Evidence for Believing

[downbeatplumb]

If it was a testable, verifiable phenomenon that spontaneous remission occurred significantly more frequently during or as a result of prayer, we should look at some powerful psychosomatic (natural) cause, like perhaps another order of magnitude in the placebo effect. If something is observably repeatable within the order of empirical phenomena such that you can form an inductive conclusion from predictable data, that makes it less likely to be a miracle, not more likely.

These tests have been done you know.
They don't show what you'd think they do. The group that were prayed for and knew it actually did worse than the other groups.

So prayer actually makes things worse if you go by this study.

I don't think that's true by the way. One study would not prove that but it certainly proves no positive effect.

Another good example is the 2006 “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer” (STEP), also commonly called the “Templeton Foundation prayer study” because they funded it, or simply the “Great Prayer Experiment”, and was quite a rigorous investigation that was led by Harvard professor Herbert Benson. Starting with 1,802 coronary artery bypass surgery patients at six hospitals, they randomly split them into three groups and proceeded as follows:

• Both Groups 1 and 2 were advised that they might or might not be prayed for, but only those in Group 1 were actually prayed for .
  
  
• Group 3 were told that they would definitely be prayed for and they were.
  
  
• The congregations of three Christian churches (two Catholic and one Protestant) were then asked to pray for specific named prayer subjects in their own manner, but were also instructed to include the following phrase in their prayers: ‘for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications’
  

So what happened?
Major complications and thirty-day mortality occurred in 52 percent of those who received prayer (Group 1), 51 percent of those who did not receive it (Group 2), and 59 percent of patients who knew they would receive prayers (Group 3).
Yikes.
It has been speculated that the results of Group 3 may have been stress related, when told they would be prayed for, individuals may have begin to think “[i]am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?[/i]”
What is completely clear is not only that prayer simply did not work, but also that those who were not prayed for did a lot better.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16569567

https://www.skeptical-science.com/scienc...-bad-ugly/