The Power of Prayer Essay examples -- Religon Praying Essays

The Power of PrayerIntroductionThere is a great deal of anecdotal order about the efficacy of request in healing. As mentioned at the beginning of chapter eight in our text, many people drive friends or relatives who recovered from macabrenesses when soulfulness was praying for them, or who can attest to the power of appealingness in other affairs. This makes scientists respect. Can prayer help heal the sick? Do meditations for the recovery of an ill person, based either on religious faith or on belief in psychokinesis, earn any real effect on wellness? Can science test the power of prayer? Though it requires putting aside the Bibles warning not to test God, several scientists have designed experiments to try to determine if prayer has an effect on patients with serious long-term diseases. Using many of the statistical tools we learned about in our biostatistics course, scientists have designed experiments to compare the health records of patients who receive standard medical care to those who receive prayer as well as standard care. In our presentation, we looked at two studies of this sort. These studies wanted to test the power of prayer as such, and not the psychological effect of a patient feeling that his loved ones are touch or believing that God will heal him. Accordingly, these experiments were designed using remote intercessory prayer, where the patients were prayed for at a distance by people they did not know. some(prenominal) tests randomly sorted patients into control and experimental groups though in one case, the computer matched patients into pairs with similar medical conditions, then randomly assigned the members of each pair. two tests were designed to be fully blinded, so that the patients did not know i... ...bborn. Many of Leibovicis proponents have made tried to explain the effects of retroactive intercessory prayer by asserting the non-linear nature of time, which most scientists find ludicrous. The criticism s of these studies make clear that correlation does not imply causation and that scientists will be skeptical of information until reasonable explanations are proposed. Until we can find how prayer works, its effects cannot be strongly linked to it, and until we have more data supporting the effects of prayer that has been properly collected and analyzed, the scientific community will not give much consideration to the claims of a few enthusiasts. In thinking about the goals, methods, and problems of these studies, we wonder if a perfect study could be devised, and if such a study returned significant results, what it would prove about the power of prayer.