“[C]omputational theology.”
I ran across this in the article “Does Prayer Work?” by Dariusz Jemielniak, Free Inquiry (August/September 2021). This sums it up:
We measured the covariance of the mean length of life, controlled for nationality. We discovered that bishops live longer than priests. However, due to a marginal effect size, this result should be treated with caution. Additionally, there are several good reasons priests live shorter lives than bishops that are not related to the number of prayers received. First, priests have much lower dispositional incomes (salaries and perks), and the income-mortality gradient is higher at low-income levels. Second, they often come from a lower social class and have lower social capital accumulated, which is known to translate to lower longevity. Third, bishops are somewhat preselected for longer life in such a comparison, because to become a bishop one has to have been a priest for many years (the minimum age to become a bishop is thirty-five, but the average is much higher). Some priests simply die before they can even be seriously considered for the role.
In our study, recently published in the top-tier academic Journal of Religion and Health, we found that the studied bishops did not live longer than male academics. Additionally, no difference was found between the mean length of life of bishops from the largest and smallest dioceses. If the number of intercessory prayers affected longevity, it should manifest there. It appears that the effect of rote intercessory prayers, even in massive numbers, is not observable.
They also observed no meaningful differences between bishops of large and small dioceses, which would generate larger and smaller numbers of prayers.
Honestly, their use of the phrase computational theology sounds like a joke to me:
We hope that our study will pave the way for a new academic field of computational theology, and we welcome other similar analyses as well as further research.
They’re not generating theology, which is how I’d take that phrase. Characterization of the phenomenon under study might yield phrases such as Measurement of Attempts To Manipulate The Divine., or more compactly, Divine Manipulation Metricization.
To see why I actually take seriously the topic of using the right words, see here and here.
