Free Will

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Prayers has power if it has a correlation to good/bad outcomes significantly greater than or less than zero.

True, given that definition, could prayer not have power for one but yet not another? And with that definition research has already shown a physiological impact in the dopamine reward system in the brain during the practice of prayer. That is an empirical correlation to a good outcome that is significantly greater than zero.

No matter how many observed phenomenon that were observed outside of the body that one attributed to prayer, an empiricist could always call that coincidence and not a result of prayer.

It's like synchronicity, so easy to prove to a person's self, but meaningless to most others without the psychological connection that one's self has.

If there is no such thing as free will, do some intrinsically have less than others? Conversely, if there is such a thing as free will, do some have more than others? If some have more will than others there is a cost/benefit of having less will and a cost/benefit of having more will.

Isn't there always a cost/benefit of will, whether we have less or more than another, or more or less than we did yesterday; if so isn't it always a case of the cost of will, or the benefit of will, rather than free will?

If there is no free lunch in life, there can be no free will.

b9:

so few - very simply, I find myself distressed that great gobs of beople assume that the Will is only free if the one who wills has complete control of the outcome.

Which for most of us ia bit the case - though I note you claim you act only as you will, which makes you unique among any humans I have experienced [I myself do and undergo MANY MANY things that are not in accordance with my will] .

aghogday - clearly, yes, prayer power quantitavely and qualitavely depends on the individual. Jesus specifying faith as a factor.

There are other places where individual choice [free will, if you will] affects the reality accessible to the indvidual - which is where ultimately heaven versus separation comes in.

I agree.

I imagine that research was properly conducted. Prayer does work for one; but only in a placebo/relaxation technique kinda way. Not by altering future events, as Theists would often have it. Ironically, a study of the effect of prayer aimed at others showed that it worsened their outcome (although only slightly).

As for "no evidence being enough", I disagree. There are precisely defined mathematical methods of finding correlations, and statistical methods of hypothesis testing. A well conducted study would convince me that prayer has more power than a sugar pill or acupuncture.

I am compelled to tell you there is no such thing as Free Will.

ruveyn

(with Stochastic elements )

I thnk it depends on how you define outcome. If prayer makes one feel better, measurably evidenced by science, they may have a different outlook on life, and make different choices in life, that result in better outcomes. But, the science behind that is not significantly different from the Placebo effect and/or the "Secret", and it is just common sense. I don't think any of it has to be "Supernatural" to be effective in leading to better outcomes and a better life.

I suppose one could find that prayer could be statistically proven to have a correlation in altering external outcomes in the same way that one could use the scientific method to prove that telepathy is a real phenomenon in predicting outcomes.

Interestingly there has been some significant research lately on telepathy and higher correlations found when predicting pictures that were sexually charged as opposed to those that had neutral psychological meaning. No significant correlations have been found as far as I know when people pick numbers or other unemotionally charged objects. Something may be going on there, but I wouldn't call it "supernatural". It may, also be, that an effective method of measuring external outcomes influenced by prayer, has not been used yet.

I think the other study you mentioned was regarding someone's recovery from illness. For instance, if one hundred people were to pray for that person and that person did not respond to the influence of prayer, it might not be likely to produce a benefit.

However, if the person felt influence from prayer, developed a different outlook with different brain chemistry, had a boost in their immune system from reduced stress, it could impact their recovery, in the same way that common sense tells us that attitude makes a difference in one's recovery from illness. I don't think one can expect a cure from illness from either prayer or attitude.

Even if negative impact is shown from prayer in illness, how would we know whether or not an even greater negative impact would occur without prayer or a good attitude? It gets pretty subjective and science can't measure what might have happened.

The benefit of one prayer doesn't necessarily produce a miraculous change in an outcome, a number of close to significant changes in the outcomes in life can have a cumulative effect that is very signficant. I think that is also common sense.

I don't think prayer is necessarily the place to look for miracles, but perhaps an overall better quality of life for some. It's hard to see unless one looks at the big picture, and the big picture is influenced by so many other factors than prayer, I doubt science is going able to isolate those outcomes and attribute them strictly to the power of prayer.

It's the same with proving religious people have better health, there are too many other factors that influence it to isolate religion as a factor that makes a significant impact on it's own. However, it is common sense and proven that people that engage in activities that reduce their stress level get a positive impact for their immune system and health in general.

If that is the effect that some receive from religion, we should be able to see the common sense that it has benefit, even if science can't isolate the factor of religion from all of the other factors in life that influence health.

I have no doubt that prayer significantly improves some peoples live. What I want to know, is is an unexpected amount of people? (higher than placebo's)



Could you post a link? I did hear something about research like that, but I thought it was a kind of "empathy test", not a telepathy one.



With a big enough sample size, you can rule that out. In particular cases, it is difficult to tell, but when you take 100,000 you are dealing with "the average case".

The idea of the study was that there was three groups; a control group, a group of patients unknowingly prayed for, and a group who were knowingly being prayed for. The first two groups were more or less even in outcome, but the last one actually did a little worse (59% had complications, compared to 51% of the control/group 2). Maybe it was the pressure to get better, maybe they though that people were calling out the prayer squad as a last resort. More likely, it was a small sample size (I'm not amazing with statistics, so I can't hypothesis test this, but there was 990 patients in total)


http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/conten ... 59/19/2273

The annoying thing is that is a study showed a correlation, every Theist in the country would cry in joy, and the Templeton Foundation would be firing around cheques. People would claim that praying causes miracles. But they ignore studies showing there seems to be no such evidence. We are dealing with precisely the claim that prayer does more than a sugar pill; that is and always has been the claims of the Faiths.

And it seems there is no tangible evidence of Divine Intervention in medicine. Prayer does not cause miracles.

http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf

Here is the link on the psi research. My understanding is that the researcher is well respected.

In the research on prayer, from a psychological standpoint, I'm not sure the CCU unit was the best place for study. I would expect a benefit more from something related to the immune system rather than a structural issue like the Cardiovascular system. I guess if one were looking for miracles, the CCU, would be the place to find them though.

And for those stressed by the good excitement that the prayers might get them well, that could have created a negative impact, because good stress can be bad for a diseased cardiovascular system, also.

I don't expect science to ever find a physiological effect of prayer significantly stronger than placebo, but it appears that there may be a physiological effect for both that is similar. That is good enough for me that both placebo and prayer have real value and benefits for humans, even if they don't produce miracles.

CV diseases are effected to some degree by placebo (see below), but less than other conditions. Cancer patients would have been the ideal test subjects, although the ethics would be questionable.



My problem with claiming "prayer works" is that people don't assume it works as a placebo; they assume it works as an anthropocentric miracle making machine, which it demonstrably doesn't.

Expectations can be counterproductive, at times, if set too high. I don't see any harm in believing in miracles as long as one accepts reality, when they don't happen. For one person a miracle might be winning the lottery and for another, it might be finding a job. Obviously prayer is useless for winning the lottery.

If a person prays for a job believes they are going to get it because of prayer, and has a change of attitude that a prospective employee finds as a positive attribute, and they get that job; landing the job could be seen as a miracle granted by a prayer by that individual, and it is possible the prayers, belief, and change in attitude might have had an objective impact in getting that job.

However, I realize that's not the kind of miracle you are talking about; I don't see prayer moving any real mountains either, but getting a job for some is like moving the non-literal mountain that threatens their survival.

Here's an interesting quote from one of the philosophy of physics papers I read trying to decipher the philosophical interpretations of Bell's inequality. Do you think this non-local aspect might allow for the existence of free-will in some way, that we may yet not fully understand:

This aspect of non-locality is especially problematic for microphysical reductionists (and epiphenomenalists) who,

"...often argue that only the most basic physical properties possessed by individual parts of systems can be truly causally efficacious. There can be no higher level or ontologically emergent properties-for, if there were such properties, they would either be powerless epiphenomena or, if causally empowered, they would somehow violate the microphysical laws governing the smallest parts.

But, if microphysical systems can have properties not possessed by individual parts, then so might any system composed of such parts. Were the physical world completely governed by local processes, the reductionist might well argue that each biological system is made up of the microphysical parts that interact, perhaps stochastically, but with things that exist in microscopic local regions; so the biological (or mental?) can only be epiphenomena of local microphysical processes occurring in tiny regions. Biology reduces to molecular biology, which reduces in turn to microphysics. But the Bell arguments completely overturn this conception."

http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/H/James.A.H ... s_Toll.pdf