Prayer doesn’t seem to help.

A new study on the efficacy of prayer reveals… nothing unexpected, really.

In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

Let the mental gymnastics begin!

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who did not take part in the study, said the results did not surprise him.

“There are no scientific grounds to expect a result and there are no real theological grounds to expect a result either,” he said.

Science, he said, “is not designed to study the supernatural.”

Au contraire, Dr Koenig. Science and logic are perfectly capable of handling the ontological issues involved here. You start by assuming the null hypothesis (that is, that the treatment has no effect), you do a double-blind study, and if the study shows no effect, you keep the null hypothesis. Or, if you’re a True Believer, you ignore the facts, cling to whatever beliefs you have, and spin like hell. But for the rest of us who are committed to the facts, you don’t accept that a phenomenon is real until you have evidence for it. And the evidence for prayer is strictly anecdotal.

One believer has already responded to me thusly: “The study couldn’t work because God doesn’t like being tested.” In other words, he made the test fail because you were testing him. See? Even when the test doesn’t work, it works. God helps you find your car keys, but won’t play ball if anyone’s watching. God makes money inexplicably appear in your bank account if you pay tithing, but only if you practice sloppy book-keeping. Quite a prankster, that God. Actually, doesn’t this kind of behaviour remind you of the Great Gazoo just a bit? There’s even a bit of a physical resemblance.

Hint: Adam is Fred. The resemblance is more marked if you sit back away from the monitor. Waaay back.

Anyway. The God who disappears when you look at him could be considered a form of ‘jealous phenomena’. Here’s a bit from an article about UFOs from the always-wonderful Straight Dope.

Flying-saucer debunker Robert Sheaffer calls UFO encounters “jealous phenomena,” meaning that UFOs are finicky about letting themselves be seen. In The UFO Verdict he writes, “It is a well-known fact that UFOs are supposed to be extremely wary of showing themselves openly…. They will not … under any circumstances fly low over a crowded vacation site in broad daylight or hover conspicuously over a major city, because the photographic record they would presumably leave behind would be clear and unmistakable…. In short, one must conclude that the UFOs’ reported behavior is principally determined by an overriding concern with human thoughts and emotions.”

The moral of this story, of course, is that jealous phenomena almost always turn out to be illusions or hoaxes.

You may draw the appropriate inference.

I would welcome studies like this, except that
a) they waste money, and
b) True Believers aren’t swayed by evidence becasue their religious views aren’t derived from solid evidence in the first place.

Too bad.