AINg isn’t remotely suggesting manipulating God, just looking for God in the world. God is regularly described as being personal and in our lives always, and claimed to be a God of consistency and order based on how the universe is constructed. Yet if you take a large group of medical patients, some being prayed for and others not, and look at their medical outcomes, God suddenly becomes aloof?
The idea that we can somehow force God’s hand would be an effort to manipulate God.
Not quite correct, it’s not based upon research, it’s based upon claims by theists that prayer is efficacious. If this is true, then it’s effects…whatever they may be, should be distinguishable from no prayer at all.
Prayer can be made for purposes no greater than to express love and thanksgiving to Almighty God.stoplooklisten:
Not quite correct, it’s not based upon research, it’s based upon claims by theists that prayer is efficacious. If this is true, then it’s effects…whatever they may be, should be distinguishable from no prayer at all.
Absolutely, but no study has ever been conducted as to the efficacy of such prayers. But the largest study to date on the efficacy of intercessory prayer has shown no discernible effects. Intercessory prayer would seem to be totally unproductive.
That’s not what the studies attempted to show. They weren’t looking for a specific outcome, just a distinguishable outcome. Any outcome that would differentiate the “prayed for group” from the “not prayed for group”.
Of course not, but if God suddenly doesn’t respond to prayer just because someone is looking more closely, that would seem deceptive, I can’t imagine you’d describe God that way. If someone is deserving of having their prayers answers do they become undeserving if someone else has a clipboard?
You know, across 21 centuries, people have been praying (May) God’s Kingdom come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus Christ taught this prayer in the Sermon on the Mount.
It is most decidedly not a scientific fact, and repeating it doesn’t make it more so. You are free to believe it is the actual burial cloth of Jesus, and I am free to believe that it isn’t.
Exactly. Except in that what I am talking about is what has been proven (or actually not proven) rather than what has been claimed as proven that isn’t. Ignoring the actual science in favor of speculation masquerading as science isn’t helpful.
How were they able to take into account prayers being said outside of the experiment? If they didn’t, I would say that the experimental methodology may have been flawed.
Unfortunately, it’s not just the claims of skeptics that lead people to question the veracity of God, rather it’s the specious claims of His believers that do the most harm.
I am not ignoring the science as there really isn’t any. Speculation about disappearing into another dimension and leaving visible traces behind is not science. Claiming that an old photograph is irrefutable evidence of anything except that a photograph exists is not science. On the other hand, ignoring evidence that is contrary to the desired result is not science either, and since I don’t have a desired result other than the truth I am not ignoring anything.
You can’t really control for all outside prayers, but what you can do, by having a sufficiently large sample size, is assume that across the entire study outside prayer will have a negligible differentiating effect on any particular group, and therefore any differences in outcomes will be due to what you did control for.
Exactly, but that would seem to imply the very thing that @stoplooklisten was ridiculing earlier. That God is a slot machine, you put in your prayers, and you never know what you’re going to get. You might get what you prayed for, you might get something else entirely, or you might get nothing at all.
That makes no sense to me actually. But whatever. I think the main point that may have been lost in all this is that prayer is not, as some would have it, to let God know what we want (He already does and always did) but rather for us to train ourselves to the correct mindset. I have to be completely honest that I don’t fully “get” this, but I can see the point even if I can’t completely internalize it or explain it.
Ah, but what some people get from prayer others may get from meditation or simple contemplation. The question however, is whether intercessory prayer is effective for anything more than that. Does God really answer prayers?
The quick answer, and one that I am sure you have heard, is: “Yes, but sometimes the answer is ‘No’”. The very idea of prayer being “effective” presupposes the possibility of a deterministic outcome, which there cannot be given the “nature” (for lack of a better term) of God.
A few years ago I spent some time digging up facts and figures for the number of people visiting Lourdes and figures for various illnesses and the chance of spontaneous remission.lelinator:
The quick answer, and one that I am sure you have heard, is: “Yes, but sometimes the answer is ‘No’”. The very idea of prayer being “effective” presupposes the possibility of a deterministic outcome, which there cannot be given the “nature” (for lack of a better term) of God.
The basic problem remains that, since God cannot be measured or controlled, then science is not a useful discipline for studying Him.
Jesus healed a lame man at the pool of Bethesda (John 5) in Jerusalem.
Indeed, the very idea that God answers prayers presupposes one of two things, either God acts within time, not outside of it as theists claim, or people don’t actually have free will.