Let's look closely at the two examples we've been discussing here: recovery from prayer and recovery from placebos.
Gerry's argument from before was this:
God was asked to intervene, person got better.
He implied that this is observable evidence of God intervening to cure someone's illness. So in other words, if you apply a treatment and the person gets better, that is proof that the treatment worked. While this is fundamentally flawed logic, it is how we start with the discovery of cures. With this first observation through continued testing (which includes testing against placebos) medical scientists can determine whether the above correlation is in fact causation. So let's not poke holes in the logic and work with it.
- Give person treatment
- Person gets better
Therefore treatment cured the person.
Now they placebo effect.
Doctors give sick patients sugar pills.The person gets better.
Using the same logic we used for prayer, can we conclude that sugar is a cure for the illness? If you look at all the illnesses people have recovered from with sugar pill placebos, we would have to conclude that sugar can cure almost everything. Sugar and any other placebo, like fake surgery.
To accept the logic used to explain prayer, you are forced to accept the logic I just used to explain placebos: not that there is a placebo effect, but that the sugar itself is the cure. This logic is embarrassingly simplistic, of course, but if you'll only employ your critical faculties so far with prayer, you should only go so far with sugar as well.
Science has attempted to explain it with the placebo effect. It is based on the patient's perception of the treatment. Karrie called it faith. That's a fine word for it, but faith in what? In the case of prayer, it's faith in the power of prayer. In the case of sugar pills, is it faith in sugar? Well not quite, it's faith in medicine. Or as pastafarian mentioned, it's a psychological conditioning. Your perceptions and expectations, even if you're unaware of them, have demonstrated effects on recovery from an illness.
So where is prayer? Just another way to manipulate the mind in a long list of other such manipulations? Or is prayer the exception to the placebo effect? Everything else is explained as psychological manipulation except prayer, which despite appearing to behave exactly like all other placebos, is actually the real deal.
Gerry's argument from before was this:
God was asked to intervene, person got better.
He implied that this is observable evidence of God intervening to cure someone's illness. So in other words, if you apply a treatment and the person gets better, that is proof that the treatment worked. While this is fundamentally flawed logic, it is how we start with the discovery of cures. With this first observation through continued testing (which includes testing against placebos) medical scientists can determine whether the above correlation is in fact causation. So let's not poke holes in the logic and work with it.
- Give person treatment
- Person gets better
Therefore treatment cured the person.
Now they placebo effect.
Doctors give sick patients sugar pills.The person gets better.
Using the same logic we used for prayer, can we conclude that sugar is a cure for the illness? If you look at all the illnesses people have recovered from with sugar pill placebos, we would have to conclude that sugar can cure almost everything. Sugar and any other placebo, like fake surgery.
To accept the logic used to explain prayer, you are forced to accept the logic I just used to explain placebos: not that there is a placebo effect, but that the sugar itself is the cure. This logic is embarrassingly simplistic, of course, but if you'll only employ your critical faculties so far with prayer, you should only go so far with sugar as well.
Science has attempted to explain it with the placebo effect. It is based on the patient's perception of the treatment. Karrie called it faith. That's a fine word for it, but faith in what? In the case of prayer, it's faith in the power of prayer. In the case of sugar pills, is it faith in sugar? Well not quite, it's faith in medicine. Or as pastafarian mentioned, it's a psychological conditioning. Your perceptions and expectations, even if you're unaware of them, have demonstrated effects on recovery from an illness.
So where is prayer? Just another way to manipulate the mind in a long list of other such manipulations? Or is prayer the exception to the placebo effect? Everything else is explained as psychological manipulation except prayer, which despite appearing to behave exactly like all other placebos, is actually the real deal.
