Divine Intervention
I strive to rid my life (and the lives of others) of superstition. This means that God is not going to save us. This means that miracles do not occur. This means that prayer has no power to change events except in the purely psychological way of making us calmer if we believe it has nonpsychological power. Thus, superstition itself has power … not only to calm us, but also to deceive us and to harm us. Since I believe the latter outweighs the former in their impact on our lives and society, I try to get rid of it. Here are a couple of examples of the nonsense becoming dangerous: In his testimony before Congress a month after a meteor had exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, injuring hundreds, then-NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, “This is not an issue that we should worry about in the near term,” but that if we did know that an asteroid or a comet was heading our way with very little advance warning, he would advise us to pray. I watched him say the