Which Comes First?

[Ryft]

Correct. Well, mostly correct. I would say that if you do not follow those steps than you are not doing science (with some minor exceptions). The part about changing only one variable doesn't always hold true, and there are meta studies that do not involve doing any testing but amount to just compiling previous results. But those steps are pretty much how science gets done.

The interesting thing is that a restrictive view like yours disqualifies quite a number of fields accepted as science (e.g., anthropology) because the very nature of their subject precludes certain of those steps, sometimes for definitional reasons (e.g., scientific research involving history or prehistory), sometimes for ethical reasons (e.g., sociologists can't really experiment on people), and so forth. The steps are applicable for physics, chemistry, etc., but should the sociologist stop calling herself a scientist?

Or could you be convinced to think as I do, that the arena of science has a larger scope than that narrow definition?

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So what I'm wondering is, how do you ever have any idea at all whether your prayers are ever answered?

Quite honestly, at first you have no idea. You pray for things and look for the answer to it, hoping he bends to your will, but you never really know for sure. Sometimes you'll experience a result that corresponds positively in some way to your prayer and you take that to mean God answered you. But in that quiet corner of the mind you don't want to admit or talk about, there lies the festering doubt produced by your inability to distinguish between an answered prayer and a weird coincidence—a fire that gets fueled by the infuriating ratio between positive corresponding results and the far more frequent absence of discernible results. It's a dissonance that cannot be tolerated long. You eventually reach a schism in your conscience and you can go one of two ways.

Most people call the positive results weird coincidences, shake their fist at what they consider divine silence, and eventually lose their faith. But some people find themselves struck by the epiphany that they are not infallible, that among the things possible for them to be wrong about, prayer might be included. So, questioning some of their basic assumptions, they decide to look up what God has to say about the nature of prayer. They might examine the template Jesus Christ provided, not only by what his own prayers looked like but also the nature of The Lord's Prayer, which he described as "how you should pray" (see Matt. 6:5-15). They may even notice that he said, "This is how you should pray," and not, "This is what you should say." After a while they begin to realize that they had been treating God like some cosmic Santa Claus, going to him with a list of their wishes along with promises that, if he answers, they will be good little boys and girls. As they learn what authentic and genuine prayer looks like, they are struck by how absolutely backwards they had it. They finally understand that prayer is not a shopping cart or wish list. That God is not their butler waiting to do their bidding, nor sitting around waiting for someone to pray him into awareness of what he already knows. And perhaps most important of all, that prayer is not about seeking their will but God's will. That he already has their best interest in mind. And that informing an omniscient being about something is sort of contradictory. Ultimately they begin to understand that authentic and genuine prayer is not a wish list but, rather, an act of worship, an intimate nexus of communion between them and their Father in heaven.

They know such authentic prayers are answered... because in that act of worship they experience the faithful presence of God.