We Should Thank Murderers, Here is Why

[Aractus]

Many physical maladies can be cured by the power of wishful thinking, the power of positive thinking, the power of laughter. Is that proof of god's existence? I don't think so.
Prayer can boost one of these powers and, through the well known placebo effect, heal someone.... Of course, no arms were ever regrown in this manner, no kidneys, no livers, no legs, no lungs.... at most, you get some cancer remissing against the odds... Odds are a funny thing. there's a statistics theorem that states that for a large enough population, you can approximate any distribution to a gaussian. A gaussian looks like this:

The center μ is the average, or the most expected outcome of this distribution.
Then, you have the tails... these go to zero on infinity. Anything more than 3σ away from μ is considered highly unlikely.... it's only 0.2% of the population. 0.2%, almost nothing, right? When normal doctors provide you with a diagnosis, they rely on this 3σ: most ~99.8% of patients have outcome X. That doesn't mean that the remaining 0.2% are god's domain. It just means doctors can't explain it, because it's not the norm.
Transistors in your computer work on some rather unlikely events, like quantum mechanic's tunneling effect. It has a well defined probability, although unlikely, but works every single time, because it relies on many many electrons being present (you know Avogadro's number, right? ~10^24), and only the few unlikely ones actually getting past the gate.

While it is good to look at everything sceptically, you can't map specific things to probability. Olivia Lambert for instance died earlier this year. I never met the little girl, some of my friends were involved with the family - prayed with the family, throughout their battle. By the way, the family didn't just "rely on prayer" as you cynics probably think, they travelled overseas to seek experimental treatment. So if you want to say that prayer doesn't work, why not say that medicine doesn't work either?

Those who preach a prosperity gospel - all good things happen to those who believe - are in err (see Acts 9:16).