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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)
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 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)
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.
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)
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)
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.
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Studies on intercessory prayer redirect. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
![]() | This page is not a forum for general discussion about Studies on intercessory prayer. Any such comments may be removed or refactored. Please limit discussion to improvement of this redirect. You may wish to ask factual questions about Studies on intercessory prayer at the Reference desk. |
![]() | This redirect does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
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)
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 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)
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.
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)
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)
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.
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)