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Prayer Does Not Help Heart Patients
mu22le writes "A recent study conducted by the Duke University Medical Center on 700 patients, found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. Researchers emphasized their work does not address whether God exists or answers prayers made on another's behalf.
This result seems to contradict a previous study by the same authors that reported "cardiac patients who received intercessory prayer in addition to coronary stenting appeared to have better clinical outcomes than those treated with standard stenting therapy alone"."
This comic strip is a great illustration of the kind of people you mentioned:
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.hQuantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Marshall Brain of How Stuff Works fame wrote a little book called Why Won't God Heal Amputees? (The Most Important Question We Can Ask about God).
Chapter Five deals with the title question and is especially pertinent to this discussion. There are some minor flaws with the conclusions drawn, but I have written the author about these and he intends to address them; they don't really detract from the conclusion.
A highly recommended read. A little wordy at times, but that is because it is trying to be conversational with a potentially hostile audience (I think).
But it is important to 'disrespect' a belief if that belief is false.
If someone said that they believed that the Earth was only a few thousand years old I couldn't disagree with them without 'disrespecting' their beliefs.
We shouldn't let people be stupid just so they don't feel bad about themselves.
If someone says "praying helps" then they are wrong. I'm sorry they're wrong, I'm not trying to be mean, but it's not true.
"I am unreligious...but what harm is praying?"
I am un-racist, but what harm is telling people about White Supremacy?
I am un-educated, but what harm is being ignorant?
Whoo, signature!
DesireCampbell.com
OK, I'll take you up on that dare. My father underwent heart surgery a couple of years ago to get a new valve, and while it wasn't life-threatening (it's pretty much a routine thing these days), I still was very worried indeed.
But I didn't pray or say "a few words to [g]od", simply because no gods exist. There is nothing in the universe like that, and to me, the idea is just as silly as the notion that there are - say - invisible pink unicorns secretly running the world. (And given that at least judaism, christianity and islam are ultimately based on the delusions of a late Stone/early Bronze Age shepherd, that's probably not surprising, either.)
If somebody prays because it personally makes them feel better and takes away their sorrows... great, let them pray! But there are also many others who realise that praying isn't actually gonna change anything about the facts and that there's noone "listening" and who thus don't pray even when in distress. Maybe you're somewhere in between, but that doesn't mean everyone else is, too.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Remember that there were different results when the patient was told they were being prayed for.
Exactly.
The mind is a powerful thing. Thought precedes all action.
I saw on TV the other night where health insurance companies are starting to give patients CDs with soothing positive thoughts and the amount of medication the patients needed was less, they stayed less in hospitals, etc.
Meditating people can do stuff like walk on fire and sleep outside in the freezing cold with only a thin sheet for cover.
Hell, some people's minds tell them that they are billionaires while others just bitch about not having any money. On average, the people whose brains tell them that they are poor are over stressed and less healthy too. Go figure.
In mathematics, this would be called "intuition", not "proof". (And in anthropology, I suppose, "intuition" - or an extension thereof - would be called "religion".) What the GP was probably implying - as an analogy, obviously - was that to "prove" that 2 + 2 = 4 you need to make deductions that are ultimately based on axioms. Without these, things as basic as "equality" are uncertain and undefined, and you can't actually prove that 2 + 2 = 4.
When you say that the King of the Potato People is just as likely to exist as any other God, you are basically regarding the world from an atheist perspective, making the assumption that the world is wholly explainable and that all people who claim to have had spiritual experiences are wrong. (If you were not making the latter assumption, you would have to admit that I could claim that the King of the Potato People would be more likely to exist if he had told me(directly or otherwise) that he did. The same argument, obviously, could apply - and is slightly more relevant - for the Christian God, or any other actively worshipped deity. Atheist mock-deities such as the IPU, the FSM, etc. and your (to my knowledge improvised) KotPP differ from the true religions in that nobody seriously claims to have any kind of divinely inspired faith in the former. (This is obviously an assumption made on a sociological basis, but one in which I feel fairly confident.) )
Now, an atheist perspective is a perfectly valid perspective from which to view the world. But don't start thinking that it is the only valid perspective, or that you have somehow "proved" that one god or another doesn't exist, or that belief in gods is somehow "objectively" absurd.
(By the way, knowing that this is Slashdot: I'm not saying that use of mathematical axioms is equivalent to religious beliefs. That was an analogy. (Oh, and I know you all know what "analogy" means. That was an attempt at a snide joke.))
The problem is that no Christian who is not completely theologically naive is going to suppose that their prayer can make God do something. God does what God chooses to do, according to his own logic. That's why the Lord's prayer opens with (my translation):
There is, right from the start, a recognition that the answer to prayer is at God's will (or whim if you prefer).In other words, prayer is not a deterministic process. You don't push a "pray" button and reliably expect a certain action from God. God's will is much more important than the will of the person praying. Because of this, prayer is not really susceptible to statistical analysis: God knows not just what you're praying, but why, and he has his own agenda that's perhaps rather different from yours. Worse, this sort of analysis generally cannot distinguish between "impossible" and "rare". Perhaps God only answers prayers for Anabaptists, or Pentecostals, or that truly dedicated fraction of the church that actually has better morals, lower divorce rates, and is what really keeps the church going. This sort of "fringe" reaction is going to be quite difficult to detect in the sort of study done.
Why pray then? Perhaps for the same reason that death row inmates keep petitioning the governor, even though clemency is rare indeed: ultimately, there are circumstances in which only God has the power to do something, and once in a great while he does, for reasons that we find inscrutable. More importantly, for we Christians, Jesus told us to. Of course, just like that death row inmate, we don't /only/ pray. We pray and pursue every other option that we believe can help. But neither do we give up prayer just because it rarely "works" according to our agenda.
One effect, incidentally, is that of maintaining hope. When a person loses hope, they've lost everything.
Now this, of course, leads to a much more complicated problem (viz. theodicy, the study of why God allows suffering and evil.) But I'm certainly not going to tackle that in a slashdot post.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
As a psychologist in training (can't use the appellation just yet) I have to take exception to that statement. It's false.
The ability to maintain a belief despite outside influences (whether or not this is a good thing is left as an exercise for the reader) is not gullibility. I think that's what was meant by true belief. I'm not certain.
Gullibility, however, is a very testable question. In some ways it is more of a measure of how readily one accepts new beliefs or statements and has nothing to do with ones ability or propensity to maintain those beliefs. A person who is highly gullible may be just as likely to abandon their newfound 'truth' just as quickly as they found it. In fact, this is suggested by the definition of the construct.
I think the parent was correct--there is not a scientific measure of true belief. There is a measure of religiosity, however, and I think this may be fairly close.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)