Does God cure (4)

When it comes to accessing the effacacy of prayer, it amazes me how serious people can take this as an issue.


Searching on the web, it's not difficult to see scholars (mostly in the west) try and perform well-structured studies and trials to examine the "prayer effect". To us, as taught in Bible, praying is not merely asking for interventions, we praise, we confess we communicate.

Even among intervention, it would be hard for us to even falsify the very statement "God intevenes." But afterall, the easiest part of it to be quantitatively and objectively accessed by scientific methods, will be praying for cure.

As my friend Andrew has pointed out in my last post, we need to seperate the morale-uplifting (or placebo) effect in prayer from the result of divine intervention. With this, scientists underwent randomised-controlled-trials. Putting a number of patients randomly into 2 groups, one with interaccessory prayer (prayed by someone with the individual not knowing). The process of randomisation and blinding will thus, theoretically, eliminate the placebo effect and the problem of background differences.

Starting from the 80s, numerous studies were performed. The results were deemed highly variable, some claim benefits, some concluded harm, while most of them remained statistically insignificant.

Here comes the follow-up questions.
1) With God (a freewill-possessing being) involved, are prayers assessable by RCTs, and are the results repeatable?
2) Does effacacy of prayer have a dose-response relatationship - ie. will the effacacy improves as we pray more, either by frequency or number of prayers?
3) Let's say we proved God's action on cardiac diseases, do we have the confidence that we arrived a positive finding in all other diseases - if not, why on earth an almighty God has such a particular taste on healing?
4) If we compare prayers effacacy to antibiotics on patients with infections, is it justifiable to conclude in this way: Penicillin is superior/inferior to prayer as therapeutic means, doesn't it sound weird?