Posted on 07/17/2002 3:47:40 PM PDT by gcruse
Amazing what the white-tipped cane of Science (in the hands of brilliant men) uncovers.
The scientific view of the 4th dimension is that it is at right angles to the 3rd dimension. Just as the 3rd is at right angles to the second and so on. If we are 3 dimensional beings then we would not be able to see, touch or know the 4th dimension. If the spiritual realm were the 4th dimension, then it stands to reason that we as spirits ourselves would be linked to that dimension.
I have witnessed many spititual healings. These are documented medically.
My prayers are always answered. I have learned to be careful what I ask for and how I pray. I've also had it take 8 years for me to see the results. God works in his own time. The hard part is learning to hear his voice so that you know his will.
I am a spirit, I live in a body. Thought you said you went to Bible school? If we are made in his image and he has a spirit, so do we.
Who conducted the study?
A major hospital.
Were the experiments replicated by other researchers?
I don't remember well enough to answer that one.
Also, how would they verify that the prayers were really praying and that they were devout believers?
They met in an off site room. They didn't have to be devout. Good vibes were accepted.
And one other- is there not some other thing they could pray for besides sick people who were already being treated by doctors? I mean, like pray for... rain or something? I don't mean that as sacriledge- I just mean a sick patient might get well quickly on his/her own, there's no way of telling.
The patients recovered faster and with fewer complications and meds than those not receiving prayor.
One such study was conducted at the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo. At first, Dr. William Harris had a hard time persuading a fellow cardiologist, Dr. James O'Keefe, to participate in the prayer experiment on heart patients.
"From a purely scientific standpoint, I thought it was illogical," says O'Keefe. "I don't really think of spirituality normally as playing a role in scientific, rigorous, double-blind placebo-controlled scientific studies. It's two different realms."
A previous study by some other scientists had gotten positive results, and Harris wanted to study remote healing for himself. But he, too, was skeptical.
"We were even doubtful that the phenomena itself was real," he says, "that prayer could do anything."
So Harris wanted to make his experiment impervious to any placebo effects. He did not tell patients they were being prayed for — or even that they were part of any kind of experiment. For an entire year, about 1,000 heart patients admitted to the institute's critical care unit were secretly divided into two groups. Half were prayed for by a group of volunteers and the hospital's chaplain; the other half were not.
All the patients were followed for a year, and then their health was scored according to pre-set rules by a third party who did not know which patients had been prayed for and which had not. The results: The patients who were prayed for had 11 percent fewer heart attacks, strokes and life-threatening complications.
"This study offers an interesting insight into the possibility that maybe God is influencing our lives on Earth," says O'Keefe. "As a scientist, it's very counterintuitive because I don't have a way to explain it."
Naturally, I got entangled again - it's a law of nature - I can't help myself..............FRegards
I'm not laughing at the study though. My wife only has one paper under her belt so far- on using CA 125 (Interferon?) as a tumor marker for women with breast cancer. She had a whole lot less patients and they were all terminal- and they couldn't be allowed to know that (because of the study). That paper was a real emotional downer for her because every time she had to take blood- (every two or three hours if I recall)- the patients would always be looking hopeful, hoping the "tests" were showing good results. They knew they had cancer, just not that they were going to die- but my wife did. They always looked at her in her lab coat hoping she was bringing hope and she wasn't allowed to say anything except she needed more blood for "more tests". Awful. Not as awful as for those dying though. She almost quit medicine because of that.
Anyway, she might be interested in trying to replicate those results one day (she's always looking for a less painful paper/study to do). I'm sure she'd have no bother getting the heart patients- the Scots have heart disease something awful. It might be the prayers she'd have trouble rounding up.
This is a nice argument and one I am fond of using myself. I use the example of a textbook. Suppose you go to university and take a course in a subject about which you have no knowledge. All the material in the course textbook is logical and has been painstakingly proven by those who do that sort of thing. Since it's all logical (and we will assume that it's also true- for this discussion) the professor should actually be able to open up the book, read its opening premise then flip straight away to the end of the book, read its conclusion and declare the course finished because the premise has been logically shown (repeatedly) to lead to the conclusion.
But obviously, this isn't teaching anybody anything. The prof has to painstakingly take the students through the knowledge step by step because while the conclusion might logically flow from the premise- it might not be obvious that it does.
The situation I like to use this argument for is the very same as the one you used it in. If there is a God, he could say I am God, therefore I am the truth and also the source and one true judge of the truth and therefore ___________ insert unfathomable truth here. I would have no choice to believe him but the rational facility he gave me- the one I cannot survive without in the hostile universe he put me in- would cry out for an explanation. But if he then said- I could explain it but the course would take a million years and there would only be a 50/50 chance you'd get a passing grade- I'd have to simply accept the truth in the form that he gave it to me in.
But I do not believe that the phenomenom I have listed that did occur in the natural world (I know this because I was there ;-) would require such an otherworldy explanation. That's why I brought it up on a "quantum entanglement" thread- although QE approaches otherworldliness.
Besides, even if there is a whole big spiritual world- it has to be part of the universe because if it's not a part of this universe it doesn't exist because existence is of this universe. It means "to be". It either be or it be not ;-)
Well... To use your own phrase, "not exactly".
Stanford University was not involved in any way. What was involved was SRI, the Stanford Research Institute. This organization was at one time affiliated with Stanford University, but according to their website "formally separated from the University in 1970", well before they conducted the government sponsored "ESP experiments".
And today, SRI is clearly trying to distance themselves from this loony episode in their past. From their website:
SRI International is not currently involved in parapsychological research and has had no involvement in such research since 1990 when the last of staff working on the project retired or joined other organizations.Because all the staff involved have left, and all research records have been returned to the government, the only knowledge we have of the research results are those published in the referneces cited below.
Please note that the use of SRI's name in conjunction with this research and any claims made by participants in the research, other than those published in the journals cited below, is not approved by SRI and is not authorized by SRI.
While it's true that former CIA director Robert Gates (not Stansfield Turner, as you state) discussed the matter on Nightline (November 28, 1995), he hardly gave it a glowing endorsement. He stated that the CIA only undertook the research at the urging of Congress after they learned that the Soviets were looking into using "psychics" in their military, and that the results of the 20 year study were inconclusive at best, produced no usable intelligence results, and that he would not be comfortable using information from a "psychic"
The government's own overview of the long-running project (code-named "Stargate"), published on September 29, 1995, concluded:
A statistically significant laboratory effect has been demonstrated in the sense that hits occur more often than chance.In short, while they did see some statistical results that differed slightly from chance, the sloppy experimental design and procedures may have allowed a perfectly mundane explanation to be the cause of the observed results. And the last paragraph admits that many of the results depended on "subjective interpretation", i.e. judgement calls by the experimenters as to whether a given result was a real "match" or not. This makes it easy for wishful thinking on the part of the researchers to unintentionally interpret the results as better than they actually warrant.It is unclear whether the observed effects can unambiguously be attributed to the paranormal ability of the remote viewers as opposed to characteristics of the judges or of the target or some other characteristic of the methods used. Use of the same remote viewers, the same judge, and the same target photographs makes it impossible to identify their independent effects.
Evidence has not been provided that clearly demonstrates that the causes of hits are due to the operation of paranormal phenomena; the laboratory experiments have not identified the origins or nature of the remote viewing phenomenon, if indeed, it exists at all.
[...] The information provided was inconsistent, inaccurate with regard to specifics, and required substantial subjective interpretation.
About the only result of the project that remains "significant" but unexplained was the ability of one test subject to achieve results of about 28% when trying to "see" which of four random colored lights a machine produced each trial (pure guessing would have resulted in a 25% success rate). But this could have been due to such non-paranormal explanations as a flaw in the machine which caused it to produce results that were not entirely random. As one of the project heads wrote, "This information [the 3% deviation from chance] was given in written and oral form to the ORD Project Officers, who maintained there must be yet another flaw in the experiment or analysis, but it was not worth finding. Because of more pressing demands, the issue could not be pursued to a more definite conclusion."
In other words, they didn't take the time to try to rule out ordinary explanations for the observed results. This makes any attempt to cite this project as an example of "success" of paranormal phenomenon shaky at best.
It's also an excellent case study of why I stated that there has yet to be a demonstation of ESP *under properly controlled conditions*. The reason is that it's easy to get "results" if your testing procedures are so sloppy that ordinary mistakes (or intentional chicanery by test subjects, which is common in "paranormal" testing) can produce the appearance of what you're hoping to see.
What else have you got?
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