Evidence that Praying Works

[Mersenne]

I didn’t say that,

Well, I provided my reasoning why that was the case, and your response was basically “well, of course that’s how it has to work” okay, if that’s the new catholic belief, fine, but you might want to inform the pope. Rationalizing why it works that way is not the same thing as proving that it doesn’t work that way. By your own description of how prayer works, you’re describing something that does nothing. That’s what it means to “do nothing” If he only “answers” it when he was going to do it anyway, that’s not answering anything!

 

[Answersplease]

It is relevant, as it says something about the god you worship, and the many excuses you must constantly come up with for him.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16569567

Here is a good example

A Randomized, Controlled Trial of the Effects of Remote, Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients Admitted to the Coronary Care Unit

William S. Harris, PhD; Manohar Gowda, MD; Jerry W. Kolb, MDiv; Christopher P. Strychacz, PhD; James L. Vacek, MD; Philip G. Jones, MS; Alan Forker, MD; James H. O’Keefe, MD; Ben D. McCallister, MD

Arch Intern Med. 1999;159:2273-2278.

This, for example, the authors did their calculations wrong by making 34 separate t-tests and not accounting for that, and thus came up with incorrect results.

Hardly, it trashes your silly argument that some third partying observing.

It doesn’t effect the possibility of studying it, only the practicality. Are you suggesting that god only answers prayers once every thousand years?

Irrelevant

Following evidence is not faith. Now you’re just being silly. You shouldn’t put your faith in anything that claims to have absolute answers. No one has absolute answers. People who claim to have absolute answers are just liars.

Refresh my memory. What’s your proof that some prayers are answered positively?

I should have been more clear, THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT THOSE PRAYERS WERE NOT ANSWERED NEGATIVELY.

Equating prayers is irrelevant, prayer is prayer, you need to understand how illogical you sound.
You said “no one is trying to force God to do anything”, this debate is NOT about God it is about whether prayer is successful.
You saying that it is rellevant because “it says somthing about God” shows how flimsy your attempt at logic is.

Think what you want, this debate is over.

 

[VociMike]

Well, I provided my reasoning why that was the case, and your response was basically “well, of course that’s how it has to work” okay, if that’s the new catholic belief, fine, but you might want to inform the pope. Rationalizing why it works that way is not the same thing as proving that it doesn’t work that way. By your own description of how prayer works, you’re describing something that does nothing. That’s what it means to “do nothing” If he only “answers” it when he was going to do it anyway, that’s not answering anything!

You seem to have missed the part where I said the primary purpose of prayer is to help us alter our own wills to God’s will. That is not “nothing” however much you may claim otherwise.

Just because you have a preconceived notion of what prayer should do, and prayer doesn’t fit your preconceived notion, that’s no reason to pretend prayer does “nothing”.

 

[Mersenne]

You seem to have missed the part where I said the primary purpose of prayer is to help us alter our own wills to God’s will. That is not “nothing” however much you may claim otherwise.

Just because you have a preconceived notion of what prayer should do, and prayer doesn’t fit your preconceived notion, that’s no reason to pretend prayer does “nothing”.

You seem to have missed the part where we were talking about nothing external to yourself. Again, you may want to inform the pope that this is the new catholic belief, that all the miraculous healing claims are just total bunk and the whole things you guys have with the saints is by the same token nonsense.

 

[VociMike]

You seem to have missed the part where we were talking about nothing external to yourself. Again, you may want to inform the pope that this is the new catholic belief, that all the miraculous healing claims are just total bunk and the whole things you guys have with the saints is by the same token nonsense.

Let me try one more time. Prayer may or may not result in some external response by God, depending on God’s plan for the prayer and those around him.

 

[Wowbagger]

More than sixty years ago, decades before anyone got around to actually carrying out experiments on the efficacy of prayer, C.S. Lewis thoroughly debunked the notion of such an experiment, since every hypothesis would have the same predicted outcome – no result.
C.S. Lewis:

I have seen it suggested that a team of people—the more the better—should agree to pray as hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B. Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths. And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of irrelevant factors.

The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayer could go on under such conditions. “Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” says the King in Hamlet. Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for our experiment. You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery. But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance. In other words, whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying. The experiment demands an impossibility.

Empirical proof and disproof are, then, unobtainable. But this conclusion will seem less depressing if we remember that prayer is request and compare it with other specimens of the same thing.

Thus, prayer and its effects, in general, will never result in firm evidence for or against the existence of God. Individuals might believe that their prayers have been answered (or not), and they might be right… or not. But there will be no objective standard by which this efficacy can be measured. Period. That’s what two millenia of theological tradition have held, and it’s what these recent experiments have firmly demonstrated. The only place where prayer and its effects might give firm evidence for God’s existence and nature would be when they result in clear natural miracles (and I mean the stuff you read about in the lives of major canonized saints).

Now, if someone carried out the experiment and there was a statistically significant change between Group A and Group B, that would be strange indeed, because neither the Christian nor the atheist model predicted any result. But, as Mersenne reminds us, no such result was found, which means… absolutely nothing. Christians and atheists both adopted the same hypothesis; that hypothesis was proven true. We make no headway.

Incidentally, the rest of Lewis’s article is well worth reading. Find it here: worldwithoutend.info/bbc/books/articles/cslewis.htm

 

[Mersenne]

Let me try one more time. Prayer may or may not result in some external response by God, depending on God’s plan for the prayer and those around him.

I demonstrated why your understanding of prayer is equivalent to being able to accomplish nothing external to yourself. You haven’t offered a counterargument to that. Repeating yourself doesn’t change that.

 

[Mersenne]

Thus, prayer and its effects, in general, will never result in firm evidence for or against the existence of God. Individuals might believe that their prayers have been answered (or not), and they might be right… or not. But there will be no objective standard by which this efficacy can be measured. Period. That’s what two millenia of theological tradition have held, and it’s what these recent experiments have firmly demonstrated. The only place where prayer and its effects might give firm evidence for God’s existence and nature would be when they result in clear natural miracles (and I mean the stuff you read about in the lives of major canonized saints).

CS Lewis’ argument doesn’t apply here, as the studies were no structured in the way he described. The experimenters were not the ones doing the praying, but a third party of religious people were given the names of sick people to pray for. So these were not meaningless words uttered to test god, they were the sincere prayers of believers for the welfare of another.

 

[MarcoPolo]

all the miraculous healing claims are just total bunk and the whole things you guys have with the saints is by the same token nonsense.

How if there is no evidence one way or another that prayer has an effect are you able to assert definitively that miracles are “just total bunk”?

 

[Wowbagger]

CS Lewis’ argument doesn’t apply here, as the studies were no structured in the way he described. The experimenters were not the ones doing the praying, but a third party of religious people were given the names of sick people to pray for. So these were not meaningless words uttered to test god, they were the sincere prayers of believers for the welfare of another.

Were the prayer teams not aware they were part of a study? If so, then the study was unethically constructed with uninformed, non-consenting participants, which is rather surprising. If so, then making a sincere request of God was impossible under the circumstances – which is precisely Mr. Lewis’s point.

Lewis lived in a time, remember, when it was still safe to assume that the vast majority of the people around him were religious. He was not arguing that atheists could not carry out this experiment (that would seem obvious); he was arguing that religious people could not carry out the experiment, because making a sincere request of God on behalf of another human being is incompatible with a well-structured experiment, with its carefully-constructed control groups and experimental groups with no distinction between one and the other aside from the experimental agent (in this case, treating “prayer” in the same way one would treat a new acid reflux drug), no reason to pray for one group and not the other except as a means to test God. It’s inherently faithless, and that’s neither how prayer works (as this experiment showed) nor how it is supposed to (as thousands of years of theology had already well established, thank you very much). I will go read the procedures of the study to verify that I’m understanding it correctly, but I did read the story when it came out in the papers and found it both seriously flawed and highly amusing.

The worrying thing would have been if the test had shown positive results, because that would have made God out to be someone other than we understand Him to be.

 

[Mersenne]

Were the prayer teams not aware they were part of a study? If so, then the study was unethically constructed with uninformed, non-consenting participants, which is rather surprising. If so, then making a sincere request of God was impossible under the circumstances – which is precisely Mr. Lewis’s point.

That’s silly, of course a sincere request would still be possible. Do you suddenly stop caring about people because a scientist is watching?

 

[Mersenne]

How if there is no evidence one way or another that prayer has an effect are you able to assert definitively that miracles are “just total bunk”?

It’s rude to take people’s words out of the context of the conversation they are in.

 

[Wowbagger]

I checked the study. Worse than I thought. Each participant was required to pick up new “prayer lists” daily, to add the names on the lists to their daily intentions, to initial the prayer list when finished, and – my favorite bit – they were asked explicitly not to pray for “all participants in the study,” but only for the names on the list.

It is exactly as Lewis wrote: “You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery. But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens.”

Their prayers weren’t made insincere by the fact that a scientist was watching. They were made insincere because the intention of the ones saying the prayers, forced on them by the very act of praying according to the parameters of the study, was not the recovery of the patients, but simply to find out what happens. That’s not a sincere request. It’s a request for one thing (evidence of God, born of doubt) masquerading as another (the good of another person, born of caritas). It won’t “work.” It can’t “work.” If it did “work,” Christians would have a serious theological problem on their hands. To quote again from Mr. Lewis:

“Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate.” Link]

The experiment only “discovered” something that serious Christian thinkers worked out centuries ago using simple reason.

 

[MarcoPolo]

It’s rude to take people’s words out of the context of the conversation they are in.

I’m following. What’s your answer?