Theology III

[Gwaimir Windgem]

Originally Posted by sisterandcousinandaunt

So, there you go.

If science is a problem for faith, out goes science.

Coffeehouse, I think you can retire the rational approach, now. You've seen where the card is palmed.

No, that's not it. It's exactly what I said; after seeing so many people on Entmoot posting so many studies that flagrantly contradict one another, I have very little trust in studies. Look, on this very issue, studies contradict each other:

A number of studies have claimed that patients who are being prayed for recover more quickly or more frequently. One such study, with a double-blind design and about 500 subjects per group, suggested that intercessory prayer by born again Christians had a statistically significant positive effect on a coronary care unit population.[10] Another such study was reported by Harris et al.[11] Critics claim Byrd's 1988 study was not fully double-blinded, and that in the Harris study, patients actually had a longer hospital stay in the prayer group, if one discounts the patients in both groups who left before prayers began,[12] although the Harris study did demonstrate the prayed for patients on average received lower course scores (indicating better recovery). One of the largest randomized, blind clinical trials was a remote retroactive intercessory prayer study conducted in Israel by Leibovici. This study used 3393 patient records from 1990-96, and blindly assigned some of these to an intercessory prayer group. The prayer group had shorter hospital stays and duration of fever.[13]

Some studies of prayer effectiveness have yielded null results.[14] A 2001 double-blind study of the Mayo Clinic found no significant difference in the recovery rates between people who were (unbeknownst to them) assigned to a group that prayed for them and those who were not.[15] Similarly, the MANTRA study conducted by Duke University found no differences in outcome of cardiac procedures as a result of prayer.[16] In another similar study published in the American Heart Journal in 2006[17], Christian intercessory prayer when reading a scripted prayer was found to have no effect on the recovery of heart surgery patients; however, the study found patients who had knowledge of receiving prayer had slightly higher instances of complications than those who did not know if they were being prayed for or those who did not receive prayer.[18]

And I've seen Lief and inked posting so many studies, and other people posting studies with results that contradicted theirs and each other, with studies both showing and denying everything that they can pertain to, that eventually, as far as I'm concerned, they all cancel each other out.

And don't give the name of Reason to these random selections and observations. Reason is something very, very different.