In Reply to: Does prayer work? posted by Perry on August 16, 2004 at 16:03:18:
A very interesting article, Perry, and if one goes by the statistics that show that placebos are in many cases as effective as actual medication or operations, then this would be a case for mind over matter and a case against the effectiveness of prayer. However, it's interesting that after citing all the supposed stats about the effectiveness of placebos, the article lists a recent Danish study stating that results due to placebos are probably just faulty test methods. Sort of pokes a hole in the whole balloon.
My own thots on prayer have changed. I certainly no longer believe in the "name it claim it" faith of the Family, and like you, I don't know that prayers necessarily turned the Florida hurricane aside. It presupposes that the people who WERE finally hit were not praying, but I'm sure they were very much praying as the hurricane veered toward them.
My feeling is that if you live on the side of a volcano, expect that eventually you will have a very exciting life. If you live in Florida, expect that you will be hit by hurricanes. It goes with the territory. Conversely, if you live in California, your big worry is not hurricanes but earthquakes. I think some things are built into the geography.
I'm glad for Mr. Don he was missed in the recent hurricane, but I'm not so sure how much prayer had to do with it. If the hurricane simply HAD to go somewhere, and simply would not dissipate, is it a GOOD thing that you pray for it to veer to one side and hit your Christian neighbors instead of you? I don't think Mr. Don was praying that, but this is a complex question.
I do believe in prayer and there are several kinds of prayers. Simple meditation can calm you, but you can get that from various things and approaches. I think the kind of prayer that you're talking about is the kind that not only make you feel calm and peaceful and gives you the extra spunk to face the day, but the kind where prayers are answered dramatically in a way that cannot be easily explained away.
I think if a person wants to, just about any prayer can be explained away. But I don't think that explaining the physical causes for how a prayer was answered means explaining it "away." For e.g. when the Israelites crossed the Jordan river, the water stopped flowing. It is thought by most Bible scholars that that happened because an earth tremor caused a mudslide some 40 miles futher upriver in a narrow part of the gorge where mudslides often happen, creating a temporary dam. One happened just the last century, blocking the Jordan for about 40 hours. Yet the timing of the event with a couple million Israelites set to cross the river was quite miraculous.
Just some thots. Will post more later.