What Is The Point Of Prayer?

[Chas]

Here's where the point goes missing. My comparisons were in reply to your observation that people would have stopped doing something proven to be a lie. Clearly, this doesn't happen in the examples I mentioned. The only prayer (nyuk nyuk) for prayer at this point is special pleading.

I very much doubt prayer would have survived for long past the axial age when the modern view of the universe began to be developed. It continued because the people who practice the technique experience something. If you want to put it down to something psychological or physiological you can but that's only you're opinion. You have nothing particularly to support your opinion beyond that.

Religious practices, including prayer, persist because they are taught, generation to generation.

Brain scans of people engaged in thinking show activity in parts of the brain involved with thinking. Earth shattering.

It's a real physical effect of some kind you can observe so that's a demonstration that prayer does in fact do something beyond a person talking to their imaginary friend who doesn't exist.

The physical effect shown is that the verbal are of the brain is excited. It only shows that the person praying is doing something verbally, nothing more.

One question: if this stuff is proven as you submit, why aren't all neuroscientists religious?

Because they're under assumption that consciousness is a byproduct of brain function alone. Of course there is no particular evidence for this, it's really just a belief popular within the scientific community at this point.

There is clear evidence that affecting the brain affects consciousness. Changes to brain structure and to brain biochemistry change thinking and consciousness.

There is no evidence that thinking is anything other than an emergent property of the brain.