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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

I loved this bit:

“In her autobiography, Payne tells that while in school she created an experiment on the efficacy of prayer by dividing her exams in two groups, praying for success only on one, the other one being a control group. She achieved the higher marks in the latter group.”

Assuming the result was statistically significant, what would be the theory she used to explain the result? Evidently god does not exist (it says she became an agnostic in later life). But in that case wouldn’t the two groups have similar outcomes? Probably the thought of an outside force helping vs I’m on my own thinking was the cause. Or God had other plans for Cecilia.

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> Assuming the result was statistically significant, what would be the theory she used to explain the result?

Assuming the result was statistically significant:

It's very difficult to isolate all the variables. Perhaps the last 15 minutes before the exam she prayed instead of studding. Perhaps she studied less because she secretly hoped the experiment to go this way.

Double blind randomized controlled trial or it didn't happen.

Also, there is reporting bias, for example if she got the oposite result, perhaps she would have not mentioned it so often.

And perhaps she has some methodological error we can guess without a detailed report. Perhaps she had some weird exception list in the exams she counted.

Preregistered double blind randomized controlled trial published is a serious peer review journal or it didn't happen.

And we now have to discuss what serious means that is another can of worms. And ignore the webpages that claims that the comment section is peer review.

Too late to edit: I forgot a random fluke https://xkcd.com/882/

One simple theory is that God does not like to be tested. That's also plainly said in the Bible.

Seems odd that she would test the efficacy of someone else intervening without first confirming if they'll participate.

Finding proof that prayer works would violate free will (specifically the free will to choose to believe or not believe), and since free will is the most fundamental of all of God's rules, there is no chance at all for this kind of study to ever find a result.

If you need elaboration: For God to impose a punishment or give a reward the person must have free will. If you took that away, then humans would become like animals (or angels if you prefer) who don't have free will. When Genesis 1:27 says "in his own image", that's what it means: With free will.

This also means there's essentially a religious mandate to study science. Science is God's alternative explanation for how the world works, so studying it is essentially studying God.

This is also why Young Earth Creationists don't understand their own religion. They are attempting to find proof of God, which is something that their own religion claims isn't possible.

I really like how people write this is a sort of a feature of Christianity when in fact a bunch of people sat down and invented excuses to explain stuff exactly like they do in sci-fi books.

Everything you just said is a hypothetical. So is the existence of the Rabbit's hole in Alice in Wonderland.

All of this just strikes me as a lot of elaboration on fundamentally silly ideas. When I was young and fresh out of the religion I was raised in, I felt this powerful need to like logically debunk it. But now that I'm older I feel dumb for ever feeling the need to do that. Literally the only thing Christianity has going for it as a serious hypothesis about the world is word of mouth. "A lot of people believe this" isn't a good reason to believe something since a lot of people also clearly believe in Islam, Buddhism, etc, etc, which are mutually exclusive.

I guess I say this because I wish someone had told younger me: "You just don't need to believe any of this stuff. You don't need an argument for doing so, really, just like you never needed an argument not to be Jain or Hindu. You can just stop believing it."

In any case, I don't buy this particular argument anyway. In fact, one can just as easily construct the exact opposite: a person's will isn't free unless they have perfect information. God had to reveal himself directly in the inspired works of the bible because if people didn't know that he existed it would be unjust to judge them for deciding or failing to decide to follow him.

Angels, in fact, according to some adherents of your religion, knew everything about the reality of God and some still chose to disobey and were punished. And we don't exactly have to comb the new Testament to find examples of Jesus working miracles/granting prayers right in front of everyone, which also contradicts your idea.

Christian apologetics is a big pile of bad arguments.

> God's rules

Who? What are these rules of which you speak? Which respectable peer-reviewed publication may I find the rules in?

I know this is somewhat tongue in cheek, but I'm going to answer as if it's serious:

Did she randomly decide which ones she would pray for? Perhaps she was more likely to pray when she knew she was less prepared.

> what would be the theory she used to explain the result

If god does exist, then this is not a double blind experiment.

The result of that experiment could mean a variety of things, such as:

  - sample size too small (too few tests,
    too few test subjects)
  
  - poor test setup
  
  - praying for success made her complacent,
    thus not leading to success as often as
    when not praying for success
  
  - praying for oneself is not rewarded but
    punished
  
  - God does not permit scientific experiments
    to prove God's existence, even indirectly
    via measuring the effectiveness of prayer
  
  - other reasons such as your "[o]r God had
    other plans for Cecilia".

A theologist can probably come up with more reasons.

Anyways, that test does not pass the smell test for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficacy_of_prayer

If prayer was effective, wouldn't industry and governments capitalize on it? I'd expect to see a prayer department in any major corporation or government.

I guess one group had more time to study

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