it would be too far to extrapolate from the results with regard to physical healing to there being no effects that depend on the actual reality of God, but I understand what you meant better now.

Oh believe me I am reading it!

Your task is great because MB is disputing basic theology without yet fully grasping basic theology. I appreciate your efforts, however, I think stating concepts in black and white actually exacerbates conceptual problems (in this case).

As well named pointed out petition prayer is really only a part of what prayer is (I am sure you agree).


I take it at face value but the discussion is really "what does faith mean?". All the examples in Heb. 11 are not about people that simply believed that God existed. Belief in God's existence is a minimum requirement. I think faith can be more simply understood as trust. Of course for one to trust God one must believe He exists.

As we see in Heb. 11 ones trust in God will be lived out in various forms.

This is another situation where you show you've created a definitional vacuum. If prayer (of this type) were shown to have an effect, you would define it to be natural, thus not supernatural (since your particular definition of supernatural encompasses the concept of "cannot be proven"), and therefore this would not prove anything about God's existence. So you end up just restating your assertion over and over again.

I thought I'd said a few times that I'm not focusing solely on that. On that specific type of prayer, though, it does seem to be the easiest for which to show that it has no discernible divine effect. Clearly prayer has 'earthly' benefits, and they are obvious, but there's zero evidence to show that it has any kind of divine affect and 'petition' prayer, or 'intercessory' prayer is testable and falsifiable unlike 'relationship' prayer which is about as hard to prove or disprove as your own experiences, the ones that inspired your belief. If anything, the abject failure of petition prayer may actually be one of the strongest reasons to disbelieve in gods, you can actually demonstrate that it doesn't work.

To believe in god, you have to first believe in god. Well, I could believe in anything that I choose to believe in if I just agree to believe in it so that I can believe in it... especially if I were told that I was going to be rewarded for doing it. Verses like that simply don't help the religious cause.

I think I'm just making you uncomfortable because I don't agree with you.

If anything, the abject failure of healing stones may actually be one of the strongest reasons to distrust medicine.

I'm not sure to be honest, what the best route is, but I'm really just answering MB's questions, and try not to over-complicate things with "unnecessary" theology. Perhaps you're right, I honestly don't know.

Agreed. Petition prayer is a pretty good starter though, I'd say a better starting point than other topics in this area.

Belief in God is the minimum requirement, yeah, the OT is filled with God-believers who didn't have faith and mucked up everything. I can relate with that a great deal at times.

Faith is complicated - God is pleased with faith, but faith is also a gift from God. In either case, it's difficult to separate both concepts of prayer and faith.

It wasn't an accusation, it's probably an easier starting point to examine petition prayer.

Whether or not prayer actually works is a different topic altogether than whether or not prayer is logical in a biblical sense. I believe both are true, and I don't expect you to believe that prayer changes anything, but I'd hope that you'd see that there is nothing illogical with prayer, in the biblical sense and it's relationship to God and his will.

The point is that God is pleased with faith. For me it's an effort to show you that it's at least logical, not that it's true. Logical may be too strong a word, because it's not always so, but that at least it's congruent in some sense.

Well, you know... if something can only achieve a placebo effect, the general gist is that it doesn't work; the independent variable is something else.

Sounds like you want to conflate "something happened" with "works as advertised".

It's not really an answerable question, but prayer seems to hold no particular power than other claimed magical ritual can't hold, so it seems to hold no particular spiritual position of superiority.

That should cause concern for non-pantheists who believe in the power of prayer.

It seems obvious to me that there is either no God, or a God who does not want us to possess hard contemporary evidence of His existence. If He wanted us to have such evidence, we would have it.

Given that, could a Supreme Being with essentially unlimited powers answer prayers while confounding our attempts to detect Him? I would say that the answer is obviously "Yes". In that case, the inability of scientists to demonstrate "divine intervention" is really not a problem for theists at all. Nor is it a particularly telling point for atheists. What surprises me is that it gets so much discussion since it truly leads nowhere.

What is being "advertised"?

I'm just taking the claim that you made:

And I projected how people would actually respond to the intended effects of prayer.

And then I made a comment that suggests that this is the reality of the situation right now.

Of course, "placebo effect" is just a label for "things that happen that we kind of expect to happen but we don't have an explanation for the mechanism right now." So if that is understood, we would not be surprised that something like "prayer" might legitimately be labeled as such.

I agree that it's more or less impossible to believe in a God who wishes His existence to be obvious. However it's not surprising this sort of topic gets attention since

1) Not a lot of religious people agree wholeheartedly with that premise, obvious or not. I do not think it's a common understanding in evangelical Christianity for example

2) A lot of people will feel that if the choice is between a Deus Absconditus and atheism, that atheism makes more sense to them.

I think there is a difference between "no hard contemporary evidence" and "not obvious".

I think there is a third option, where God may be more obvious to some than others, despite the lack of "hard" evidence.

On point 1, I agree completely. Of course, I am not an evangelical Christian. But arguments directed against positions that are elements of evangelical Christianity have virtually no traction from my point of view. But they are tossed at me.

On point 2, that could very well be true. However, just because there are a lot of people who think that something makes sense does not mean there is really a strong case for their point of view. In fact, I have encountered the opposite situation far too frequently.

Yeah I don't see much consideration from atheists that the struggle of going from ignorance to understanding is what the process is about. Metaphysical understanding doesn't come from changes outside of us, but rather understanding is already accessible to us but WE have to first change and then realization occurs as a result.

Well, there's no good reason for anyone at all to believe that prayer changes anything in a divine way. Are you aware of any studies that show it can? I'm not, and the studies that I am aware of show that it has no effect, which is what you would expect to see if there weren't in fact any gods.


So you say but I don't believe that god would be so petty as to need your displays of faith. I'm surprised that you don't think better of your god. You make him sound like the ancient gods who were quite emotional and required pleasing. What makes you think that?

I'm always surprised when I encounter this line of reasoning. You can't prove that your god is real because he doesn't want you to be able to. Despite that the only reason that you believe in him is that theists claim that the bible, and a bunch of other stuff, actually proves that he exists. If god doesn't want you to be a able to prove his existence then why, when asked for proof, isn't that the stock answer? Why do so many people try to provide proof?

More parsimonious than that contradictory and somewhat tortuous logic is that prayer doesn't work because the intended recipient doesn't actually exist.

This is wrong. A placebo effect is not ""things that happen that we kind of expect to happen but we don't have an explanation for the mechanism right now." A placebo effect is getting results from a group you know received a non-working treatment, it says nothing about whether the mechanism behind this is known or not known.

Anyway, a better phrasing of my original point is that "when something can't beat the placebo drug, it is a good indicator it has no effect". Saying that actual treatment results in a placebo effect, like I did, is wrongful (but popular) use of terminology.

Apart from popularity, there is little that sets God apart from thousands of other superfluous explanations.

Then of course some believers might argue that when the numbers are so great in God's favor, maybe I should question my belief. Which is a fine argument. However, when take a close look at all these believers we see that there is no agreement whatsoever. It is just hundreds of thousands of different beliefs, a large portion of which argue that all the others are wrong.

So in the end there is no more reason to believe in the Biblical god than there is to believe aliens built the pyramids or that Mu existed. And sure, I could believe in all these and all things with similar levels of evidence and I would end up believing millions of things that directly contradict each other.

Then of course I could believe in a mystical faceless God that does not intervene. But then why should I not believe in a mystical faceless Titan that does not intervene? Or a mystical faceless fax machine that does not intervene?

What you see as lack of consideration is simply presence of consistency.

I haven't felt the need to look at studies on prayer, but I would question any results both positive or negative, once you add an observer and start telling people what and when to pray, it's changes the game.

You keep saying displays of faith, when it's not what I've said. Just faith. God is pleased with faith, IF it takes a display for faith to manifest itself, then so be it, but the display means nothing in it's own right.

It's true to an extent. If we did the same with therapy for example, we could be reasonably certain that therapy would yield diminished returns.

However, considering the billions upon billions of prayers that must have been uttered and that we still don't see prayer working as completely obvious, I think it is fairly apparent that if prayer has an effect, either the effect must be so minuscule or the chance of success so low (or a combination) that its effects (overall) are indistinguishable from doing nothing.

Which is certainly something I can't disprove, but it is also not how prayer is typically seen by people who tend to discount prayer studies (since the findings in a typical prayer study would then be just what they should expect).

I'm guessing you didn't read past 'atheists' in the first sentence of my post? I was agreeing that it will never be possible to prove the existence of God to anyone because that's not how the game works.

Yes, and I was explaining why it doesn't make sense to prove it to yourself. I'm certain there are countless of hypothetical beliefs you wouldn't want people to go about holding, so I suspect there is quite a limitation on your willingness to accept personal proofs such as these in others.

Would that be lack of understanding as well?

This seems like special pleading to me, why wouldn't prayer work simply because someone knows you're doing it, after all, public displays of faith through prayer are common and isn't it up to god whether it works or not? Are none of those public prayers working then, or are they in some way compromised by being observed? How do you know that observation or instruction 'changes the game'?

It's a simple fact that no one has been able to show that intercessory prayer has any effect that couldn't be ascribed to causes that aren't divine. In fact, there's nothing to show that prayer has any effect that a placebo couldn't have. Given that the study I linked showed that knowing that you're being prayed for can actually result in increased chance of complications, perhaps the nurse shoudl be disciplined for attempting to provide treatment that could have little effect other then to worsen her patient's condition.

Displays, demonstrations, whatever you want to call it, if you're doing it just so god can see that you're faithful (even though he knows better than you do how faithful you are), which is a reason you've given for prayer ITT, then it must mean something to you. It doesn't necessarily mean anything to god though and I think we'd both agree that a god that needs your demonstrations of faith would be somewhat disappointing. If his treatment of you is influenced by your demonstrations of faith, again, this isn't behaviour I'd assign to the kind of god I would want to believe in.