Talk:Studies on intercessory prayer

Ignorant Assumptions

Prayer itself isn't an agent, and it is ignorant of researchers to say we are studying the effect of "prayer", that's like saying we are studying the effect of quantum entanglement and the efficacy of prayer through this mechanism. A person prays to God who is meant to be the higher being and efficacy of the prayer, the arrogance in the research is that it lumps "prayer" by all religions to many different deities together. Assume for the sake of argument in this scientific context (if your Atheist) that God exists and you want to prove this, there are people who pray to statues, rocks and the sun are these studies measuring the efficacy of prayer to these things? what is the underlaying premise in the research, its subtext, its an argument for or against God. Maybe they got a group of satan worshipers to pray for these people, the point is, Prayer by who and to whom. Otherwise the entire underlaying premise of the researchers is null and void as a scientific experiment.

They should repeat the research and conduct it in the manner of, The efficacy of Buddhist prayer vs Christian prayer vs Jewish Prayer vs Islamic prayer vs no prayer etc, not the Efficacy of "prayer" and the end conclusion is for all prayer and that those prayed for are far worse than those not prayed for. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 101.174.192.28 (talk) 01:46, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't know just how much of the article you actually read before recording your displeasure, but I feel compelled to correct a misunderstanding on your part. It does state quite explicitly in the introduction that: "The third party studies discussed here have all been performed using Christian prayers".

I would also point out that studies on the comparative efficacy of prayers of differing religions would be pointless until such time as any of them could be demonstrated to have positive results in the first place.Tarquin Q. Zanzibar (talk) 21:17, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

By responding that "the third party studies discussed here have all been performed using Christian prayers," you are actually making the original anonymous poster's point. "Christianity" is just one level lower in the "religion" hierarchy. "Christianity" is such a broad religion with so many diverse practices and theologies about how prayer works, there really isn't very much of a difference between "Christian" and "all religions" for purposes of the argument that he was making.

To study this properly, scientists are going to have to get a whole lot more specific and nuanced than to just recruit a few random groups of religious Christians and prescribe a certain way for them to pray. (Remotely with impersonal fax machine prayer requests, huh? Meh.) Cultural anthropologists live among their subjects to study every nuanced aspect of human behavior and their effects in great detail. I just don't see that happening in these studies. Obviously, prayer is not immediately effective for most Christians in a way that is interesting to science. As for the rare Christians (usually not caught up in fame and therefore harder to find) whose prayers do seem to be really effective, the strikingly measurable results are not under their full predictive control often enough to be an ideal fit for excellent empirical science. (Even the "best" among them suffer the need for great humility.) Although this is not something that science can easily work with, it's not something that I would just give up on. Some science is just hard; this is not unprecedented. A large enough sample size with the right demographic or maybe just certain individuals would be most revealing. In future studies, scientists should focus on isolating their measurements comparatively across several dozen different Christian practices and take a more cultural anthropological approach. This may require more resources than they are willing to invest right now, so it may be for a future generation of science to discover.

One last tip. Focus a lot less on the comfortable Christian mainstream because, so far, comfortable Christianity has not been very interesting to science.

DavidPesta (talk) 13:27, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

STEP's experiment was flawed because the experimenters didn't understand spirituality. Considering the cultural climate in science (naturalists mock religion all the time and demonstrate great ignorance about the difference between religion and spirituality), the probability is very high that there was less interest in getting the experiment right than there was in creating a false due-diligence in science to promote an anti-religious agenda. When you study the experiment in detail, the sloppiness of their assumptions betray that agenda and confirms that characterization. The fact that their results show prayer to be statistically harmful can only mean one of two things: 1. Prayer does in fact do something real (albeit opposite of expectations) or 2. The experiment was broken and the results need to be thrown out. The fact is, their conclusion is something other than 1 or 2, but 3. prayer doesn't do anything. This betrays an agenda because 3 does not follow from their results.

DavidPesta (talk) 13:04, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Sicher et al

The review at the bottom mentions Sicher et al but it is not present in the article. Is there any reason why this is not the case? IRWolfie- (talk) 15:53, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, it was clearly an oversight. I guess you could call it a case of double-blind editing. History2007 (talk) 17:32, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

You seem to have missed adding the source to the peer reviewed article it was published in. Do you know the details of it? IRWolfie- (talk) 17:36, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

I guess a case of triple-blind editing, then. But Shannon has a good summary of it as well. History2007 (talk) 17:48, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for (triple-blindly, good one) including the Sicher article, but it studies distant healing, "including prayer and "psychic healing"," and only mentions intercessory prayer once (Byrd)." The 40 "self-identified healers" were from "Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Native American, and shamanic traditions as well as graduates of secular schools of bioenergetic and meditative healing." Would Sicher be more suitable for the Energy medicine page than the present one? Keahapana (talk) 01:42, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

I am not sure if it makes a big difference. The conclusion here (and maybe there) is that there is no conclusion. The long and short of it is that there is not enough money to do proper studies, and these days the money is not going to appear anyway. So there will probably be no answer any time soon anyway, either way. History2007 (talk) 03:18, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

The two reviews presented as being in contrast to each other in fact do not. The first review suggests there is no effect whilst the second returns a result of inconclusive. IRWolfie- (talk) 14:42, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

I am not sure which two you mean, I have forgotten the topic now... So please modify it accordingly. Thanks. History2007 (talk) 14:45, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

It was this change I made I was referring to: [1]. IRWolfie- (talk) 15:10, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

Ok, now could you comment on the ITP journal being RS? Thanks. History2007 (talk) 15:13, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

It wouldn't pass WP:MEDRS; it appears to be based on a religious type movement as highlighted here: Transpersonal_psychology#Criticism. IRWolfie- (talk) 16:42, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

According to article on Elisabeth_Targ, one of the original authors, the study was a misreported and data-dredged; a latter study by the same author, published posthumously, attempted to replicate the findings with a larger group but did not.

OR

No source mentions that "Neither study specified if photographs were used, or if belief levels were measured in the agents or those performing the prayers." You have looked at the primary source and then talked about what it doesn't contain, that is original research. IRWolfie- (talk) 14:13, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

In such cases, WP:Primary can be used if worded carefully. I will reword that later, can delete it for now. But it is certain that they did not use those items, so no big deal to reword it and add it later. It may even be in other sources. I will look later. History2007 (talk) 14:29, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Sure they may not have used those terms, but no reliable source has mentioned there absense as noteworthy. IRWolfie- (talk) 14:34, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

If you want it out, it must be noteworthy... But what they used or did not needs to be clarified anyway. For instance, O'Laoire used photos. History2007 (talk) 14:37, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Anyway, I will look for the sources tomorrow, no need to make a big deal of the whole issue given that there are less than a handful of rigorous studies, all inconclusive and no one can draw any conclusions either way. That should be the message of the article. I would, however, point out the tremendous (really tremendous) amount of analysis Zynga performs to determine what type of goldfish users like to play with. So that is where the world's intellectual power is focused now. History2007 (talk) 14:51, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it's not a major OR so no rush :). IRWolfie- (talk) 15:21, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Retroactive intercessory prayer

I have to note that the Retroactive intercessory prayer section is quite possibly the funniest thing I've read in the article namespace on Wikipedia for a while. —Tom Morris (talk) 12:25, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Or maybe retrocausality is not so ridiculous after all: https://gizmodo.com/basic-assumptions-of-physics-might-require-the-future-t-1796730487

This is the kind of thing that makes us rethink the stuff that we laugh at. -- DavidPesta (talk) 17:12, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Merge

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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A note at the head of this article says "It has been suggested that this article be merged with Efficacy of prayer." Since the two articles cover essentially identical material, I would vote yes, merge. 76.241.138.58 (talk) 03:54, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The importance of a double-blind study

If a person were aware that others are praying for them, then that could influence that person independently of whatever effect intercessory prayer may have. (Also, it is not clear what direction that influence might take.)

Thus if a controlled experiment is to determine the effect of intercessory prayer, both the treatment and control group could be informed of the prayer. Or better, neither would be informed — so that being informed is simply not an issue.

It is striking that no mention is made of this important aspect of any useful experiment. It would probably be a good idea to restrict the review of available research to those where no mention is made of the fact (or not) of the prayer. (Or at least to classify the two types of informed and uninformed experiments separately.)Daqu (talk) 02:10, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

"...both the treatment and control group could be informed of the prayer. Or better, neither would be informed"

So what exactly would be the point of a "control group" in either of those arrangements?Tarquin Q. Zanzibar (talk) 21:32, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Deleting Dawkins

Hi Leuce, I could be wrong, but there aren't any Wikipedia conventions or rules about citing sources exclusively from a "human sciences medical study expert". Google finds zero ghits for the phrase; it's not even a thing. Please explain why this content from Dawkins's bestseller should be deleted. Thanks, Keahapana (talk) 22:13, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

"Scientific" studies all showed very poor design.

All of the studies that are used as examples in this article were very poorly designed. Unfortunately I do not think there can be a scientific study designed to truly study this phenomena. The problem is that you cannot have any controls. You cannot control whether a person will visualize themselves to be in better health. You cannot your friends and family from praying and visualizing the person's health getting better and their general health improved. It is not a natural phenomena not to see yourself getting better. Many people hold up these fallacious studies to say these techniques do not work, which is absurd. When studies are undertaken to see if systematic visualization works, the studies are all positive. Prayer is a form of visualization and you will not get people to stop visualizing, so the studies that have been published are not worth the paper they are written. Given this, the studies that did show a positive correlation are significant, but not the way that they were analyzed. They would have to take a metering factor to offset all instinctual and mindful visualization of the patient themselves and all the family and friends of the subject. These studies are all a farce and this article is just a piece of pseudoscience. The skeptics deride their study subjects as being often pseudoscience, but the skeptics themselves always use pseudoscientific studies and techniques to "debunk" their subjects and make money. The techniques that are described could never determine whether prayer works, or not. I designed experiments for a living for twenty years and I can say that none of these studies would fly.

Brian T, Johnston BSc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.172.0.200 (talk) 19:59, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

God favors belief

Note that these studies are outside the realm of what most believers call miracle cures. Such cures never happen because of controlled experiments. The God of believers does not want faith to be proven, but to rest upon one's living in the Spirit, and active faith. These studies cannot prove that cures beyond medical explanations do not exist. Such "miracles" are the result of personal prayer, not of controlled experiments. Perhaps these studies seek to discover unknown, physical forces. More likely they will reveal the physical effect on a person who knows that they are being prayed for, through very explicable human psychology and mind-body relationships. Beyond that, it remains to be seen. But the intercessory prayer spoken of here is not like the intercessory prayer about which most mainstream Christian believers speak. This should be made clear in the lead, since only a very narrow, rare type of intercessory prayer, diverse from most Christian intercessory prayer, is being discussed in this article. Jzsj (talk) 13:57, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

The so-called "proving a negative" (as in cures beyond medical explanation) is definitely impossible, but that's not really an issue when investigating whether intercessory prayer has demonstrable outcomes. What the goal of a study typically is would be to look for evidence of an outcome and this should be done by means of invoking various controls. This need not require any special interaction with believers. If there was a propensity, however small, for miracles to occur to praying believers, this is an effect that can be teased out of data. If it cannot be teased out of the data, then the effect does not exist. jps (talk) 15:41, 14 September 2020 (UTC)