(May 16, 2014 at 10:04 pm)Heywood Wrote: With everything else you can isolate and control variables. With prayer you cannot. You cannot guarantee God even considers the prayers genuine prayers and not artifacts of a scientific study. You cannot guarantee prayers are not offered for people in the control group. Every study I have seen suffers from these two fatal flaws.....meaning the results of the study are useless.
We already know prayer doesn't work because the rate of so-called 'miracles' are no higher or lower for any belief (or lack of) group. Believers of a true god would be able to present data showing that their prayers are more often answered than others. They would be able to show a reduced rate of random accidents, injuries, natural disasters, diseases that no other group (even those with better technology and infrastructure) could match. There are so many believers and so many incidents that definite trends would appear naturally. The data would conclusively show that one set of believers has their prayers answered more often than any other.
Obviously, this never happens.
But, we already knew it was a useless attempt. Hypotheses that are designed to not be tested are worthless assertions that don't deserve attention. When people have voices in their head that aren't Jesus or Allah, we don't even bother testing them for efficacy, and it's precisely the same thing going on.
