Prayer does not work

[Jacob(smooth)]

I prayed this morning that I'd feel better about some stuff at work. Do you know what? I felt better about that stuff afterward. Thus, by most definitions, prayer worked.

Not by any definition does that mean your prayer worked. You would have to provide evidence that it was the prayer that made you feel better rather than the natural change in a normal persons moods over the course of an average day.

Ah, I didn't say that that PROVED that prayer works. To do that I would as you say have to conduct a controlled trial with three groups, Christians praying, atheists doing similar activity (taking the same time to talk to themselves) and a group doing neither. But I wasn't trying to prove anything. I can't prove to you that I had a nasty accident last night whilst eating naga chilli biltong then going to the toilet without washing my hands. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. It did. It was intense.

When your outcome measure is as subjective as "feels better" and it's impossible to blind your test, the nature of evidence is different.

Does wanking feel good to you wolf? I bet it does. I could ask a bunch of people and they'd tell me the same. I could also line up a bunch of Christians and they'd all tell you that prayer made them feel good. So does wanking "work". Can you provide evidence?