t depending on us.

    P.S. I promise I’ll never write a long, long email again!

  22. Janet Leslie Blumberg

    So sorry, Elliot, for misspelling your name! I’ve read too many Renaissance manuscripts, where everything is spelled eight different ways, and I can’t really remember how we spell anything today anymore.

  23. Gavin Polhemus

    It’s been a few months since I made a fool of myself on this board, so I’ll risk it again.

    I am open to other ways of knowing, but I approach the idea with extreme caution. Science has a fantastic record of experimental verification. I can’t think of any other way-of-knowing that approaches it. As a result, I tend to think that if a problem can be approached scientifically, then that is the right approach.

    However, there are two types of questions that I do not how to treat scientifically: ethical questions and aesthetic questions. If someone has a scientific approach to these questions, I’d like to hear about it. I haven’t given the aesthetic questions much thought, but I think our sense of compassion is the correct tool (way of knowing) for deciding ethical questions. There are many other options (moral codes or our sense of retributive justice, for example) that are wrong ways of answering ethical questions.

    None the less, I think that something like the existence of a personally involved deity, like the one cited by the prayer fliers, is well within the scope of scientific investigation.

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top