My regular readers (both of them) see frequent references to post hoc reasoning, anecdotal claims, and communal reinforcement. These are key elements in alternative medicine, divination, and cryptozoology. But the area where they play the biggest role is prayer.

Prayers with satisfactory results lead to praise of whatever deity was summoned. Unfavorable results lead to more prayer and talk of blessings in disguise, mysterious ways, and infinite wisdom, along with praise to the god in an unending cycle.

But prayer will not impact icy roads, leukemia, a troubled marriage, or Mrs. Osteen’s parking spot. Seemingly answered prayers are the result of Magical Thinking, which is the connecting of two events as though one caused the other, without regard to the casual link or other factors.

Relying on prayer can be unhealthy if used in place of bolstering one’s self-esteem and building resiliency. It can be deadly in the revolting practice of faith healing, where parents let their toddlers die a painful death for the glory of Jesus.

There can be a small measure of value in prayer. When someone KNOWS they are talking to themselves, they can work their way through an issue, analyze a situation, and examine a way forward. Likewise, expressing these thoughts through prayer can have the same results. A praying person thinks they are talking to a god. I think they are talking to a ceiling. But either way, they have access to the ultimate listener. This listener will never belittle, interrupt, or turn the conversation to themselves.

And since prayer can lower stress, it might positively impact stress-related illnesses, as can meditation and yoga. But praying for someone else who has a stress-related illness would be as pointless as chanting “Hari-Om” for them or doing a Modified Cobra position on their behalf. Prayer also has a comforting effect and makes people feel empowered that they are doing something positive.

Belief in the healing power of prayer comes mostly from communal reinforcement and selective thinking. Persons forget or rationalize when prayerful desires conflict with the results. By contrast, successes are highlighted and shared with fellow believers. This is known as confirmation bias.

I know many who swear by the power of prayer, but these people have their limits. Of the thousands of Facebook prayer requests that have come across my news feed, none have asked God to heal the congenitally blind or to grow missing limbs. Facebook death announcements are met with prayers for the family, not a supplication that God will pull a Lazarus on the recently deceased.

I was following on civil online chat between a Christian and an atheist about whether God existed. The Christian wrote, “I’m just really feeling called to talk to you more in-depth. Please send me your e-mail address so we can talk about this further.” I interjected, “Have God send you his e-mail address, then he’ll believe.” A miracle, by its nature, would violate the laws of physics. Show me my great-grandmother back from the dead, a Kindergartner with Muscular Dystrophy jumping up and running around, or someone walking on water to win the James Randi Million Dollar Challenge and I will reconsider prayer’s efficacy.

Despite the difficulty of putting prayer to the test, a serious attempt was made by a team led by Dr. Herbert Benson. Results were published in the American Heart Journal. Heart patients at six U.S. hospitals were randomly assigned to one of three groups. In Group A, 604 patients were told they might be prayed for, and they were. In Group B, 597 patients were told them might be prayed for, but they were not. In Group C, 601 were prayed for after being told this would happen. The intercessory prayer was provided for 14 days, starting the night before the patients had coronary artery bypass graft surgery.

The results: Complications arose for 52 percent of Group A, 51 perent of Group B, and 59 percent of Group C. Mortality was the same in all groups. Faced with this, some believers said it was all in God’s plan, which would raise the question why this prayer, or any other, was offered in the first place.

If there were a god that answered prayers, the population pleading to and praising the correct one would be overwhelmingly blessed compared to the heathens. If prayers to Allah were effective, the Middle East would be a paradise as opposed to a perpetual war zone. If genuflecting before the Biblical god were beneficial, Mississippi would be Heaven on Earth, instead of ranking 50th in the country in income, education, and health. If Buddhist prayers worked, Tibet would be Shangri-La for real instead of suffering its seventh decade of brutal Chinese occupation.

Not everyone is going to agree with me, and I accept and respect that. I am also open to considering new evidence. If someone wants me to believe that prayer works, pray that this blog post will disappear and we’ll check the results.

Among those displeased with the movie Noah, their most frequent objection is to the Rock People, a group of creatures the critics find preposterous. They have no issue, however, with the Rock People working alongside a 600-year-old man.

There are many who interpret the Flood story as an allegory about mankind’s fall and redemption, and others who note that there are similar pre-Genesis accounts, such as Gilgamesh. We are unconcerned here with the morality or literary qualities of the tale and are only addressing the scientific implausibility of it being literal.

A decade ago, I was under the impression that a sizable majority shared my view. But since then, I have known many adults, at least one with an advanced degree, who have expressed sympathy for the literal interpretation. So, in the country that launched Voyager I and conquered polio, I will employ computer technology and the Internet to argue against the proposal that a 600-year-old man built a giant boat and filled it with 100 million critters and their 13-month food supply, in order to protect the inhabitants from a flood that covered Mount Everest, and that ended with kangaroos hopping and swimming from Turkey to Australia.

In this Marsupial Movement, even if we allow stops on every piece of the Indonesian archipelago after leaving Malaysia, the final leg to Australia requires a swim of 300 miles. Also making their way to new homes would be animals found only on Madagascar, Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands, Papua New Guinea, Palau, and Costa Rica. One creationist offered that these animals could have floated there on unspecified objects. It remains unclear what the nature of, or source was, for this armada of seaworthy transportation that came supplemented with adequate food, water, and shelter.

Before riding this mystery debris for thousands of miles, there are other obstacles to overcome. Answers in Genesis puts the flood account at about 4,400 years ago. This conflicts with records of civilizations in China, Egypt, and Babylon before, during, and after this time.

Then we have the literal mountain of a problem relating to all of Earth being covered. This means that Mount Everest was under water. At an altitude of 29,000 feet, persons could not survive more than a few hours. To submerge Everest in 40 days, a nonstop libation of 360 inches of rain per hour would be required. By contrast, the heaviest rainfall ever recorded is four percent of this. The tremendous force this deluge would create would tear apart a vessel of gopher wood and pitch.

Some of my fellow skeptics have noted the dimensions attributed to the ark are 50 percent larger than any known wooden boat. Since ancient civilizations produced the Moai, Stonehenge, and Pyramids, I can charitably overlook this point. Getting representatives of every creature on that boat is another matter. In Genesis 6, God tells Noah to bring a male and female of every living creature into the ark, evidently delegating to Noah the task of deciding what to do with the hermaphrodites.

The Bible never makes it clear whether Noah gathered the animals or if they came to him. But either method is fraught with serious problems. In the first scenario, Noah makes his way to Antarctica to get the fur seals, to Alaska to get the caribou, to Indonesia to bring back the Komodo Dragons, and he safely corrals tigers, crocodiles, and copperheads. Moreover, the dictate in Genesis 6 allows no exceptions for microbes or sea life, so Noah would have to identify the single-cell organisms and transport jellyfish and blue whales. He has to do all this while building a 450-foot boat with Bronze Age tools. Oh, and per Genesis 7:4, he has a week to do this. Remember that the next time you complain about multitasking.

Allowing for the easier method of the animals seeking Noah, we have no explanation for what prompted the beasts, most of whom don’t migrate, to leave their homes and make their way to Mesopotomia. There is no answer for how animals that need special climates or diet would survive, and no explanation for how flightless animals made their way from America. I have heard two main creationist counters to this. The first posited that animals such as penguins, lions, and walruses were living in Mesopotamia at the time, an idea with zero scientfic or historic backing. The other proposes that God magically did it, an idea with zero scientfic or historic backing.

By whatever method Noah and the animals hooked up, we still have to wrestle with the lack of space. Even if all the animals had been babies or in eggs, the ark would have been much too small to accomodate between two and 14 of every creature. Besides the animals, there would had to have been supplies for food, water, cleaning, and sanitation. The already impossible conditions would have grown worse because, even if babies, many of the animals would grow to full size within 13 months, the approximate time spent in the ark per Genesis 7 and 8. At the other end of the spectrum are animals with life spans of less than a year. Furthermore, parasites would have either killed their only source of sustenance or died from the lack thereof.

The idea of tens of millions of creatures fitting on boat less than two football fields long is too much for even Ken Ham to manage through mental gymnastics. For the only time I’m aware of, Ham deviates from a literal interpretation of the Bible. For him, the reference to every kind of animal doesn’t mean every kind of animal. It means species. For instance, Noah took only two bears, not two each of the polar, brown, Kodiak, sun, grizzly, and black varieties. But the purported time span of 4,400 years is insufficient to account for the variety of species in the modern day. Creationist John Woodmorappe arrives at a figure of around 16,000 animals. He came to this number not through a thorough study of zoology, but by figuring out how many animals could fit on the ark and working his way backwards, mixing Orders and Families when needed, and using creative biology.

If we further tighten the pretzel we’ve bent ourselves into and allow the 16,000 animal figure, other issues remain. Genesis references just an 18-inch window at the top of a three-tiered behemeoth boat. This would be a woefully inadequate ventilation system, which would quickly be exacerbated by the mounds of excrement and consequent methane gas.

As to where all the corpses ended up, Answers in Genesis offers that fossils are animals killed in the flood. But this would require every animal, including those extinct, to be in the same level of the geologic column. In actuality, the most simple life forms are much further down, and radiometric dating shows them to be billions of years old.

By necessity, I have kept the scientific objections basic. I lack the competence to address the more complex ideas. But I want to share a couple of the advanced ones in order to give a sampling of the scores of other objections raised to this being a literal tale.

In the Marshall Islands, there are coral reefs that are hundreds of feet thick. Forty days of 360 inches of rain per hour would have obliterated the coral. Yet the rate of deposit reveals the reefs have survived for 100,000 years. Futhermore, rainfall this heavy would have created a heat that boiled the water it was striking and kept it from rising. So this story, literally, does not float. I suggest seeing the movie instead. It’s not real either, but at least you get Rock People.

THIS IS MY COLUMN THAT RAN IN THE MOLINE DISPATCH-ARGUS

In the April 9 column, “What colleges teach young believers,” it was written that persons deserve to hear all sides. This is true. A person should never be afraid to have his or her beliefs challenged. If the beliefs are true, they’ll survive the challenge. If the beliefs are wrong, the person will be enlightened.

In that spirit, I offer a different viewpoint. In the column, it was written that if a person believes there is no god, then anything goes. Yet nonbelievers make up 19 percent of the country, but are just .02 percent of the prisoners. One need not be religious to be moral. I commit all the assault, robbery, and pillaging I want, which is none. I don’t need a book to tell me those things are wrong.

Those are my morals; now let’s look at the Bible’s. We have, on God’s instruction, a man being stoned to death for picking up sticks. We have, at God’s prompting, bears tearing apart 42 children for teasing a bald man. A woman marrying her rapist is mandated in Deuteronomy 22:28-29.

The greatest irony was the columnist criticizing the indoctrination of children because, without this, religion would collapse. Thailand is overwhelmingly Buddhist, Qatar is overwhelmingly Muslim, India is overwhelmingly Hindu, and the rural South is overwhelming Christian. This is because a strong majority believes what they’ve been told to since pre-school. You’ve got to get them when they’re young because if you wait until adulthood, they will likely reject a talking donkey and a 969-year-old man.

The columnist offered God as an alternative to evolution, yet her best evidence was citing the Bible as its own confirmation. Science, meanwhile, has Lucy, Archaeopteryx, and Tiktaalik.

Such evidence shows that Genesis is not a first-person account of creation. It is a myth written by Bronze Age Middle East nomads. It teaches that the universe is 6,000 years old, which we know is false because we can see light from stars millions of light years away. It teaches that humans came along within a week of Earth being formed. Yet the geologic column shows that man came along much later than less-developed animals. It teaches that the moon has its own light, an idea inconsistent with astrophysics.

When Nebraska Man was shown to be an error and Piltdown Man proven a hoax, science admitted the mistakes and changed its thinking accordingly. By contrast, religion holds onto its teachings in spite of the evidence, as cited in the previous paragraph.

Besides science, the Bible is also in conflict with itself. Has a man ever seen God, as Moses did in the Torah (Exodus 33:23), or has man never seen God, as declared in a New Testament gospel (John 1:18)? Was Joseph’s father Jacob (Matthew 1:16) or Heli (Luke 3:23)? Does a Christian man follow God’s command that males have long hair (Numbers 6:5), or obey his dictate that it be short (I Corinthians 11:14)?

Persons in some ancient cultures believed the wind was a god’s breath. This and similar explanations helped them try to make sense of the world. As science advanced, we needed deities less and less to explain our universe. That search for truth continues today, as does the denying of that truth. Science essentially says, “I don’t know, let’s find out.” Religion essentially says, “I don’t know, therefore God did it.”