But the rock did move, it the study just showed that they could not attribute the moving of the rock to the prayers they recorded (or more weakly even find a correlation). OK I am mixing metaphors or whatever here. If it assumed there is a linear realtionship between prayer and recovery then adding more prayers would have no effect. That is almost certainly the assumption here. But all you have shown is that prayer does not affect recovery in a linear fashion.
Now this is all caveated by the fact that I have not actually seen the study.
cmkeller has it. We can’t control for outside prayers, and it may be that the ‘amount’ of prayer the control group got equaled the total amount of prayer the ‘prayed for’ group got. In other words, if the people in the control group had more secret prayers praying for them, the groups may have had equal amounts of prayer.
If that were the case, both the ‘prayer works’ model and the ‘prayer doesn’t work’ model would predict the groups would recover about the same.
If they tell people in the control group not to have their friends or relatives pray for them, then it’s not a blind study.
Having said that, it’s extremely unlikely that the control group got enough ‘extra’ prayers to bring them on par with the other group, which had both organized prayers and extra prayers.
I think the way to do it would be to have the prayed for group have so many organized prayers praying for them that ‘extra’ prayers would be noise level.
OTOH, in church every week, millions are praying for ‘all who are sick or suffering,’ which makes the organized prayers noise-level numbers.
But also irrelevant since none of the groups were affected. If you want to do an experiment to see if holy water wil turn people blue, and nobody turns blue, it doen’t really matter if you can’t prove the unblessed “control” water might have been secretly blessed. The objection in this case is like saying, “yes, it’s true that no one turned blue but maybe that’s because they ALL got holy water.” The objection is senseless,
When my son prays for “all the sick people”, does his prayer get split by the number of people sick in the world at that time or do all the sick people get full credit for his prayer? Knowing this would go a long way in determining the possible effect of unknown prayers in the study.
Perhaps there is a critical mass for prayer and until the world has enough population and all pray to the same god, we’ll never know.
Seriously though, pointing out that the study failed to take in to consideration unknown prayers in crazy. They are measuring recovery and I suppose they are looking for a placebo effect on those who think they are being prayed for.
Are you referring to the finding that those who were told they were being prayed for did slightly worse (albeit at a statistically insignificant rate)?
I wouldn’t call that “moving the rock,” it’s just a completely expected normal variation.
What other fashion is there?
One trouble with similes, metaphors and analogies is that you wind up arguning about them instead of the actual case. That said, I’m not sure yours is all that good. Not enough people likely to be blessing the water at the time the experiment is done so as to average out. It seems quite likely that worldwide, there are enough praying for the sick in general to average out over the three groups in the study.
In any case, I agree with you 2/3 of the way, tending toward 3/4, that the objection isn’t a very strong one.
I havn’t seen the study either, but you are suggesting thatnone of the subjects improved at all, or the rock didn’t move. If that is the case, then you are correct. If the study was that the improvement rate didn’t change between the subjects, then the rock did move. The question is, was gravity moving both rocks, or where there 100 unknown people behind each rock pushing it.
You don’t know that they weren’t affected. How long would they have taken to get better if nobody had prayed? Or would they perhaps have died?
Even if they got better at the same rate as the population at large, those people are prayed for too.
We don’t know how well or poorly non-prayed for people get better, because you can’t get such a group.
Perhaps the human body is resilient and prayer is a non-factor. This is just as valid, some may argue that it is more, as your statements.
Well, sure. I don’t think prayer works either. I’m arguing about what conclusions may be drawn from this study. I think the criticisms of it are valid.
Maybe prayer did nothing.
Maybe everybody got about the same amount of prayer and had about the same number of complications - but fewer complications than if they’d received no prayer.
Neither model is disproved by the study.
Non-linear. Linear would imply ten times the number of prayer units (whatever those may be) would be ten times as effective. I see no reason to presume this is the correct assumption. But it is statistically far more tractable to assume that and it is a reasonable starting point. But from here, if there was a true academic concern for the issue ( which I am not really sure there is, or should be) you would ask various additional question, one of which might be: Is the realtionship a linear one. Maybe it is exponential? Perhaps it is non-continuous? Or maybe there are different factors that need to be controlled.
And the most important part of the study has been left:
With all the grant money they received, how many trips to the Bahamas did they take?
The human body recovering from heart surgery is only to be expected. Animals can heal. That’s no more remarkable in itself than a rock rolling downhill. I think the “rock” metaphor might be better served by trying to determine if chanting can make a rock roll downhill faster than rocks that aren’t chanted for. If neither group of rocks rolls any faster than what is predicted by plain old gravity and physics then I think it’s pointless to speculate that the “control” rocks (which rolled at no extraordinary rate at all) might have been secretly chanted for.
There is no indication in this study that anybody recovered at any rate or to any degree which would exceed normal expectations for the human body.
But I don’t think that’s the only kind of effect they were looking for. If all participants had recovered at rates/degrees that fall within normal ranges, but those who were prayed for had recovered significantly faster or better, on the average, than those who were not, this also would have been a significant result, one that this particular study did not find.
I think bup has it.
There wasn’t (necessarily) a control group for whom nobody prayed.
Of course, I would argue that this sort of study cannot possibly work (“You shall not tempt the Lord your God”), so it may be a moot point.
Regards,
Shodan
And nothing in this study could have disproved anything. What the study did show is that there is no son to reject the null hypothesis (prayer does not work). It also shows that the results the previous experiment about the efficacy of prayer (which had the same problems) were not reproduced.
In an experiment like this there are things you can’t control for, so the objections are nitpicking, so long as no one claims this proved anything. This is a good example of the difficulty of falsifying anything in real science. One can come up with all sorts of excuses for prayer not working, including the ones heard here, and that maybe the prayers were not effective. But the results are good enough so that someone claiming the set-up masked the power of prayer would have to come up with a protocol that took care of the problem. As of now, the null hypothesis still holds.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Everyone recovered at a perfectly ordinary rate. There was no extraordinary effect on anybody. The “rocks” rolled downhill at just the speed gravity would predict and no faster.
So is any prayer for something not tempting God? (Prayers thanking god wouldn’t fall under this.)
You might as well claim that prayer always heals, since there is a background level of prayer from people praying for the generic sick. But the change in recovery rates from the use of medicine is a strong argument against this.
So, Shodan, are you happy that government paid millions of dollars for a study that:
- proposes no testible explanatory mechanism for anything that may or may not happen in it
- that it’s funders and reserachers couldn’t care less what the results are, since they will discount any negative religious implications regardless of what happens
- you don’t think could ever work anyway
- involves an inherently unquantifiable element as is variable (i.e. private internal thoughts. For all we know, the prayers could have been thinking about Hooters the whole time, and there would be no way to know)
At the very most, this study balances out sloppy studies that claimed tha prayer had an effect. But it’s still just a crime that it ever existed, and I think the real question is what idiot greenlighted it. I mean aside from its subject matter, it was a really good study, with tons of good funding… that had absolutely no purpose whatsoever and no chance of producing a meanginful result. I mean, here’s a study that can only exist if the greenlighter has a prior religious belief in prayer (because otherwise there’s no surface plausibility to justify the study, no mechanism that can be tested), would only be done if they want to prove something about prayer… and then when it is done, they discount the results. What the hell was the point?
There is no evidence that prayer accomplishes anything relating to sending messages to a being that carries out wishes. This study is perfectly in line with that lack of evidence… but believers don’t care about evidence, so the whole project is idiotic.
We can’t prove that there has ever been a heart surgery where the healer wasn’t prayed for.
A better control might be praying for mice that vets could operate on. Assuming the test was kept secret until after the surgery, we can be fairly confident no mice in the control group were prayed for.