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In Reply to: RE: Will the sun rise tomorrow? posted by regmac on July 15, 2012 at 08:35:36
Well, yeah, there could be a monk in Tibet who is praying for the entire world. Good thing for us that monk doesn't die, because without his prayers the world will end.
It seems to me that Mr. Avalos is trying much too hard. If he wants to show that prayer is efficacious, he'll have to conduct a controlled experiment that shows that it is, because merely pointing to shortcomings in an experiment is not, in science, sufficient to credit a theory.
Follow Ups:
“It seems to me that Mr. Avalos is trying much too hard. If he wants to show that prayer is efficacious, he'll have to conduct a controlled experiment that shows that it is, because merely pointing to shortcomings in an experiment is not, in science, sufficient to credit a theory.”
You have misunderstood. Mr. Avalos is taking the *skeptical* side of the debate as to the healing power of prayer. Nevertheless, his criticism that any such study can never control for which group gets prayer and therefore renders said study flawed (a priori), strikes me as sound.
Audiophiles can't even agree on a valid methodology for blind testing gear, and you expect believers and unbelievers to reach agreeable terms for a controlled test -- or for a third party to provide a solution -- as to the efficacy (or not) of prayer?! I've got a bridge to Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. ~:)
First there is only one god according to each religion.
A Christian prays and will get some things and not get them - but so too will a Muslim.
Muslims are convinced 100% that they are 100% right and they're God grants them their wishes through prayer. Indeed, so convinced are they that they pray many times a day.
Christians believe the same - and the other 100+ religions believe the same.
Put yourself in the non-believers shoes and looking at all of these religions for the first time and you read the EXACT same stories.
My friend was nearing death and the doctors said he was done for - then we prayed to God and a week later he was cured - WOW - that means our God heard the prayer and saved him. Blah blah blah - every religion has these exact same stories. So that either means all the Gods are up there or that their body happened to be misdiagnosed by the doctor and wasn't as severe as thought, or was something entirely different with the same symptoms.
Then there is the old "I was dieing and I saw a white light" routine which has been proven biologically to be an oxygen based lacking in the brain at the optic nerve that creates that light - it's a shared experience because it is biological/medically proven. Further the lack of oxygen to the brain creates hallucinations.
Prayer is a matter of placaebo. In many instances belief can overcome. For instance doctors have used sugar pills and told patients that they were powerful drugs that would take pain away. The belief in the doctor and the belief in the pills made their pain go away - no for everyone but it was illustration that "belief" in something could actually reduce pain.
I don't see why belief in prayer could not do exactly the same thing. So in fact I can see that "belief" in prayer could be beneficial for certain people.
I prayed to God to not make me an Atheist. For some reason He said no.
But then, all studies are flawed. Who's to say that a freak wind or an unknown phenomenon didn't influence Galileo's experiment on the leaning tower of Pisa?
Fortunately, as Einstein said, God is subtle, but He is never malicious. When we have adhered to scientific method, it has so far led us in the right direction, overall. This despite many famous scientific errors, and even the occasional malicious hoax like Piltsdown Man.
I don't think most believers have a genuine desire for objective testing, whether it be of the efficacy of prayer, or of audio. This is true of both sides, in the case of audio: the guys at Hydrogen Audio seem to me as biased as the most hard-core subjectivist. But I don't get the sense that the same thing is true in the case of religion. Believers want to believe, and so they do. All you have to do is look at the fact that religious beliefs differ widely from place to place to see that they're mostly fiction, accepted as truth. Unlike many atheists, I don't actually believe that religion is without benefit, or truth. It's just that religious truths are moral truths (as understood by a given society) that are represented symbolically, in the language of the subconcious, rather than literal ones. Religion is a tool for the social control of behavior, and it has been a crucially important and successful one.
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