(May 16, 2014 at 9:09 pm)Heywood Wrote: I'm not a big believer in the power of prayer for reasons that have nothing to do with the results of prayer studies. That being said, I often hear atheists claim that scientific studies of prayer show that it doesn't work. I cringe that people actually put faith in studies which are obviously fatally flawed. How do you test God? How do you control that variable?You don't, because you can't. Researchers cannot even realistically determine what a "successful" prayer is, since theists determine that after the fact and based on a number of non-testable claims. And if all else fails, theists simply remind us that there are some things science cannot test.
I keep hoping that one of those tests will turn up a result in favor of prayer that is just significant enough to get theists to claim "SEE! THEY PROVED IT SCIENTIFICALLY!!!" Then non-theists can be the ones making the objections to the testing methodology and so on.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
