Can you stop yourself from being an atheist through prayer?

Having presented his famous wager, Pascal considers the atheist who sincerely wants to bet on God but who is psychologically unable to. He urges "Endeavour, then, to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you […] Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness."

Tim Mawson (member of the Oxford philosophy faculty) has a similar suggestion in a paper published in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. Suppose you are an atheist but consider it possible (with a non-negligible probability) God exists. According to Mawson, you are then under an epistemic obligation to pray to God ask him to stop you from being an atheist. He writes "the person who prays that God help him or her to believe in Him is as reasonable as someone who finds himself or herself shouting ‘Is anyone there?’ in a darkened room about which he or she has various reasonable prior beliefs." If you hear something, that's prima facie evidence that there is in fact a person in the dark room. If you don't hear anything, this is evidence too: "When one shouts into a darkened room, ‘Is there anyone there?’ and hears nothing by way of reply, this is in itself evidence that there’s no-one there, all other things being equal."

The problem is that the evidence is defeasible (especially if it is positive), and I think it is even more so than Mawson allows for. 

For instance, it might be that the atheist who has a religious experience, or just gets some strong sense that God exists experiences a false positive. This is a possibility Mawson raises, but rather quickly dismisses. He thinks it's more likely all things considered that the evidence you get after sincere prayer is evidence for God's existence, rather than for mental illness. Mental illness is the only alternative explanation he proposes to balance off the hypothesis that God exists. This moves rather too quick, since I don't think an observed false positive points towards mental illness. Authors like Stewart Guthrie, and more recently, Bruce Hood in his Supersense, have argued that *normal* human psychology is geared towards making false positives, such as seeing false correlations, inferring spurious causes, etc. The reason is that, from an evolutionary point of view, it is better to be safe than sorry - better to discern an agent that isn't there than to fail to discern an agent that's actually there. If that's the case, the atheist who thinks she observes a sign from God may in fact have fallen prey to such normal, human tendencies.

Conversely, it might be that God has good reasons not to heed a sincere prayer for belief. However, I agree with Mawson that a consistent absence of response constitutes strong evidence against theism, at least of the traditional Abrahamic kind. Some people have tried Mawson's strategy before, for instance, the author of this blogpost. However, while I am fairly confident that receiving no response is strong evidence for atheism (why would God not answer a sincere atheist's prayer?), I'm not sure whether reports of *others* receiving no response is strong evidence for atheism too (after all, there is also anecdotal evidence going the other way, such as Augustine's Confessions, where he earnestly prays God for a sign and gets one). Similarly, I don't think that reports of religious experiences from others carry anything near the evidential weight compared to one's own religious experience.

The Atheist Prayer Experiment wants to look at this in a more systematic way. (The organizer, Justin Brierly, is part of the United Reformed Church.) The experiment goes as follows: If you're an atheist, you can sign up for the experiment by e-mailing the organizer. You get a copy of Mawson's paper, which outlines the rationale behind the experiment. You agree to pray for 40 days, starting September 17, for 2-3 mins a day where you ask God to stop you from being an atheist. For instance, you could ask him to reveal himself in some way to you. You then follow up by e-mailing your report - (did you experience anything? Is so, what?). Mawson proposes an experiment like this in his paper, except that the atheists are randomly assigned to a control condition (no prayer) and a prayer condition.

While I will read the results with interest, there is no way to screen out the initial self-selection bias that will recruit mainly participants who find theism less improbable than the average atheist. Also, 2-3 minutes a day seems short, but to sustain this every day, for 40 days is not even something religious believers always manage! 2-3 minutes of sustained prayer is actually quite stretch if you aren't practiced in prayer or other mind-focusing techniques like meditation. Another objection is that an experiment like this is putting God to the test, something that's definitely a no-go according to scripture (e.g., Deut 6:16, Ps 78.18, Matt 4:7, Luke 4:12) [again under the assumption that God, if he exists, is the God of the Abrahamic religions]. While this problem doesn't apply to Mawson's individual thought experiment, it may apply to the group experiment just outlined. (Mawson also thinks a collective experiment will be unsuccessful, but he thinks it's because God wants to remain maintain a general level of hiddenness, even if he is willing to respond positively to individual atheists who sincerely pray for some revelation). .