RE: Can prayers heal?

Moorad wrote:
    "The main purpose of prayers is first and foremost to acknowledge that God is and secondly obedience. The content of our prayers is secondary and how precisely they are answered sometimes we will never know except on the other side of death."

Ed wrote:
    "The majority of educated Christians probably agree that prayer
changes the mind/heart of the person doing the praying to a far greater
extent than it changes the physical world." followed by anecdotes and research studies indicating no significant impact of prayer.

It occurred to me that there might be a parallel between the ID community and the "prayer research" advocates:

It seems that a presupposition of the ID movement is that God's origination/providential action in nature is discernable through scientific investigation. In the absence of such detection, either God works only through hidden variables, or else we have a deistic Creator, or perhaps no Creator at all.

Similarly, the "prayer research" advocates seem to have a presupposition that God's providential action in nature and on human behavior is discernable through scientifically designed research. In the absence of such detection, either God's work is hidden (not subject to investigation, only to faith), or else we have a deistic God who doesn't interfere (unable or unwilling to interfere except on rare occasions), or perhaps there is no God. If there's no "third-party benefit" in prayer, then many a prayer meeting needs to be refocused.

In both cases, I wonder if either type of research would change anyone's mind.

Randy
Received on Sun Oct 17 18:54:56 2004