Prayer Studies

[Esquilax]

1. You cannot guarantee the control group(those to whom prayers are not offered) are not being prayed for by people not involved in the study.

Yes, you could: if you isolated the control group and administered their procedures (I seem to recall at least one of these studies being done in the lead up to and aftermath of heart surgery) without a publically available schedule, you could remove any reason for others to pray.

Or you could just, you know, have the control group ask the people they know not to pray for them.

2. You cannot guarantee God will treat "prayers" that are elements of a scientific study the same as genuine prayers.

This is actually the contention I'm raising: defaulting back to this "mysterious ways" nonsense whenever you don't get the results you want doesn't mean the study is flawed, it means the concept being tested is unfalsifiable.

Just because you move the goalposts doesn't mean the problem doesn't still lie with the thing you're seeking to defend.

In short, prayer studies are unreliable because you cannot isolate or control all the variables being studied. There is nothing ad hoc about these reasons. It is simply the reality of the situation.

You can't isolate or control every variable in any study, but you don't see anyone else seeking to invalidate other tests because "for all you know, god could have made that happen!" This is the issue: you are invoking something unfalsifiable to worm your way out of having to deal with a chink in your ideological armor, and it's the same thing we see a lot with theists, where they retract their god away from scientific investigation as much as possible in order to flee from the possibility that nothing will be found.