Evidence for Believing

[Simon Moon]

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/

You know what's so great about this, right?

The Templeton Foundation is a Christian philanthropic organization that has a "horse in the race" so to speak.

They are actively looking for scientific confirmation of Christianity.

What is a very impressive, though, is they have the intellectual integrity NOT to 'spin' results on any of their studies.

Unlike the vast majority of other Christian apologists (WLC, Pantinga, McDowell, Strobel, Wallace, etc), who make a living on spinning, lying, and have NEVER corrected any of their fallacious arguments.