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Praying Doesn't Help
dannywalk writes "Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina have run a study to see if praying for sick people makes any difference. Apparently it doesn't. 'Before their operations, they were randomly split into two groups, and half were prayed for by Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims. However, checks revealed they had fared no better than those not prayed for.'"
God didn't respond to the prayers so as to test peoples' faith.
</sarcasm>
meh.
(roman catholic version, but can translate to any other religion)
then why do doctors sometimes come to the conclusion that something beyond medicine was the cure in a case where a family prayed to some saint-to-be, allowing that person to be promoted to sainthood?
eg - a family has a seriously ill child, and prays to a man/woman who has already died but worked (in a religious context) toward improving the lives of children. child recovers, and doctors are unable to explain how after investigating. several other cases of this results in that man/woman in being recognized a Saint by the Pope.
(like I said - I'm certain there are ways to translate this into Judaism, Hindi, Islam, and other religions)
where's your god now?
all you are, is all you are, i'm so sorry for you.
Hmmm, seems that perhaps we need a moderation system for article posters? (Score -1; Troll)
This is going to be a hugely active thread here, and it's not going to do anyone any good, because those who always believed that prayer was bunk are going to say "I told you so" and the people who always believed in prayer are going to say "It doesn't prove anything". And we're going to be right back where we started.
This one would have been better left to the religious websites, not the geek ones.
"Thou shalt not look to see if I am actually here." -God
Damn heathens.
Now they need to have another study: tell patients that they are being prayed for , yet don't do it, and see how well they fare. My guess: they'll have increased recovery.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
In other news, witchcraft was proven ineffective too.
It would have been far more interesting imho to check whether a group of patients praying to their own higher entity themselves would become better sooner/more often than a group of atheists and agnostics.
bkw
I wonder wether it would have made a difference if the group of "prayers" included loved ones / family members of the sick person's.
Not that I ascribe any powers to prayer, but if there is *any* phenomena that would raise odds through focus and concentration, my guess is that without a bond to the person being focused on, it wouldn't work. Sorta like concentrating on some guy named George... Even if some as-yet-undiscovered psychic phenomena would be helpful, how helpful would it be for poor George, if no-one can even find his.... eh, what should we call it? person? body? mind?
Waddya think?
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Maybe the sick people were telemarketers...
Apparently it doesn't.
But it doesn't hurt. You know, as a backup plan, just in case that UFO behind the comet doesn't get here in time to save me.
Uh oh, I've said too much.
This one is really straightforward to explain. You see, in addition to prayer by the One True Religion, the prayers of infidels were also mixed in. Since the prayers of infidels are actually prayers to the Dark One who does the opposite of what was asked, these amount to anti-prayers. Hence they cancelled out their results.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
How would a scientist claim that he removed a deity from the control group? How could the scientist prove this?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
The prayer itself is not the point.
Remember this slash article about the pain of rejection?
What scientists should be looking at is the power of positive thought and feeling of social acceptance in improving quality of life for recovery.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*beware the cute-bunny virus
Other recent discoveries of the same calibre:
...
:)
Pigs can't fly
Earth isn't flat
Just to say that it's not really such a surprise to me
If only I could come up with a good sig
Jeez. Way to depress an already morose population.
"In other news, today it was scientifically proven that life sucks for you, yes you, and always will..."
Oh YEAH! In your FACE, Mrs. "Please God help my kid beat cancer"! Woo!
*does endzone dance*
Who's the man?
Who's the man?
Not God!
YEE-HAW!
But, did it hurt ? There was no significant decrease in the well-being of the patients who where prayed for, so what's the big deal? If Duke had discovered a statistical difference, do you think they would have begun classes for prayer for patients? Sometimes the arrogance of academia astounds even me, and I'm jaded as all getout ...
is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
So the editors are trolls now? For every scientific study "proving" that prayer doesn't work, there's one proving that it does. For example, look at this Wired article which talks about a faith healing study done at UC San Francisco Medical Center. It's just one of many. Nobody who believes in prayer will be swayed by this report, and those who don't believe won't be swayed by the one I linked to. Pointless article in a slow news week.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
also with the conclusion that healing by prayer is basically a load of bollox.
Faith healing only works if everyone involved has no doubt that it will work. Meaning everyone believes the person will be healed. This is shown many times when Jesus is healing the sick, just because they believe in him. If you recall he didn't perform many miracles in his hometown because no one there had believed he was the Christ. If you would like some scripture references let me know and I will post them at lunch.
There is a long tradition in most religions of Prayer for the sick. Do I belive G-d may cause a sick person to become well due to prayer, yes. Do I belive G-d will always do this, or do it on a regular basis, no. I belive miracles are posible and do happen, but not on a regular basis. After all if I was sick with cancer and knew that I could become well by getting a bunch of my friends to pray for me, I would do that and not go to a doctor.
It should be noted that a large number of Rabbis over the years have also been doctors both in Medieval times and modern times.
If you ask me its a silly study.
For the record I have a degree in physics and consider myself very much to be a religous person.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
"Praying to God won't help you now! I fragged him last Tuesday."
Project Steve
For one, it means that my research project is doomed. Not even God can save it, it seems.
More than mere navel gazing.
Being a somewhat slacking Roman Catholic, I look at the people who pray for various things, (especially other people's health), and I've realized that while I have no idea whether the prayer helps the person prayed for or not, it does definitely help the person praying. Sometimes people feel helpless, like there is nothing they can do when someone they love is dying, and prayer gives them some hope that they are doing something to help out.
As well, prayer research studies are hard to rate because there will always be questions of faith of those in the study, whether connectedness is important, and what the one "true faith" is. All of which will alway make is easy to discount/support any conclusions.
Personally, I take prayer from a very sociological and psychological viewpoint. It provides some form of hope to people who feel otherwise helpless. It gives them the opportunity to feel that they can do something, anything to change what they feel needs to be changed.
Whether it works or not, in the end, is irrelevant.
~ kjrose
Nothing fails like prayer!
It would be far more interesting, IMO, to change or add a variable: which patients know that there is someone praying for them.
Tell some that there will be prayers for them, others that there will not (or will not know for certain). The power of beleif and the want to be well are very powerful forces, I'd wager.
Please, do not read this sig
Being prayed for by others obviously wont help your odds in any activity. But I'm a firm believer in mind over matter. The placebo effect is great evidence of this. If someone truly believes that they will survive through some surgery, or live another day because of some deity or something, then they probably will. Their religeon, deity, values and morals could all be completely false and it doesn't matter. Because in their brain they truly believe that X will happen, it does. Because you truly believe a surgar pill is actually the perfect cure for your ailment, it will be.
That's my real problem with religeon is that it gives some imaginary omiscient being credit for the achievments of flesh and blood people.
"Save me Jebus!"
Jebus didn't save you, you saved you. Because you believed you would survive the surgery, you did. It had nothing to do with your Jebus, who is completely imaginary and such.
I probably could have gotten my point across in fewer and better words, but I'm too lazy now.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I don't get it. Why try and apply the scientific method to faith? That's just silly. God isn't Santa Claus; HE IS GOD! Duh! I'm sure God is a bit wiser than us (if you have faith that he is omniscient, omnipresent, etc. - basically infinitely perfect in all things). Why a scientist would try to apply a 4 dimensional measuring system to an infinite being (God) is beyond my comprehension.
C'mon, logically, either you believe in God or you don't. You can't measure that. You can infer by a person's actions with a high amount of accuracy that they do or don't believe in God, and that miracles are or are not possible, but you can't ultimately prove it one way or another. Let me guess, this was a US GOVERNMENT funded study, wasn't it?
ROFFLES, you can't pray like that, and especially not to all the different gods, they will start fighting and possibly make it worse(I guess they are busy fighting each other though).
Stupid gods... *ouch*... stup... err... never mind.
The classic essay on "worse is better" is either misunderstood
Thanks for posting this wonderful article so the large Anti-Christian (or Anti-[Insert Faith Here] for that matter) Slashdot community can let their mindless God bashing begin.
I'm sure God loves to be involved in "scientific studies". How many times have you stopped to take a survey by those freaking people that stand there in the shopping mall?
Dr Richard Sloan, from the New York Presbyterian Hospital, described the concept of a prayer "dose" as "absurd".
He said: "It requires us to abandon our understanding of the physical universe."
That's right Doctor, faith does involve a thing called faith.
Klowner
Turns out it made no difference at all. Having a Holy Joe on board means you get no better chance of not swimming with the fishies.
So the logical conclusion is that obviously the Moslems or the Jews are right, and they just chose the wrong religion to test :-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"That someone felt this study needed to be done? or that someone might be surprised by the results?
or is it that they didn't test the various belief systems against each other? - maybe they were afraid of the results.
obviously to do this pointless study right people would have to be segregated by religion, seeing as most religions feel that the others are wrong, and therefore the praying won't work.
either way its a bunch of nonsense.
I'm inclined to think that the first two would be strong 'yes' answers, myself, because a sense of hope and a sense of support are two of the important factors in a patient's prognosis. Having family and friends praying for you demonstrates a very strong community of support, and that's a subject for sociological study of patient outcomes. It's aslo common sense.
My guess is that they were trying to isolate prayer from the other support that tends to accompany it- a sense of family and place in a group, the small touches like bringing in food and news and congregational visitors to keep a sense of connection with the outside world. But i think that they failed, because even if it were a higher power, we don't know that that higher power is more or less influenced by strangers praying for strangers, whether fervency inreases prayer's effectiveness, or relation to the prayed for (prayed upon? i know, bad pun, bad pun...)
But a point for you, for bringing up that article, because that's what i thought of, too...
sol
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
Perhaps it's the pray-er and not the pray-ee that benefits by feeling better that they are trying to make a difference.
if we could see what difference it would make if one group of patients was told they were prayed for and the other wasn't.
The earth is not flat.
You know, wishing won't make it so
Hoping won't do it, praying won't do it
Religion won't do it, philosophy won't do it
The supreme court won't do it,
the president and the congress won't do it
The UN won't do it, the H-bomb won't do it,
the sun and the moon won't do it
And God won't do it,
and I certainly won't do it
That leaves you, you'll have to do it
you wanna tell me there is no God, well, there is, but you are the furtheset to know he is there, you will only realize it when you are being stummped over by a cumming elephant having a blow job , MAY YOU ROT IN HELL YOU FAGOT...
Seat belts do save lives, and there is a strong correlation between wearing seat belts and surviving car crashes.
There is not a correlation between heart surgery success rate and prayer, when the circumstances are extra people praying for randomly chosen patients.
Your parable may mislead people into thinking that prayer is as powerful as seat belts. It was not in this case. I would love to see a case in which it is as powerful as seat belts.
-Numinous
Isn't the typical Christain position something like "God requires our faith". If so, wouldn't God have to not answer these prayers to keep Man from proving stuff that Man is not supposed to?
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
It's the "Heidelberg Uncertainty Principle".
;)
By trying to measure the effectiveness of "prayer", you interfere with it.
That is, you can't measure its effectiveness and believe in its effectiveness at the same time.
is belied by the sorry condition of M and J's ships of state. If God were protecting one or the other it should have been evident by now. Unless. . . of course! THE UNITED STATES IS GOD!
illegitimii non ingravare
They should get some of the patients to pray for the others, and see if the ones who pray do better. Then, they should tell some of the patients they're being prayed for, and see if those do better than the ones they don't tell.
This study could be valuable if it provides a baseline set of procedures for studying questions like this. That they didn't find any difference suggests that their methods are sound.
There was a psychologist who spent an enormous amount of time running rats in mazes and figuring out how to keep them from being able to solve the maze by any means except memory. It turned out to be really hard. Later research has mostly ignored his methods, and got mostly meaningless results, because rats are good at using all kinds of clues to tell where they are and where other rats have been.
"After all if I was sick with cancer and knew that I could become well by getting a bunch of my friends to pray for me, I would do that and not go to a doctor."
So... if God healed people, then it would make doctors unnecessary, and we would not have to suffer from evil things in nature? Sounds wonderful!
-Numinous
Now, do you know what I mean?
Also, bear in mind, that I did say that it was a crude illustration. If people can't see it for what it's worth, then I can't do anything about it, because there is only so much that I can do. I'll try to be clearer next time.I wish that I could give you 1. Then I'd be able to put the whole discussion to rest, for everybody. However, when you are dealing with people, it's really hard to quantify them. God is a living being according to the Bible, so even though he may have a set flow chart for how he decides who to help, it may be so complex that everything seems random.
Let's use a down to earth illustration. Most people have managers over them. The workers may be consistent & fair the whole time of their employment, but funny things happen with people, & problems occur. Sometimes we get fired through no fault of our own. I guess you could argue, "Ah, that means God fires people unfairly!". Well, that's not the point of my illustration. My point is that the world is complex, & even though there is a specific reason for everything, it is too hard to predict the outcome, based only on a few variables. I would argue that getting God to heal people physically in a measurable way is possible, but it is difficult to do because there are so many factors.
Perhaps a better example is charitable giving. There are things that they can do to increase donations. However, does that guarantee that everybody will give? Does that mean that they will give more? Does it mean that organizations will need to implement the same techniques everywhere? I don't think that they need to implement the same kind of techniques everywhere because people give through other channels, in different cultures & contexts. However, it does help overall to use the same techniques.
Looking @ it from the relationship point of view, I don't think that he wants to be ignored just because he already intends to heal some1.
I hope that helps. I don't expect my words to win souls, but rather to give a solid understanding of why my point of view is very logical & valid.
testing out my trending skills
I think he was pointing out "for extreme car crashes" (like falling off a very steep and high cliff), even seatbelts won't help. That example should not stop people from using seatbelts, because 'minor' car crashes, seatbelts DO help. Same is with prayer (not necessarily medically, but just with everyday life). You may agree or disagree with this, but I'm just expanding on eugenes analogy for the point you may have missed.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Two tests were run.. one a while ago with a smaller group, and one now with a larger group and more rigorous conditions. Ok, but I'm wondering how the discrepancy is being accounted for?
Remember people, the scientific method doesn't favor any particular hypothesis over any other.
I'd like to know why the first test succeeded and the second failed. Maybe we can learn what happened in the first and do that more and help people recover from sickness more effictively.
Stupid Presidents dont work either! who knew!
Did any of the peoplr praying benefit from the prayers?
The middle mind speaks!
Why try to apply science to God? Because God is a fundamental influence to many peoples lives. Because people justify their entire moral system on a book written a couple of thousand years ago because they believe it is the word of God. Because people have, and continue to kill each other in God's name.
People complain that scientists do research which is unrelated to "real peoples lives". Well you don't get much more relevant to real people than this.
Imagine what a storm this research would have caused in the scientific world if it had been found that prayer DID help people get better.
It didn't. But still, it's an interesting result. It shows that either:
1. God doesn't exist.
2. God does exist, but doesn't listen to calls for help from humans he supposedly loves. This leads me to question how loving/compassionate he really is. If I were God, I would help people, which is one reason I could never be a Christian: I couldn't worship a God I knew was less loving/compassionate than myself.
3. God does exist and he does listen to people, but not when it could lead to his existence being proved. Again, I'd question the value of a God who is more concerned with blind worship from people than he is with helping the people he loves.
The whole concept of scientifically testing prayer is ridiculous, anyway. Prayer is -- at the end of the day -- a request to suspend the concept of cause and effect. "I want this to happen, even though it shouldn't." The problem is, any scientific test of prayer relies on cause and effect to demonstrate that prayer works. "I pray, therefore cause-and-effect don't apply."
Well, that is certainly one interpretation. However, let me propose another (which could be scientifically proven or disproven by expirement, I might add):
Premise 1 / Hypothesis 1: There is a low level empathic or perhaps even modestly telepathic ability inherent in all humans (and/or animals, but not relevant for now).
Premise 2 / Hypothesis 2: Empathic support, whether through touching, verbal communication or other human-to-human communication builds confidence, strength and desire (to live / get well / etc..) in human beings. This translates into a higher probability for recovery.
Premise 3 / Hypothesis 3: The act of praying for another (known and loved) individual activates our innate empathic / mildly telepathic abilities and results in feelings of support in the target individual.
Conclusion 1: The act of praying results in feelings of support, love, etc.. and therefore results in a higher probability of recovery in the target individual.
While I am postulating this argument scientifically, those more theological amung us may look upon this, if it were true (and it may well not be) as simply the means by which their respective higher power allows prayer to operate and manifest results. It in no way cancels faith, in fact, like so much of science, it just takes the mystery away. The more theologically minded viewers will be quick to interpret this happily through their "faith" perspective. And that's cool.
What I was trying to say before, and clarifying here, is (A) This sort of research is useful, and should have many control groups (including those with real bonds to the target) and (B) It is science, what we will discover (if anything) will be natural phenomena and (C) It should not be scary to those who have "faith". In fact, if results are real, you should be gleeful of these tests - they will show that to be the case, and as always, will show that god's hand (choose your god, or whether this sentence is even meaningful to you) in our reality plays by the rules of that reality.
To those of you who may have a problem with hypothesis of empathy / telepathy, I will say only this: Inductance proves that signals can be passed between similar circuits. The physics works. While the math shows that the amount of signal available between two human brains is probably too miniscule to be "interpreted", we also have to remember that the brain is an incredibly complex, highly adapted and specialized organ. Also remember that billions of years of evolution, squeezing every imaginable advantage out of reality is working in our brains and that electromagnetsim may not be the only means for communication between these circuits to operate. Who knows, there may even be quantum entanglement factors or other such weirdness that could come into play). We are early on in the search for how our own minds operate and we shouldn't be too quick to discount the possible, even if seemingly unlikely.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Why would God be against being tested? If he wanted people to "believe" in him, why would he be against showing himself? Beware: rant destroying Christianity: Why is "believing" necessary anyways? I do not require you to be certain that I exist in order for you to be friends with me. Why would God require this? (It would be silly if he did, especially since we cant be certain of his Truth, and faith is self deceiving [See THE BOX]) And there is that problem of God hating sin, and if a sinner is in his presence, the sinner dies. If you were to do something awful to me in my opinion, then you asked me to forgive you, I would forgive, independent of weather you are certain of my existence. Lets say we asked for forgiveness for our sins, and then God would accept if we were genuine (and he would know our genuine-ness since he knows everything). Then we would be forgiven. Then we wouldn't have to worry about blowing up (or whatever happens when sinners are in the presence of God). Then we could hang out with God! Except, for some reason... God wont hang out with me : ( =====THE BOX===== You think you can be certain? Imagine a box, you cant sense anything inside it, and you have no way of learning any information about what is inside the box. Can you know the Truth of what is in the box? Imagine a box, and you can sense whats in the box, and you are given a whole bunch of information about what is in the box. Also, you know that you cannot trust your senses, and you cannot trust any information given. Can you know the Truth of what is in the box? Imagine a box, and you can sense whats in the box, and you are given a whole bunch of information about what is in the box. Also, you are uncertain of weather you can trust your senses and the information. Can you know the Truth of what is in the box? =====THE BOX===== The box is your experience of life (or whatever experiences you may have), and indeed presently, we cannot know the Truth of our experience. Certainty is knowing what is inside the box, and there is no possibility of being wrong. Maybe one day, after we learn a whole bunch of stuff about what is in the box, and what we are, and learn about the box, we can figure out if we can trust our senses and information. Then we might be able to be certain. Faith is deceiving to yourself that you are certain of what is in the box, even though you know that it is possible that you could be wrong. God did not give us the ability to be certain. He did give us the ability to have Faith. But why would God want us to have Faith? Faith deceives us from the truth of our current situation in our box/existence. Why would God want us to be deceived? Faith seems silly to me. -Numinous
Everyone knows a patient's positive thought helps heal. That's not worthy of investigation. This experiment was trying to detect whether prayer helps.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I'm not going to speculate whether god exists or prayer works. (Shocking.) But I'm trying to reason through why people continue to pray, even when results aren't observed...
1. Person of faith prays for X to happen.
2. One of two outcomes occurs:
a. X happens. God answered prayer and/or it was god's will,
so existence of god confirmed and person's faith grows.
(More prayers to follow!)
b. X doesn't happen. Person of faith believes it was god's will,
so existence of god confirmed and person's faith grows.
(More prayers to follow!)
Results don't matter! I can see why people would continue to pray, but the feedback loop in the reasoning kind of sickens me from a "truth" perspective.
This god geezer has it all thought out, hasn't he? There's just nothing a rational man can do to measure this god geezer in an objective and repeatable way that will stand up to peer review.
Stick Men
if you know it works that way. Why not go and visit them everyday, without praying like you used to. Share your love and hope for them, and bond with them in a non-religious way. At least then you don't get the wackos screaming that god is dead after their dear are dead and departed. Just cuz religion works doesn't mean it's the only solution. In fact, religion carry's a lot of baggage, so it'd be my last solution.
Photos.
Well, on the one hand a few catholic cancer survivors get to live past their life expectancy. They're probably in first world countries anyway and have allready outlived most of the world pop. But it's nice because more people are alive cuz of prayer. Then they go back home, and continue to fund a murderous organization taht perpetuates spread of the aids virus in africa. And last time I checked, all the praying they were doing didn't help a damn soul. Religion carries too much baggage. It's a dangerous tool, can be used for good or evil. But mostly evil it seems.
Photos.
From a scientific perspective, there are WAY too many variables to do a concluesive study. From a Christian perspective, the Bible says, "The fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." I would question the fervency of the people praying. They are praying for people they don't know, and maybe have never met. Were they paid to do this? Were they told it was for a study? You aren't going to pray as hard for someone you don't know as you will for a family member. Also, as was mentioned, God may be trying to get their attention, and the illness is the only way to do that.
On a personal note, my grandmother had non-hodgkins lymphoma. After many months of prayer, she was healed. The doctors were shocked and said it was a miracle. Can I prove the prayer did it? No. If I could, we wouldn't need faith anymore. I've seen prayer change things, but you can explain away anything if you put your mind to it. The mind is the most powerful tool we have, and also the most dangerous weapon.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
The biggest problem with your argument in favor of highly selective skepticism is that this testable: we can study the data and determine whether it really helps. The subject study on prayer says it doesn't help - if there's a signal in the noise, they can't find it. However, there is a a clear signal in the seatbelt data.
I'll bet snake oil doesn't help much either. But wait, there are more factors then whether or not you took your snake oil! Just because snake oil fails, it doesn't mean it never works! It works just fine if you, uh, don't get sick in the first place...
OTOH, your belief in a god who is just a little tiny bit powerful is an interesting throwback.
Helium balloons want to be free.
But from a scientific perspective, there is a strong correlation between The Power Of Positive Thinking(tm) and well-being.
You may have terminal cancer, but if you're thinking positive, you're more likely to: exercise, eat right, abstain from things like smoking and drinking, all that stuff. Moreover your body is more likely to produce its own happy enzymes and chemicals (endorphins, etc) than when you're depressed and morose (most likely because you're moving around, eating right, etc).
HOW you achieve this state of positive nature is up to you. As it happens, many people feel better as a result of prayer; and not prayer alone, but the sense of community and belonging that comes with it. Church gets you out of the house; you meet new people, who you probably identify with; you abstain from risky behavior.
Is it the force of God that helps, really? Well like you say, if it was conclusive, who needs faith? But for an secular atheist like me, I say "keep up with the faith", because no matter what you pray to, it almost certainly isn't going to harm. The fact is, it often helps. It may not cure cancer, but it may make living tolerable.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
This is getting to be a very tired strawman, so let me put it as simply as I know how: you don't have to ASSUME something is bunk to CONCLUDE that something (say, Peter Popoff's performances, or a pyramid scheme) is bunk. The conclusion may not be silly at all.
Helium balloons want to be free.
Do you think that if religions were to teach faith in humanity first that it would result in a more tolerent society insofar as others' beliefs?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Outcome: Prayer works
Christian: Nah Nah, told ya so! God passed the test!
Outcome: Prayer doesn't work
Christian: Nah Nah, told ya so. God doesn't like to be tested. now stop trying to know stuff! LALALA can't hear you anymore LALALALA
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
Wow, as soon as I read this article I picked up my palm and started looking for that exact verse, with that exact same logic.
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
...Someone prayed for this experiment to fail.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
www.spirtiuality.com
This could be broken down by religeon, income, and various other stats to check for biases.
-- Stephen.
What were these researchers trying to do, anyway? Build a God-meter?
Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to him, "Teacher, we want to see a miraculous sign from you."
39He answered, "A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
From Mat 12:38-40
On the Friend List. Thanks for actual thought in your post.
jason
Imagine if the prayed-for had done significantly better. Later a family finds out their father, who died, was randomnly chosen to not be prayed for.
Imagine if the prayed-for group had done significanly worse. Later a very conservative bible thumping Christian family (this is Duke of course) finds out the hospital had Muslims asking Allah to intervene for their father, who then died.
I think they're very lucky no effect was seen.
Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina have run a study to see if praying for sick people makes any difference. Apparently there is no God...
::i visited slashdot and all i got was this lousy sig::
That's a pretty tortured apology, when a simpler explanation is that it just doesn't work.
So is it your contention that these prayers would work if they weren't being studied?
That's so laden with hidden assumptions I'm not going to untangle it. Exercise left to the intellectually honest Believer (empty set?). But I would assert that we are talking about a measuring purely human phenomenon here. People got sick. People prayed for some of them. No evidence was found that it helped. No reference to the God of the Bible (which Bible?). No need to invoke a particular canon or reference any given dogma.
Helium balloons want to be free.
Great minds think alike... ;-)
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
I'm sure it would, but is that necessarily a good thing? Is tolerance the end all and be all virtue? Should I tolerate people committing horrible acts against others? Should I tolerate falseness and lies? Tolerance without any guiding morality is no virtue.
As a Christian, I am extremely tolerant. The Bible tells me not to judge others, that is reserved for God. I can exist peacefully with all sorts of people. I believe in the freedom of religious expression. I have no problems with people of any faith or of no faith, I get along with them all. But I do believe in an all-powerful God, who has set up moral standards and sent his son to save us from sin. Does that suddenly make me intolerant? Or incoherent? Well, I may be incoherent at times, but I don't think it has anything to do with my faith :-)
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Do you think that if religions were to teach faith in humanity first that it would result in a more tolerent society insofar as others' beliefs?
No. My religion teaches love of all people regardless of faith, race, creed, religion, Operation System, etc. However, there are WAY TOO MANY Christians that go around judging everyone, never looking at what is wrong in their own lives. Unfortunately, there will always be people who are intolerant, racist, hateful, or just plain mean.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
Actually I'd rather think of it as "Holy Spirit Led minds think alike"
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
Christianity would admonish us by making us think of the individuals that make up these masses of; suburbanite stock that waddle in convience, as pop stars revel in mediocrity, and presidents mangle sentences worse than eliza as worthy of some owed respect. I choose instead to lay the shame at those that prevent us from potentially realizing social and technological progress by worshipping these piss poor implementations of human life. Why most we contend with wage slaves, middle managers, and such? Why must others be forced to serve me for a living wage, or for me to submit to others for my own? What age of ramshackle justifications for exertion of power over anyone and everyone do we live in? Companies run like dictatorships, this should incite revolution; yet, people are fat with money and hope of more of it.
Given limited resources (such as time, space, and emotion) I grow weary of the pitiful and think we need no justifications to be wholly indifferent toward them. I am not talking about the poor or any general class like that, but those of any class that would have us serve equality at the price of our freedom.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
God has told me that he likes being tested but only if castarate yourself and eat your own penius with fava beans while listening to the band Roxy Music. If you do so he will arrange the fava beans in words to prove his existance.
St Linzeal 16/10/03
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Duke medical center discovered that if you transplant organs from a donor with the wrong blood type the patient that gets them will die.
Maybe they should start reading charts more and studing praying less.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Comments unnecessary. Instead, check this out: http://www.the-brights.net/
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
. . . who pointed out that a true prayer by a Christian, given the duties of Christian charity, could never be "heal this person but let the people I'm not praying for suffer."
Taken to the logical consequence, then, such an experiment can never give evidence that Christianity is true; in fact, a differential rate may constitute evidence that Christianity is false.
Seriously, I think you're full of hooey. (Where's the survey? Conducted by whom?) And even if "most scientists" disagree, it's a fact that "most scientists" are not cosmologists; they are not the people actually studying the matter. Among cosmologists there is no question and has not been since the discovery of the CBR; everyone else is outside their field and their opinion is worthless.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
I think we can all agree that for many people prayer can have a powerful placebo effect. But the thought that any person would believe, with all we have learned through science, that through the mere act of thinking something to yourself (i.e. praying) you can make some arbitrary event happen (in this case heal the sick), bums me out because I would like to think humans would have learned by now that if you want something done you have to DO something, not just hope for it.
Mod points are no substitute for reasoned debate.
I'm not religious, but it seems to me that the study is a reasonable one to do. If it turned out that prayer had a measurable, salutary, repeatable effect, that would have meant that there was something going on that would be worth investigating further.
On the other hand, if there's no difference, it doesn't disprove God or prayer. Even though I'm not a believer, I know that the *theory* is that there is a God listening to the prayers who isn't an automaton but an omniscient and omnipotent being. Such a being could presumably cause the test to come out any way he chose. If his purpose is to test people's faith, that purpose would not be well served if anybody could discover the reality of God with no need for any faith at all by simple scientific experiments.
So it's just a test to see what would happen. If something did, it would be worth looking into further. If nothing happened (results uncorrelated to prayer), then it doesn't appear to prove anything more than that there is no automatic benefit or harm from prayer performed in this manner. All the Big Questions are still there.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Only Jedis can heal with prayer(a.k.a. The Force)!
This is not really a test, but a request to be with his greatness. I would like to know what he thinks, from my own senses (like my ears). I would like to ask him some questions, and answer any questions he might have (seems unlikely). It would be nice just have some sort of conversation with him, where he actually says something back.
Yet he does nothing. He loves me (as some say), but he does not take a moment of his infinate amount of time to even say "hi" to me. Isn't there something wrong with this? Is there something that I am missing?
This is not quite a test. Wouldn't it be in God's interest to fulfill my request? Especially since he loves me and wants me to love him too?
-Numinous
is it just me or does this seem really sick? now i've never been very religious or anything, but you would think that prayer has to have some meaning. from what i've heard people (who are very religious) say, you have to actually *feel* something in order to believe that any effect is possible. if you just mass market this 'prayer study' thing, and send out emails to random people who have never even met the people they are praying for, of course it's not going to do any good, because nobody really cares! science is wonderful, but it doesn't mix well with religion.
that prayer was a non statistical phenomenon. With significant quantities of test subjects--i.e. atoms--quantum behavior disappears. Not to say that the two are linked, only that statistical analysis tends to sum behaviors and silence abnormalities--by design. My oppinion, of course, does not bode well for those who are looking for empirical evidence of prayer working. It also does not prove that prayer could work. Simply, I would conjecture that most behaviors dissapear in statistically significant populations of subjects.
i am so very tired....
Maybe one religion was praying for healing and another was praying for sickness.
I once heard somebody pray for the immediate immolation of a small mediteranean country, so I have to guess that studies like this are a phenominal waste of money given the degree of conflicting opinions about God out there.
Fast machines, powerfull AI, impulsive invention,... All I lack is a good espresso machine!
Except that that is the point. Doing those things will statistically increase donations. That is scientifically measurable, and the basis of the whole concept of marketing. This study did exactly that, using long-proven scientific methods, and found that praying did not statistically increase anything. Either your analogy is crap, or you are saying that God said, "These people are unknowing participants in this study, so I will punish them. I cannot allow these researchers to have any evidence that I exist, so I will just ignore all of the devoted prayers I normally would have answered." Is that the God you worship?
True.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
In that case, it might be said that prayer DOES help -- it makes the people who DO the praying feel like they did something. That by itself may give them some sense of peace instead of a feeling of powerlessness.
I plan to plan / Dutch course in The Hague
I have the theory that the way people use and experience religion is often a reflection of their already existing ideas and prejudices. Someone who is naturally tolerant will indeed pick up all the bits about not judging others, turning the other cheek, etc. On the other hand, the same religion is used as a basis for homophobia and xenophobia. I'm not amused with people who go "god hates gays", because they found several passages out of context. If you're going to nitpick over out-of-context passages, you could use the same argumentation style to defend a whole bunch of obviously wrong things.
You are apparently tolerant, but there are MANY passages in the bible which preach a severe form of INtolerance. Just look at Exodus, where all the firstborn kids in Egypt were slaughtered because of the decisions of their *unelected* leader. According to the bible, it is OK to murder people for a variety of trivial reasons. Such things rank high among the reasons that people like me cannot take the bible seriously as a guide on morality. I'm not unwilling to accept the concept of one or more gods, but I firmly refuse to accept such an insulting description of such a being.
I plan to plan / Dutch course in The Hague
I have only seen the abstract (not the full report), but it looked very much like they measured everything they could find in the kitchen sink, and reported that handful where the test group got luckier than the control group. But basic statistics says 5% of those tests should be significant at the standard alpha=0.05 even if the scores were just random noise. If they were not even able to find some faux significant results after scumming the data that way, they should have recognized that they really had a problem. And yet they chose to publish it anyway, as if they had discovered something worth reporting...Mmmm, yes. Is that supposed to be an experimental control? How do they know that someone in the control group didn't benefit from unathorized prayers evoked by a "pray for little Johnny" chain letter?
These are grotesquely flawed studies. The first one should never have been published, and they only reason you've ever heard of it is because lots of people who don't understand experiments think it supports their righteous agenda.
And of course, if the first one hadn't been published there wouldn't have been any need to publish the new one either...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Thats a great point. I think I saw other people suggest that if you are at peace in your mind, your healing may go faster. We don't know all the secrets of the mind, but it is said that your thoughts can both help and hinder your physical self (trying -not- to sound like L.Ron Hubbard, btw) ;-)
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Google pointed me to this little essay by a believer.
Helium balloons want to be free.
- It's the behavior of people which is bullshit. (Like the people who repeat the fallacies of the argument from ignorance or the argument from antiquity, as if either one validates their point rather than proving their lack of support for their conclusion.)
- It's a logical impossibility to prove a negative (as you should have known had you ever studied logic). Besides, the burden of proof lies on the person making the assertion.
Extensively documented. If you can't even be bothered to stay current with popular publications like Science News, you can look up "Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe" on the web and start there; a search on the reason that the Hubble space telescope got that name would enlighten you also (hint, it's because of the Hubble recession, which is a consequence of the Big Bang). If you think that the USA would spend hundreds of millions to investigate "bullshit", and that thousands of researchers would put their support behind this rather than other fields of inquiry, you're in worse shape than I thought. You make me fear for the future of science education in the United States, and I hope you are never paid to teach your misconceptions to others.Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Prayer by strangers probably isn't as much.
Have you read my journal today?
Would the patients have fared better if they prayed to Cthulu or Zoroaster?
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
while (1) {
pray();
bang_head_against_wall();
sleep(rnd(0));
}
that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee..
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Who said there's a unique center of the universe? Not me. I know my 2 year-old thinks SHE's the center of the universe, but it will be a year or two before she can submit such a tightly reasoned post to Slashdot.
who says spacetime existed at all before the Big Bang? Not me - it may be meaningless to talk about "before."
Maybe try reading this. I don't agree with everything he says (e.g., no evidence that faith is innate IMO), but at least it's not incoherent rubbish. It seems from the conversations I've had that nearly all thoughtful, well educated Christians now reject the GotG.
Also, I'd recommend lsitening to (or at least reading the libretto of) Schoenberg's Moses und Aron . In addition to being one of the greatest achievements in music in the last 100 years, it's a powerful meditation on theism (Schoenberg was a Jew).
Helium balloons want to be free.
The next time you decide to conduct a real scientific experiment, make sure that all variables are equal: God having no incentive to heal anybody; God willing to jump @ a moment's notice ["Jump!" "How high?"] by healing only those who were prayed for. I will always contend that when you try & force God to answer to your every whim, then you won't have enough sample data.
testing out my trending skills
If the result of the Duke study had been positive, you woudn't see a single post here about "not testing God."
Unless, that is, it turned out that one denomination's prayers were more efficacious than the rest.
Helium balloons want to be free.
Let me draw an analogy for you. If I find some skid marks in the road ending at some broken glass, and a dead deer 30 feet away from the broken glass in the direction away from the skid marks, I don't go invoking divine explanations for the evidence. I conclude that a vehicle hit the deer and drove away, because that is the most parsimonious explanation which fits all the evidence. If I found a gunshot wound in the deer and found that the glass was actually leaded crystal I might entertain the possibility that the scene was actually set up by some performance artists who are also hunters, but that sure isn't going to be the first take.
I'm guessing vehicle. You're insisting performance artists. I laugh at you.
You're implying that there is a contradiction between believing the evidence which proves there was a Big Bang, and being religious. This is a false dichotomy. I am not an atheist, I am a militant agnostic. My war-cry is "I don't know, and you don't either!". If you don't have evidence to back up your claims, expect to be pressed to produce it and dismissed out of hand if you won't. Before you can find the truth, you first have to admit what you don't know.Speaking of evidence, you have claimed twice that many "scientists" (qualifications unknown) don't believe in the Big Bang. I ask you for the third and last time: how do you know this (who performed the survey, who was surveyed, et cetera).
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Now they need to have another study: tell patients that they are being prayed for , yet don't do it, and see how well they fare. My guess: they'll have increased recovery.
You guess is that the placebo effect exists?
Good guess.
You can't take the sky from me...
>
> That's pretty rich, in light of all of the appalling tests which Job had to endure at God's hand. What happened to 'do unto others....?
And the Lord God answered Job out of the Whirlwind: "Dude. I'm God. That's why. Deal."
What makes the story interesting is that Job, unlike his friends, and unlike how most of us would react, Dealt.
----
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Great minds think alike
And so do fucking morons.
50 people pray for healing
50 people prey for death and a big inheiritance.
Hmmm?
Just kidding. I'm an atheist and accept the scientific findings at face value.
In order to probe that faith in a god is a
supreme waste of time?
In order to probe that faith is akin to a farytale comparable to believing in gnomes, Santa Claus and the monster of Loch Ness?
In order to probe that to guide our lives based in the "wisdom" of some middle eastern sheperds that lived 3000 years ago is not very wise?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I ma atheist. Very different.
I pitty religious people, so much energy into a mindless endeavour is truly heart wrenching.
And my "god" bashing is not mindless, I use all the might of my reason to arrive to a conclussion: there is no god.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The harder you try to know "God", the less you know about "man"... and vicea versa.
__
David Barry reference:
"Schrodinger's Soul" would be a great name for a band...
"Fear is the rootkit of democracy.." Blarkon
Well, duh. That just cancels it out. Half of those prayers went to God, and half went to Satan.
That's like giving someone half a dose of medicine, and half a dose of poison. They don't get better, and you say: "See! Medicine no good."
Take it from someone belonging to a religion which has been roundly persecuted by so-called "tolerant Christians", almost to the point of extinction. If the Bible teaches that Christians should be tolerant, then a whole lot of Christians are going to hell.
[Yes, Mormons have intolerance streaks too -- but at least we can admit it]
I'd also like to relate a joke I heard recently:
The joke is especially funny to me, because the only prayer I have had (clearly and immediately) answered was not delivered any particular position, only from the heart.
__CmdrTHAC0__
In Soviet Russia, Spanish Inquisition doesn't expect YOU!!
In the first case, life would suddenly change its meaning entirely. All men and women of logic and reason would suddenly have no choice but to accept religion and pray to God. In fact, free will would rather lose its meaning. What choice is there to make? If you've already seen it proven beyond a reasonable doubt that illness is healed by prayer, everyone would pray. "Belief" and "faith" would cease to be meaningful words - you would no longer "believe" in God, you would simply make requests, demands or entreaties of him. Only the most irrational and stubborn of people would insist on active disbelief in a world in which you could trivially prove God's existed and interceded on behalf of prayer.
In the other outcome, we still don't know shit about the meaning of life and we have neither proved nor disproved anything. Either God is more intelligent than the "scientists" who crafted this study and foresaw the first possible outcome, thereby undermining the experiment itself (and this wouldn't be too hard for an omniscient God too do). Or there is no God.
Thus, we find ourselves right back where we were before - a world filled with scientific certainties and philosophical and moral vagueries, where right and wrong have to determined by our own minds and hearts, whether we believe or have faith in a God, various books written by those claiming to know this God, and so on.
I don't think this is a shocker to anybody who's moderately acquainted with the basic tenants of modern science and theology.
... is that "prayer" is not empirically verifiable.
To pray, one has to be SINCERE about it.
They should try doing a study to determine whether people are being sincere...
No surprise really...
WHAT!? You mean the invisible man in the sky cant magicly heal me? Maybe if we took better care of our selves and others we wouldnt have to beg an invisible all knowing man in the sky for help.
+-+-+-The folowing statement is true. The previous statement is false.-+-+-+
And I should follow up to say that duplication of this negative result would not be silly, either. However, the burden of proof is on those who claim therapeutic value.
Helium balloons want to be free.
"He was gracious enough to heal any of them as it is"
So your saying that God regulates the bodies natural healing process, and without his divine intervention and healing I would never recover from a pepercut or a broken arm?
So in other words, if you were an unbeliever & nobody prayed for you, then your papercuts & broken arms should heal naturally under normal circumstances, without divine intervention. I think that we should be greatful for anything that works out well, as opposed to being happy when people are stuck in the hospitals, etc. There are other opposites. I'm just trying to explain what I mean by "greatful".
From what I recall, I sensed a bit of bitterness from the others in that they believed that praying should help out no matter what. I'll let them speak for themselves. I'm just trying to give a context to what you quoted me as saying.
Does that clarify my stand on the issue?
testing out my trending skills