Taking No for an Answer

This is probably the most unsurprising news I've read in a while. But despite the fact that this study upholds rational logic over superstition, the supporters of remote prayer won't be discouraged. That's, after all, a central tenet of faith: one must continue to believe in spite of the evidence. This quote demonstrates what happens when scientific processes are placed in the hands of people with non-scientific agendas:

The new study was rigorously designed to avoid problems like the ones that came up in the earlier studies. But experts said the study could not overcome perhaps the largest obstacle to prayer study: the unknown amount of prayer each person received from friends, families, and congregations around the world who pray daily for the sick and dying.

This is bullshit, pure and simple. If one assumes that the anonymous prayer cohort has an effect on the study, one must recognize that such prayers affect all subjects equally, thus washing itself out of the analysis. The prayer of family and friends should amount to a small margin of additional prayer for a given individual, compared with the numbers accumulated through participating congregations. Unless these objections are based on the presumption that the prayer of loved-ones is somehow worth more than the prayer of strangers, this uncontrolled independent variable should affect the data as nothing more than a bit of statistical noise. If one does assume that friends and family prayers are weighted more heavily, there's no reason to believe that the pattern of family prayer matches the pattern of remote prayer, which is demonstrated not to correlate with dependent outcome disparities, except to cause additional anxiety.

Actually, I'm a bit surprised that nobody mentioned one of the more common "proofs" of divine intervention: God works in mysterious ways. Mightn't He answer prayer with further suffering, offering His subject greater opportunity to demonstrate his grace? Just ask Job.

Eventually, I predict, the remote prayer argument will devolve into something along the lines of the following standard religion as mock science logic:

Assumption: God works in mysterious ways
Hypothesis: Thing A will occur in situation B
Observation: Thing A does not happen
Conclusion: Since A did not happen, we have a mystery, thus proving the existence and intervention of God.