RE: The inefficacy of prayer
September 24, 2008 at 12:31 am
(This post was last modified: September 24, 2008 at 12:41 am by Edwardo Piet.)
(September 7, 2008 at 7:18 pm)Meatball Wrote: I can't remember to chapter, but in The God Delusion Dawkins references a study done to test the effect of prayer on terminal hospital patients. Needless to say it had no effect.Actually it did have an effect... but a negative effect , obviously due to psychologial reasons. To paraphrase The God Delusion:
There were 3 groups
1. Patients not prayed for.
2. Patients prayed for but not told they were being prayed for.
3. Patients prayed for and told they were being prayed for.
The patients who weren't prayed for were as equally effected as the patients who were prayed for but didn't know it. However the patients who were prayed for; who were also told they were being prayed for didn't do so well as the other two groups. Dawkins suggested something like that it could be because group 3 must have thought something like "For them to need to pray for me...I must be really ill. I must be doing really badly". Which created despair which for psychological reasons is of course bad for health.
