(September 30, 2009 at 5:41 pm)Rhizomorph13 Wrote: Solarwave,
Nice, except all the results must be verifyable under peer review and your definitions need to be solid. "See what happens" needs to have a metric involved; for example you could use penny flips and pray for heads. If heads comes up more often than tails, in a statistically significant way, then you can publish your results and win a templeton award, maybe. It has been done before and there are even some studies on patients but the results were very slightly negatively correlated with prayer. I can't quote the study sorry, but I am sure if you google "scientific prayer test" you could find some interesting tests. Include Templeton to be more specific.
Rhizo
Well if I could be bothered to think of an more detailed description I would put something other than 'see what happens', but I'm feeling lazy at the moment lol.
To be honest I am very doubtful of testing God through prayer. Who do you think God is, what do you think prayer is? As I said prayer isn't a magic you can use to prove a point whenever you want. Pray for healings only happen if God says yes and from what I know of God He doesn't take well to being test on our terms normally.
I think it also has to be remembered that Gods goal isn't to make people believe He is real. His goal is to have a relationship with humans, and two are two very different things. This is mainly shown by what some atheists have said, like that even if there was a God they wouldn't worship Him, and a will not to want to believe. I think its possible to know there is a God and turn your back on Him, so maybe a prayer study wouldn't actually make a difference.
Mark Taylor: "Religious conflict will be less a matter of struggles between belief and unbelief than of clashes between believers who make room for doubt and those who do not."
Einstein: “The most unintelligible thing about nature is that it is intelligible”
Einstein: “The most unintelligible thing about nature is that it is intelligible”
