User:Fairchild/sandbox

Empirical Approach

One of the difficulties in assessing the efficacy of intercessory prayer is that there are vastly differing opinions about the conditions necessary for intercession.

For example, the Christian religion holds that strong faith is required for intercessory prayers to be answered. This makes testing the efficacy of Christian prayer troublesome, since a negative result can always be taken as evidence that the supplicant lacked faith. Some people would consider that to be an example of moving the goalposts.

It is instructive to consider a class of intercessory prayers that are universally ineffective. Over the last two centuries, warfare has created a sizable number of amputees of all religious persuasions. Many of them have prayed for their limbs to be restored, and it is highly probable that at least some of the supplicants possessed genuine faith. Many more have had their families and churches pray for them, further increasing the chances that individuals of genuine faith were praying for those veterans to be healed. And yet there have been no documented cases in which an amputated arm or leg has regrown.

This leads to one of two conclusions:

• No one with genuine faith has ever made such a prayer.
• Intercessory prayer is ineffective at regenerating amputated limbs.

Returning to the example of Christianity, we find that the Bible says

“”If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.

Admittedly, moving mountains is easier than regenerating limbs; the former requires only dynamite and bulldozers; the latter requires as-yet nonexistent medical technology. But if we are to believe that "nothing shall be impossible unto you", there is no reason that intercessory prayer should be unable to heal amputees. This would seem to contradict the efficacy of intercessory prayer in Christianity.

Statistical Approach

Some have claimed that empirical tests of intercessory prayer must fail for faith to exist. This is sometimes called the Babel fish argument. Religion is based on faith, so divine beings must necessarily refrain from any act that would prove their existence. Therefore, divine intervention must be indistinguishable from chance; otherwise, modern statistical techniques could easily uncover it. When combined with ubiquitous surveillance and data mining, divine intervention would ultimately be impossible in the modern age, regardless of whether the divine agent in question actually exists.