On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote: > If people have some unknown psychic powers, prayers might do some good > even without a God (unlikely, I imagine, but who knows?). >
Who knows? We know, and we know because if prayer could effect our world the way the religious say it does it could certainty be detected by the scientific method. There has been an extensive study of the power of prayer that lasted for 10 years and involved more than 1800 people. Nearly all scientists thought such a study was a waste of money but it was payed for by the Templeton Foundation which loves religious crap and does everything it can to promote it. The results were reported in 2006 but they were not what the Templeton Foundation had hoped for. From the March 31 2006 New York Times: "Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found. And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested. Because it is the most scientifically rigorous investigation of whether prayer can heal illness, the study, begun almost a decade ago and involving more than 1,800 patients, has for for years been the subject of speculation." John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
