"Science has no means for measuring the supernatural, so it must exclude it."
A while ago there was a report of a scientific experiment where certain patients were prayed for, and others were not. The poster boasted that the ones that had been prayed over had a better recovery rate. All well and good ...
But, I had the audacity to ask "who was being prayed to ?"
Christ ? The Virgin Mary ? St. Joseph of Asprin ? Bhudda ?
It would seem to be an obvious scientific question about a scientific experiment, but the answer was not forthcoming, nor did I ever here of any followup experiments.
Very curious considering the supposed "success" of the first try at measuring the supernatural.
Were the prayers all believers or were some of them nonbelievers? How were prayers outside of the study blocked from praying for the control group?
Did the patients know which group they were in? Did they know they were part of a study?
Was additional study blocked by a court? A study of this nature was proposed by someone associated with the University of Minnesota. I heard about the proposed study after a suit was filed by an atheist group to block it. A Madison (Wisconsin) court was going to hear the case. I never found out how the court ruled, but since the hearing took place in an atheist friendly venue & I haven't heard any more about it, I could guess.
"The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers.
The researchers asked the members of three congregations — St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City — to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials of their last names."
It would seem to be an obvious scientific question about a scientific experiment, but the answer was not forthcoming, nor did I ever here of any followup experiments.
"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.-- Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer
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."
...
"The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion," said Dr. Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia and author of a forthcoming book, "Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine."