Prayer not working

[Darkstar]

So let me get this straight. If I pray one hundred times and one prayer comes to pass, that proves prayer works and is not a one in one hundred chance of coincidence?

Until you or anyone for that matter can disprove God, well, you can not prove coincidence. The all powerful God can make all things possible.

Null hypothesis

The practice of science involves formulating and testing hypotheses, assertions that are capable of being proven false using a test of observed data. The null hypothesis typically corresponds to a general or default position. For example, the null hypothesis might be that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena or that a potential treatment has no effect.

The term was originally coined by English geneticist and statistician Ronald Fisher in 1935. It is typically paired with a second hypothesis, the alternative hypothesis, which asserts a particular relationship between the phenomena. Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson formalized the notion of the alternative. The alternative need not be the logical negation of the null hypothesis; it predicts the results from the experiment if the alternative hypothesis is true. The use of alternative hypotheses was not part of Fisher's formulation, but became standard.

It is important to understand that the null hypothesis can never be proven. A set of data can only reject a null hypothesis or fail to reject it. For example, if comparison of two groups (e.g.: treatment, no treatment) reveals no statistically significant difference between the two, it does not mean that there is no difference in reality. It only means that there is not enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis (in other words, the experiment fails to reject the null hypothesis).

Choice of H0

The choice of null hypothesis (H0) and consideration of directionality (see "one-tailed test") is critical. Consider the question of whether a tossed coin is fair (i.e. that on average it lands heads up 50% of the time). A potential null hypothesis is "this coin is not biased towards heads" (one-tail test). The experiment is to repeatedly toss the coin. A possible result of 5 tosses is 5 heads. Under this null hypothesis, the data are considered unlikely (with a fair coin, the probability of this is 3% and the result would be even more unlikely if the coin were biased in favour of tails). The data refute the null hypothesis (that the coin is either fair or biased towards tails) and the conclusion is that the coin is biased towards heads.

Alternatively, the null hypothesis, "this coin is fair" could be examined by looking out for either too many of tails or too many heads, and thus the types of outcomes that would tend to contradict this null hypothesis are those where a large number of heads or a large number of tails are observed. Thus a possible diagnostic outcome would be that all tosses yield the same outcome, and the probability of 5 of a kind is 6% under the null hypothesis. This is not statistically significant, preserving the null hypothesis in this case.

This example illustrates that the conclusion reached from a statistical test may depend on the precise formulation of the null and alternative hypotheses. The example data set demonstrates the point, but is actually too small to support either conclusion. Generally, fewer than 30 trials puts any "yes-or-no" conclusion at risk.

Atheists take the default postion in saying that they do not believe god exists. Now, this is not necessarily the same as the raw statistics, but in the case of prayer, you have admitted that you would consider a 1% success rate significant enough to reject the null hypothesis (noting that this would be far over the recommended 30 trials). It is unreasonable to accept the alternative hypothesis on such flimsy standards, and yet you do anyway. This is called faith. If you did this on the coin example, such as null = coin is fair, and it landed heads 51 times and tails 49, you would soon see why it would be unreasonable to accept this as statistically invalid evidence for the coin's unfairness.

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Right and I agree you shouldn't stand on street corners praying out loud in a very loud tone of voice. Rather,we go into a room,shut the door and pray. Not a long prayer. Just a simple prayer.

So, wait...you are going to pray for her...but isn't that a petition? And aren't petitions not supposed to work? It seems you guys are giving me conflicting ideas here.

[Godscreated]

@ Darkstar, all coins are biased when they do not fall as I call.

[IATIA]

Until you or anyone for that matter can disprove God, well, you can not prove coincidence. The all powerful God can make all things possible.

I have never claimed that there is a god. It is all on you. I reject your baseless claim. It is you that must establish proof for the existence of your god.

Statistically, prayers are no more relevant than normal everyday random chance. Coincidence. No more, no less.

[pocaracas]

Well, since we're on the topic of proving negative:
* I'd like to request that someone proves to me that gods are not man-made.

[IATIA]

Well, since we're on the topic of proving negative:
* I'd like to request that someone proves to me that gods are not man-made.

I cannot, because they are.