God never answers any prayers. The entire idea that “God answers prayers” is an illusion created by human imagination.
How do you, prodigal, discover that “answered prayers” are illusions? We simply perform scientific experiments. We ask a group of believers to pray for something and then we watch what happens. What we find, whenever we test the efficacy of prayer scientifically, is that prayer has zero effect:
- It does not matter who prays.
- It does not matter if we pray to God, Allah, Vishnu, Zeus, Ra, etc.
- It does not matter what we pray about.
If we perform scientific, double-blind tests on prayer, and if the prayers involve something concrete and measurable (for example, healing people with cancer), we know that there is zero effect from prayer. Every single “answered prayer” is nothing more than a coincidence. Both scientific experiments and your everyday observations of the world show this to be the case every single time.
For example (here’s your ‘proof’), this article says:
One of the most scientifically rigorous studies yet, published earlier this month, found that the prayers of a distant congregation did not reduce the major complications or death rate in patients hospitalized for heart treatments.
And: A review of 17 past studies of ‘‘distant healing," published in 2003 by a British researcher, found no significant effect for prayer or other healing methods.
This article from March, 2006 discusses the fact that the same conclusion was reached in another study:
In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.
In this article we find an amazing quote where theologians and religious leaders declare that prayer has no actual effect: Religious leaders will breathe a sigh of relief at the news that so-called intercessory prayer is medically ineffective. In a large and much touted scientific study, one group of patients was told that strangers would pray for them, a second group was told strangers might or might not pray for them, and a third group was not prayed for at all. The $2.4 million study found that the strangers’ prayers did not help patients’ recovery.
This is a remarkable example of “positive spin” – religious leaders are “breathing a sigh of relief” because prayer has been shown to be meaningless. The fact that prayer is a total waste of time does not matter to them. It does not matter that all of Jesus’s promises about praying and such in the Bible have been proven completely false.
To be fair in my argument (and less ignorant than you seem to throw around) a peer-reviewed scientific study published in 2001 did indicate that prayer works. According to
this article:
“On October 2, 2001, the New York Times reported that researchers at prestigious Columbia University Medical Center in New York had discovered something quite extraordinary. Using virtually foolproof scientific methods the researchers had demonstrated that infertile women who were prayed for by Christian prayer groups became pregnant twice as often as those who did not have people praying for them. The study was published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine. Even the researchers were shocked. The study’s results could only be described as miraculous.”
This study was later proven to be completely fraudulent. However, everyone who cut out the original article in the NYTimes and posted it on their refrigerators still has that article as “proof” that prayer works. This article entitled
A prayer before dying uncovers another case where a “scientific study” of prayer is unmasked as fraudulent.
It’s not just prayer that is ineffective. Not even a hopeful attitude helps. According to
this article:
A positive attitude does not improve the chances of surviving cancer and doctors who encourage patients to keep up hope may be burdening them, according to the results of research released Monday.
The dictionary defines the word “superstition” in this way:
An irrational belief that an object, action, or circumstance not logically related to a course of events influences its outcome.
ref]
I’ve tried to be more unbiased in my views as well as providing references to most of my points.
