Or maybe the universe started three seconds ago. We’ve played this game before.
There is no evidence that prayer affects anything. And if this study has any finding at all, it implies that telling someone that you are praying for them can harm them.
We aren’t. We’re testing the effect of a particular practice (i.e. praying)
Three is no way to reconcile eternal torment to any sort of coherent moral sense. It’s pure sociopathy, just defferred.
And the Jesus portrayed in Matt. 10:12-15 does consign to such punishment those who will not accept the word of His disciples.
Jesus in fact, may or may not be the first to ever suggest the idea (its certainly arguable: most other hells were arguably not “eternal” in any meaningful sense). If so, it’s probably only idea original to him.
I think you’ve made a decent argument that the existence of hell makes God a monster, but I don’t see how it makes one of his followers one.
I’ve had this debate with many religious people, because I come from a family of very devout Christians (while I stopped believing in childhood). What I’ve found is that there is a major disconnect there in the minds of believers. Some believe that God doesn’t mean it literally. Others believe that after the resurrection peopel will be given so many options to repent after having undeniable proof of God’s existence that only the truly wicked will wind up in hell.
The capacity of the religious mind to explain away or ignore inconsistencies, moral failngs, and physical evidence are without limit. That’s why I think a study like this is pretty much useless. Because if it finds that prayer does no good, the only people who will care about the results are those who already believe that.
I doubt if there is more than a handful of people out there who currently pray for whatever, who will see this study and go, “Huh. I guess prayer is useless. I’ll never do that again.”
It’s possible those who conducted the study aren’t trying to convince anyone. Maybe they just want to find out.
I think the directors of the John Templeton Foundation wanted a positive answer but that doesn’t necessarily apply to those who designed and ran the experiment.
Huh? Control the control group? Huh?
Control groups are matched populations. The statistical likelihood of the control group recieving more non-experimental prayer than the experimental group in a study of this size is infintessimal. The study can conclude that prayer using a first name and last initial by a stranger does not influence recovery rate from this sort of surgery, and that knowledge of such prayer (being a non-blinded experimental group) may be harmful. No more and no less. The objection is silly.
I’m with those who think that studying prayer scientifically is ill-concieved. Prayer and God are outside of science. I do not want religion telling science what to believe in matters of science and I do not want scientific methods telling the relgious what to believe in matters of spirituality. They are different (and potentially complementary) ways of knowing and should stay out of each others ways.
For the most part I agree with you. I think the majority of people who believe in Hell are not “monsters” or sociopaths, they just haven’t thought about it very deeply. There is a small subset, however, who honestly can’t see the moral problem with an eternal Hell no matter how much those problems are called to their attention or how much they think about it. Those people are the ones who disturb me. They are often the same people who express incredulity that people who don’t believe in God are still able to restrain themselves from going on rape and murder sprees. That kind of thinking has to make you wonder.
I’m with Voyager in Post #78. God might be outside the realm of scientific inquiry by the effect of prayer isn’t. Specific claims are made by some religious groups as to physical effects produced by prayer. That has been tested by an apparently well designed experiment and no such physical effect was found.
I concurr. And there are many believers who simply reject the concept of Hell entirely, at worst rethinking it as the harm one would do themselves by not embracing God. Good on them.
…As well as those who believe that they have no right or ability to judge the morality of God. Humility in the face of an omniscient being, and all that.
In any event, this was one of the major issues that caused me to lose faith, along with some rather disturbing events in the bible that are explained as being good things, but which clearly weren’t the actions of any kind of merciful God (I’m thinking of a passage in which two children taunt a holy man, and God sends down wild bears to rip the children to shreds, or something like that.)
None of it made any moral sense to me. As I got older and learned more about science, none of it made any scientific or logical sense, either.
However, I knew lots of wonderful people who believed in Hell. In fact, one of the things that drives many evangelicals is their desire to save as many people as possible from eternal damnation. They don’t judge God - they just try to help others avoid the fate he has in store for him. Not the actions of evil people.
Not really. No such effect was found in one specific circumstance. If I was a believer in an interventional God then I could come up with lots of explanations for such a finding. Maybe just having a first name and a last initial without really knowing who it was you were praying for just isn’t enough to direct a prayer intercessionally. Maybe God feels that faith is that which is held despite the evidence, and therefore God creates results that defy tests to prove His existance. So on and on.
The point is that those who have faith will hold to that faith despite overwhelming opposing evidence. They will, as it is told of a great sage, recite the Shma even as they are burned to death, and like Job, believe even when events surely show that God either does not exist or does not care. That is what faith is. So what can this study accomplish? Make non-believers feel smug and the religious feel attacked, not much more.
Better that science and religion offer each other their own spaces and respect each others epistemologic roles.
Exactly.
I think this particular experiment is justified on the grounds of reproducibility. There have been experiments which claim to have found positive impact of prayer, though there are doubts as to their methodology, and the PI of one was a conman, now in jail. Still, the best way of addressing such results is to attempt to reproduce them. It is not proper to only snipe from the sidelines.
It would be nice if no one else spent money on studying prayer, though the negative effect deserved is interesting, and has absolutely no supernatural component.
Except it was the religious who motivated this study. No secular scientist was demanding that we pour this much money into trying to find scientific support for an effect there was no evidence of or testible mechanism for in the first place. No secularist was making wild claims about the power of prayer for strangers.
If someone is to blame for trying to combine the two, it’s the advocates of prayer-at-a-distance healing. They claimed that there would be an effect. They tout studies that claim that there is an effect. All the “well, God would never do that” excuses don’t pop up THEN (though the "you can’t make up your result methodology after you have the results! criticism was there). It’s only when God doesn’t show up that out come the unfalisifiability excuses. You can’t have it both ways. But the people trying to have it both ways are not the “non-believers.”
One more time. No one is saying that anything will convince the true believer. And as has been said here several times, the question of the existence of God is a red herring. However, again I’ll cite Voyager. One experiment of any kind isn’t convincing. Remember cold fusion? Others must be able to duplicate it or, even better, get the same results using a different method. There have been past experiments that purported to show that prayer has an effect. They have been criticized for bad methodology. It seems to me that the Templeton folks might have set this one up in order to quiet those criticisms and put the claim for prayer on a more solid foundation. It didn’t do that and instead the critics of the past experiments were supported in their view.