RE: Prayer Studies
May 16, 2014 at 10:15 pm
(This post was last modified: May 16, 2014 at 10:17 pm by Silver.)
(May 16, 2014 at 10:04 pm)Heywood Wrote: You cannot guarantee God even considers the prayers genuine prayers and not artifacts of a scientific study.
Of course not, because for god to be considered a proper variable he must first be proven to exist. Without his existence to support the controlled variable, one can only study the effects belief in god and prayer have on particular outcomes.
Studies have shown that mind alteration geared toward the positive sometimes, that being the operative word, can improve an outcome. Of course, even the opposite can be stated as well. As a pessimist, I can state for certain that sometimes good things happen to me even though I was genuinely expecting the worst.
Outcomes, overall, cannot be controlled by thought, mind alteration, or god. Outcomes occur the way they do for the simple reason that was the way they were supposed to occur. Outcomes are nothing more than coincidences, no matter how much meaning we would prefer to attribute to them.
"Never trust a fox. Looks like a dog, behaves like a cat."
~ Erin Hunter
~ Erin Hunter