Not, of course, if you want to increase his chances of getting better.
A meme appears to have begun to circulate about praying for the footballer Fabrice Muamba, who suffered a cardiac arrest on the pitch during a cup quarter-final earlier this week. As an aside, it appears that the internet is not yet the sole domain of memes; the football world can spread them rapidly too.
Muamba's family are deeply religious, and have asked fans and players to pray for Muamba's recovery. This has had a great impact, and has no doubt been very comforting to the family; it may yet be comforting to Muamba himself in the future.
But the campaign is for more than that. It is in the belief that a campaign of prayer can actually have a direct, supernatural impact on an individual's health. Now this leaves me feeling very conflicted. Muamba may, of course, recover; he is receiving the very best medical care, and has been from within seconds of the incident. Yet should he recover, many people will give the credit for that to their God, and indeed take it as evidence for the reality of their world-view. Which puts me in an awkward position. Clearly, I can't wish for him not to recover; certainly not to make a rather tedious point that the True Believers will not accept anyway (should he die, it will be God Working In Mysterious Ways, of course). Yet if he does recover - and at the time of writing, that seems to be the most likely outcome - we will have to put up with tedious fundamentalists trying to use a success of modern medicine to prop up their belief in an anti-scientific superstition.
Such is life.
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