This month’s issue of the University of Toronto’s alumni “send more money soon” magazine contains a deep (?) tidbit.

A full-page picture taken of a lovely young lady in a chapel, with the caption:

You can’t come to a rational conclusion that Christ was the son of God. But if you pray, and your prayers are answered, can you accept that as proof?” – Beatrice Sze

Well, Beatrice, no, I can’t. Some reasons:

• Let’s grant that “your prayers are answered” in arguendo. Unfortunately, this alternate explanation is just as consistent with the hypothetical observations as the Christ one: the true deity, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, listened to your prayer, and decided to taunt you by giving you your wish. Could you tell the difference? No? Well then, it’s not proof.

• Still, how exactly does one decide that a prayer was answered? A technical person such as Ms. Sze (an engineering student) is a practitioner of scientific disciplines. She’s surely aware of concepts such as placebo, empiricism, logic, falsifiability. As such, she would be aware that evidence for the extraordinary proposition that “prayer worked” would be very difficult to collect with sufficient quality and quantity to convince a neutral judge. (Though that would be worth one million dollars.) Anecdotes only convince those who already believe.

Such pseudo-logical claptrap reminds me of a rather terrifying event that happened in my very basement a few months ago. Superstitious acquaintances came over to visit, which was well and good. One was going through a rough patch in her personal life, which they attributed to a curse that was said to originate from another person. So, any article baby clothing that they donated to us some years ago, and which might have come in contact with this curse-originating suspect, was to be destroyed. There they sat for an hour, making two little piles. One apparently ended up burned.

In my defense, I was not aware of the purpose for partitioning the stuff: I was only bemused at taking back of gifts. When I later heard about the curse angle, and realized that the paranormal theoretician had in fact a Ph.D. and was a practicing medical scientist, let’s just say it shook my … er, faith … in the system. I sure hope dumb people like that are smart enough to keep their voodoo out of their professional lives. But really…