(May 17, 2014 at 11:22 pm)rexbeccarox Wrote: I actually kind of agree with Heywood. I've always thought studies about prayer are ridiculous. To prove anything about prayer you'd have to first prove god(s), but even then there's no control over what god(s) would choose to do with the prayers.There would be one way to prove prayer before proving god, and that would be for prayer to have so clearly an effect that we would have to acknowledge god. If a double-blind study turned up an extremely high efficiency rate (say 98% of those prayed for recovered from heart surgery, for example) and a follow-up showed examples of what was otherwise considered impossible (amputees growing back limbs when they were prayed for), then it wouldn't matter if we presupposed god or not.
But I guess there's a reason that they start with people recovering from relatively routine surgery.
"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
