The Power of Prayer Essay examples -- Religon Praying Essays

The Power of Prayer Introduction There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence about the efficacy of prayer in healing. As mentioned at the beginning of chapter eight in our text, many people have friends or relatives who recovered from illnesses when someone was praying for them, or who can attest to the power of prayer in other affairs. This makes scientists wonder. Can prayer help heal the sick? Do meditations for the recovery of an ill person, based either on religious faith or on belief in psychokinesis, have any real effect on health? Can science test the power of prayer? Though it requires putting aside the Bible’s warning not to test God, several scientists have designed experiments to try to determine if prayer has an effect on patients with serious long-term diseases. Using many of the statistical tools we learned about in our biostatistics course, scientists have designed experiments to compare the health records of patients who receive standard medical care to those who receive prayer as wel l as standard care. In our presentation, we looked at two studies of this sort. These studies wanted to test the power of prayer as such, and not the psychological effect of a patient feeling that his loved ones are concerned or believing that God will heal him. Accordingly, these experiments were designed using remote intercessory prayer, where the patients were prayed for at a distance by people they did not know. Both tests randomly sorted patients into control and experimental groups – though in one case, the computer matched patients into pairs with similar medical conditions, then randomly assigned the members of each pair. Both tests were designed to be fully blinded, so that the patients did not know i... ...bborn. Many of Leibovici’s proponents have made tried to explain the effects of retroactive intercessory prayer by asserting the non-linear nature of time, which most scientists find ludicrous. The criticisms of these studies make clear that correlation does not imply causation and that scientists will be skeptical of data until reasonable explanations are proposed. Until we can find how prayer works, its â€Å"effects† cannot be strongly linked to it, and until we have more data supporting the effects of prayer that has been properly collected and analyzed, the scientific community will not give much consideration to the claims of a few enthusiasts. In thinking about the goals, methods, and problems of these studies, we wonder if a â€Å"perfect† study could be devised, and if such a study returned significant results, what it would â€Å"prove† about the power of prayer.