(May 7, 2013 at 3:35 pm)Luminox Wrote: Some people are convinced that the phrase "prayer works" is wrong, i.e. they are convinced that prayer does not have significant effect on anything.
Gee, wonder what might have convinced them of that...
I was raised Christian and the idea that 'prayer works, except when it doesn't' is pretty deeply ingrained in the believers that I know. By which I mean, when they pray for something and they get what they wanted (or something even remotely close) they give prayer the credit. When they pray for something and they do not get it, they rationalize it away. "It wasn't part of god's plan for me." "Things happen for a reason." Shit like that. To someone looking at it from the outside, it's an obvious ruse. To the believer, it's perfectly plausible.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
