AngelThMan Wrote:TheDarkestOfAngels Wrote:You do understand how these tests work, don't you?No, that would be too obvious, and it would fuel the notion of someone being behind the results. It would defeat God's purpose of withholding any kind of usable results from scientists. A more subtle way is to have the people who prayed fare a little worse, which seems to be what happens in a lot of these studies.
The tests for prayer are simple - if prayer is effective, it'll yield results. Which is to say either prayer will work or it will not. The only way for god to foil these results are to NOT ANSWER THE PRAYERS (all of them) and have the results of praying be exactly the same as not praying...
... and what purpose would that serve, exactly? Other than uselessly and pointlessly obfuscating his own existance.
Praying still becomes no different than not praying in terms of whether or not it works at all.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
