Stephen Hawking famously thought that physics would reveal the mind of God. In fact, Hawking gave physics a 50:50 shot by the end of the last century. Guess he lost that one. But fellow Nobelist Jim Heckman has beat Hawking to the punch using "powerful statistical methods to evaluate the effect of prayer on the attitude of God toward human beings."
Let Y be God’s attitude arrayed on a scale ranging from zero to one. This is an unobserved variable. Let X be the intensity of prayer in the population. It too is scaled between zero and one. The population density of prayer is summarized by a univariate density f(X) which has been estimated by Father Greeley (1972)….
The paper, which goes on like that for a while, is actually quite interesting but if you are looking for the bottom line it comes at the end:
The method presented here is applicable to a number of important problems….For example, one can extend current empirical work in a variety of areas of economics to estimate the effect of income on happiness or the effect of income inequality on democracy.
Thanks to David Glenn and Lee Spector for the link.
Then there is Benjamin Franklin’s (apocryphal) method of empirical observation: “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”.
Wow – econometric comedy. As Alex is doubtless aware, the Heckman paper is an elaborate (and cautionary) joke.
Heckman is mocking those who claim to be able to infer the distribution of something unmeasured (God’s attitude, happiness, etc.) using only an absurdly strong distributional assumption. The key line (and pun) comes just before equation (1): “Assume on faith the conditional density of X given Y is…”
Heckman can magically ‘estimate’ God’s attitude to man, because he’s made a ridiculous and unproveable assumption about how X (prayer) relates to Y (God’s attitude to man).
Heckman even ends the article with a punchline: “… this powerful method can be extended to the more general case when X is not observed either.”
Cool – if we don’t have to observe X or Y, then we can write papers with no data at all…
Apologies for sounding like someone’s boring uncle, explaining why a joke is funny. I don’t expect Heckman to appear on Saturday Night Live any time soon.
Tangentially relevant – Hawking yet to win Nobel
Hawking’s been spending too much time acting on the Simpsons to win the Nobel. Regarding the paper, how many types of intelligence have been identified so far? 11? I think we need one more – ironical intelligence. Even for otherwise smart people, myself included, irony can sometimes be extremely difficult to discern. A sense of irony seems like it should be a cousin of humor and yet distinct. I wonder what the neurology of irony is.
Great stuff. Regarding the Hawking’s quote, is he using “God” in a functional sense? For some reason I had imagined him to be fairly agnostic.
I.e. I’m asking, does Hawking actually believe in a thinking Being who created the universe, or is he just trying to sound deep and show people, “Science matters!” (I’m not being sarcastic or criticizing him, I’m seriously asking the question.)
“Tangentially relevant – Hawking yet to win Nobel”
Neither did Heckman, of course. He won the Bank of Sweden Prize, not a Nobel Prize.
The author of this research paper has come up with a mathematical function for evaluation of the effect of prayer on the attitude of God toward human beings. The author is apparently assuming that God has an attitude and other emotions like human beings (I wonder whether he already has in place a formula for calculating human emotions).
In the paper the author should have first clarified as to what is his concept of God, before coming up with the formula. In an endeavor to understand God’s true nature, let us refer to what He has said about Himself:
Holy Quran (112:1-4): Say: He is Allah, the One and Only; Allah, the Eternal, Absolute; He begetteth not, nor is He begotten; And there is none like unto Him.
Holy Quran (24: 35): Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The Parable of His Light is as if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass: the glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed Tree, an Olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it: Light upon Light! Allah doth guide whom He will to His Light: Allah doth set forth Parables for men: and Allah doth know all things.
These verses give us a very metaphysical concept about God, which is well beyond human comprehension. Consequently one cannot calculate or evaluate something one does not understand.
Moreover the conclusion reached from the analysis is that a little prayer does no good and may make things worse and much prayer helps a lot. I have no problem with the second part, however, the first part is illogical. It implies that it is better not to pray at all; in this way at least things will stay as they are and will not get worse.
I would like to add here that it is not the quantity but the quality and sincerity of the prayer which matters. Prayer is to be established and not just offered. It means that along with praying we must also follow all other acts as ordained by God Almighty.
Holy Qur’an (23:1-9): The believers must (eventually) win through; those who humble themselves in their prayers; who avoid vain talk; who are active in deeds of charity………………..;
In the end I would like to express my suspicion that perhaps this is a hoax mail, with a lot of mathematical jargon just to give it some semblance of credibility.
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