It would probably constitute a thread hijack to have an in-depth discussion here about that prayer study itself (as opposed to discussing how Shermer uses it in his column). Besides, it has already been pretty thoroughly discussed in this thread and in the other thread that that thread’s OP links to.
Shermer wasn’t the one claiming that prayer had a direct “capitalistic” effect. The study was ton to test the claim, made by many many people, that it does have such an effect, and it was apparently funded by people hoping to get positive results. You can bet that if it had shown that it had an effect, they would have been publicizing it to the hills instead of playing it down in ways that, if they really took them seriously, would make anyone question why they would have bothered to do the study in the first place.
Obviously phrasing it as a question of whether “many people” or “many many people” view prayer in capitalistic terms can’t be answered, but I’ve known probably several hundred devoutly religious people in my life. I didn’t specifically discuss this question with many of them, but the vibe I got from general discussions of prayer have not supported the one-for-one interpretation is any case that I can recall. I would be interested to see any book or article by any person who thinks that prayers deliver results mechanically, delivering certain results regardless of whether or not the praying party is expressing genuine feeling. If you don’t mind me saying so, you’d have to be rather small-minded to view prayers that way.
I make no claim to being a theologian, amateur or professional, so I’ve honestly no clue whether there’s a theological basis for believing that God delivers more healing for an in-family prayer than a total stranger prayer. If we drop the “theo”, however, the argument is fairly obvious. Suppose we accept the hypothesis that some deity exists, call it Og. Suppose further that Og promotes generally healthy, strong societies, which is in line with what most major religions believe about their deity of choice. Now, since the family is the fundamental unit of every successful society, Og has good reason to support families, and that support might well include giving preference to in-family prayer.
But the fundamental fact that I’m driving at here is that the study of prayer isn’t being approached in a scientific way, which tells us something, given that it’s supported by scientific people such as Shermer (and, I presume, yourself). You say you don’t understand why prayer would produce certain results. But when you do science, you study precisely the things that you don’t understand. Imagine Galileo standing at the base of the tower in Pisa, saying “I don’t understand why the two balls would fall at the same rate, so why bother lugging them up there and dropping them off?” He did the scientific test precisely to produce results that people (at the time) would not understand. Then he set about explaining them.
Actually the tribe was very important also. I do agree that if the experimenters paid the prayers $24 and all the wine they could drink to pray any results could be dismissed, but the experimenters seemed to be working in good faith. We of course have no clue as to what God would accept, but see below…
I think you’re jumping the gun here. (And I’ll tie this back to Shermer in a minute.) First of all, I was wondering about the theological justification of prayer, not the scientific (or supernatural) explanation of its effect. This actually helps your side, since if prayer to achieve an end (not thanks etc) does not work for a specific view of a given God, then the failure of the experiment does not offer evidence against that God, since the God hypothesis does not encompass “usefu” prayer.
More importantly, before we have to worry about explaining something we must be sure that there is something there to explain. I don’t need to come up with theories on how telepathy works before I see evidence that there is any such thing. The same thing with prayer - without evidence that prayer has some measurable effect, not simply explainable through a placebo effect, we don’t need to worry about refining our understanding. If the heavier ball fell first, Gallileo wouldn’t have needed to explain why it didn’t. I think Shermer’s “case closed” referred to the fact that there is nothing to study, nothing to explain now. Be don’t need to explain how prayer works until we’ve established that prayer works.
If you don’t think the study (funded by the Templeton Foundation, not exactly atheists) was not designed to detect the real impact of prayer, you should suggest a better one. If you think prayer has no non-pacebo effect (and I’m very fond of placebos.) you need to tell the little old ladies who run around saying they’ll pray for people.
Can you suggest a test protocol that is properly scientific? For that matter, you earlier stated the study didn’t take into account “all types of prayer”. Can you supply a list of these types? You’re suggesting the testers didn’t properly analyze something whose nature eludes even proponents.
Does praying to Satan count?
That’s not quite accurate, though. The transition from folk-science to modern-science, as Shermer describes it, happens when long-standing beliefs that everyone “knows” are tested. Often, these beliefs are found to have no substance. Are you claiming prayer does have an effect? If so, please describe a test that could prove it. As for Galileo, in his time there had been a long-standing assumption that heavier objects fell faster but no-one had previously done a carefully-controlled study to show that they do or don’t. The story of dropping two stones off the Tower is almost certainly apocryphal - evidence suggests Galileo conducted experiments involving smooth wooden ramps and such, letting him slow down the “falling” enough to get observations he could measure with the primitive timing devices he had at his disposal.
Had the laws of of physics been different, though, and Galileo had gotten results that showed heavier objects fall faster, he would have tried to determine by how much and drawn up tables and whatnot. Later on, when Newton built on Galileo’s work, his second law (F = ma) would have ended up like F = m[sup]2[/sup]a, or some similar modification that showed mass had a more-than-linear effect on force. Neither Galileo nor Newton would have understood the nature of gravity (it remains elusive, though Einstein came up with a better model) but that wouldn’t stop them from studying and measuring its effect.
Prayer, by contrast, has yet to show it has any effect, even though it’s been believed for thousands of years that it does. The study Shermer cites is like Galileo’s ramps; trying to control the situation, measure it accurately, analyze it, and see if that which has been long accepted without question stands up to scrutiny.
This is a really bad article.
Shermer lumps together (a) beliefs like a geocentric universe, that are products of perfectly valid reasoning but insufficiently precise observation; (b) religious beliefs, such as planets being gods; and © beliefs that are products of faulty reasoning, such as believing in the power of prayer because of isolated successes.
He dismisses the aggregate as “folk science”, although the first might more accurately be described as “superseded science”, and the second and third aren’t science at all.
Then he ascribes the lot of them to our having “evolved in an environment that is radically different from the one in which we now live”. “Our senses are geared for perceiving objects of middling size . . . We live a scant three score and 10 years.” And how exactly is this different from the environment “in which we evolved”?
The ways in which our minds lead us into error is a fascinating topic. This blurb, however, doesn’t contribute anything to it.
It’s sloppy writing, I admit, but even elementary-school students are comfortable with the concepts of matter being made of invisibly small atoms; stars being hugely distant away and dinosaurs becoming extinct a million “three score and tens” ago. Many will just absorb and regurgitate these facts on demand to pass tests and whatnot, but some will build on the body of knowledge, analyze and expand it. This doesn’t quite happen with belief systems based on religion or pseudoscience - a modern prophet simply expands the cloud, replacing unprovables with more unprovables.
In any case, how this justifies the OP’s personal attacks on Shermer remains unclear.
Fascinating: so in not one single case did they appear to believe that prayer accomplishes any positive effects on reality other than raising people’s spirits in a mundane way. Is that what you are claiming? Do we have that correct?
When a church bulletin asks a congregation to pray for someone’s recovery, what does that request mean? When people are instructed to pray FOR this or that in general, what does THAT mean? When countless people insist that their prayers were answered, you’re going to tell me that they never really asked anything in the first place and its just a turn of the phrase?
I’m sure the Jesus of “ask and you shall recieve” would be fascinated to hear about his smallmindedness. I’m not sure what you mean about “genuine feeling though.” Is that the sort of “genuine feeling” you get from talking about a study and a subject you don’t seem to know very much about and apparently haven’t read to get the details on before trying to discuss what the people in it did or didn’t do?
The people that funded the study wanted to show an effect. If it had, they would have been jumping up and down pointing at it. You can’t have it both ways: a study can’t be good if you get the results you want, and flawed if you don’t.
Which is why I don’t like those belief systems being conflated with real science, such as geocentrism, that simply turned out to be wrong.
Stephen Jay Gould has written about this–how in thinking about the history of science, we assume that the people who turned out to be right in any controversy were paragons of rationality, while the opposing side was wallowing in superstition. It wasn’t always so.
Geocentrism, as expounded in its fullest form by Ptolemy, wasn’t a product of ignorance, intuition, religion, “folk science”, or superstition. It was a rational attempt by intelligent men (the best thinkers of their age) to explain observations made with the most care that the technology of the time would allow.
Until the time of Galileo and Kepler, there were valid, rational reasons to prefer geocentrism to heliocentrism. After that time, there were only mindless religious objections–but not before.
I can’t speak for the OP, and whatever axes he might have to grind with Shermer, but Shermer hit one of my hot buttons with his dismissal of the Almagest as “folk science”.
Anyone who’s read my posts in religion threads during the last six years knows where I stand on religious issues, which is pretty close to where you and Bryan Ekers and most other Great Debaters stand. I’m all in favor of science, and of using science to test real-world claims, including claims of religion. What I’m saying in this thread is that if you want to use science, than do it by proper scientific methods and approach it with intellectual honesty and an open mind. If you want to debunk a superstition, then you have to understand the superstition and devise a scientific approach that actually tackles the superstition.
For example, suppose we have a folk superstition that there are yetis inhabiting the high mountain peaks of the Himalayas. If a scientists tried to debunk this claim by carefully searching the lower valleys of the Himalayas and documenting that no yetis lived there, that wouldn’t disprove anything. If the annecdotal claims put the yetis on the peaks, then you have to search the peaks to debunk those claims.
So with this prayer business, Shermer starts out by ascribing belief in the power of prayer to annecdotes. Well, what annecdotes are these? A typical one would run along the lines of, “My grandma was sick with cancer for two years but then we prayed for her and she got better”, as opposed to “but then 600 total strangers prayed for her and she got better.” Therefore, scientific study of the power of prayer has to account for family relationships (among other things) to be valid.
Galileo was a bad example, which I only picked because it was the first one that came to my head. The point I was driving at was that a scientist beginning an investigation needs to be open-minded and willing to consider alternate explanations beyond the most obvious ones. In others words, I was agreeing with that old quote: “The most exciting phrase to hear in a scientific lab is not ‘Eureka!’, but rather ‘That’s funny.’”
In this thread, Voyager complained about my complaints on the grounds that he found it counter-intuitive that a hypothetical deity would assess and answer prayers based on emotional attachment, family relationships, and so forth. But much science is counter-intuitive; quantum physics, for instance. So being willing to study counter-intuitive notions is part of being a good scientist.
What do family relationships have to do with prayer? As a scientist, wouldn’t you want to remove all complicating factors, and just have a prayer and praeyee(?) Would you be happy if they’d change their conclusions to “Prayers from groups of strangers don’t help the sick”? That in itself would still have implications (praying for the sick at mass etc). What if they recruited an army of priests to do the praying? It seems like you’re saying you won’t accept the outcome until all permutations have been researched. Can you give us a statement about what would be sufficient for you (and possibly other folks who might think like you), rather than just saying the current set of findings in insufficient?
You’ll be happy to know that I prayed to Satan for your recovery today, Bryan. 
Hey, it sounds like we agree, spin aside, that this was a crap column. I’ll concede that my tone re Shermer was disdainful and aggressive, but I hardly consider the attacks “personal.” His reputation as an arrogant media skeptic attack dog is well established. You guys need better propagandists than this guy and Randi.
The softer side of scepticism.[sup]TM[/sup] You can use that.
OK, let’s deconstruct.
A prayer is what? A message sent to somebody of a certain status. Idiomatically speaking, we don’t say, “I prayed to the doctor for help,” although there is no doubt that seeing the doc for a medical condition is “effective.”
So the question of whether prayer is effective depends on the nature/existence of the target of the messages, whether they reach the intended target, and how the target will react to them.
I don’t think that a personal god exists; ergo, prayer to a personal god can’t reach its intended target. Prayers to Jesus are useless qua personal appeals to that supposedly existing being.
However, prayers are expressions of intentions. The practice of projecting one’s intentions into the world by various means without taking physical action oneself is properly termed “magic.” A bunch of nuns pounding Mary’s ears with multiple Rosaries in hopes of affecting a person’s health are clearly practicing magic.
Prayer definitely works to a certain degree and in certain cases. Even skeptics would agree that a meditation can help clarify one’s determination and help in other ways psychologically.
Otherwise, how and why it helps or fails to help is subject to analysis from a hundred different angles. E.g., is a deity interceding, or is one’s own psi at work? For this reason, I think studies like the one discussed here are pretty much useless.
The standard response you get when you tell anyone even slightly religious about some trouble is “I’ll pray for you.” Like I said, the previous study tried to detect (and claimed it did) exactly this kind of effect. So I don’t think the researchers were studying a strawman hypothesis. It was funded, remember, by theists.
My objection is not that effective prayer is counter-intuitive, but that I can’t find a logically consistent (or theologically consistent) mechanism by which it would work. I believe three counter-intuitive things before breakfast! You seem to be arguing that the kind of prayer they were studying makes no sense, I don’t think any prayer makes sense, and I still wonder if you have any cites for my family and friend prayer is supposed to be more effective.
You’re entirely correct. Martin Gardner (who I personally think is a much better writer than Shermer) explored this in chapter 16 of his 1968 book Mathematical Circus (derived mainly from articles Gardner wrote when he worked for Scientific American). A great deal of work had gone into drawing up geocentric charts of epicycles and whatnot which were fairly accurate, but the heliocentric model won out because it was more so and it was simpler.
Isaac Asimov (also a better writer than Shermer) also explored this in his essay The Relativity of Wrong. The older paradigms (Earth is flat; Earth is center of universe etc.) are adequate until they encounter something that no longer fits. If one never tries to map the Earth with any accuracy, presuming a flat Earth is sufficient. If one never tries to navigate by the stars with any accuracy, the geocentric universe is sufficient. Asimov regarded Isaac Newton highly and pointed out that his laws of motion are nearly right, and would have been perfectly right if the speed of light was infinite. However, the speed of light being infinite would rule out other things, like stars, and Newton’s laws (which are perfectly adequate for 99.999% of what we consider modern engineering, up to and including the space program) had to be refined by Einstein inserting a v[sup]2[/sup]/c[sup]2[/sup]. Asimov referred to these as necessary refinements and was dismissive of the idea that whole branches of science are being constantly wiped out and replaced, as he found was an idea frequently held by people who were dismissive of science in general.
And Carl Sagan… well, you get the idea. Shermer is by no means the best of the skeptic writers, and this is by no means his best work.
Aeschines, however, is not an especially skilled critic:
I don’t think you’re making the effort to approach this at all analytically. It’s not personal, but you describe Shermer in the next sentence as an “arrogant media skeptic attack dog”? Or, more accurately, you describe it as his reputation. Do you know of and can cite anyone who holds this opinion of Shermer who is not also hostile to his beliefs or skepticism in general? I’d personally think it was a bit comical if Gardner, Randi or Gould were on record saying they agreed with Shermer on most issues, but also thought he was a jerk.
That aside, from your “deconstruction”:
A meditation might help, but why is that equivalent to a prayer? Is it possible to meditate without it being a prayer? Can the mediation of others have an effect on one’s health? Does one have to know the meditation is underway? Can you define prayer and meditation for the purpose of this discussion? Can you speculate on a type of study that won’t be useless?
You’re right that it’s not a good article. You’re not right, as far as I can tell, about anything else.
Well, 1 out of 2 ain’t bad.
So the whole thing is just an exercise in flippancy?