Eri, hate to burst your bubble but I've followed various prayer studies of the type you described and from what I've read most show no statistical change at all when all factors are taken into account.

I don't know your friend from Adam but it's my guess he would never have undertaken the study had he not believed already in the power of prayer and the setup of the experiment could easily have clouded the results. You're talking about an experiment that, if done under proper conditions, would have to include a very large sampling of patients including a control group equally as large, intimate knowledge about the lifestyles and patient history of the victims, factors about family and support, etc. As with any study involving human physiology, the results are often all over the board between individual experiments and most effective when done over large periods of time. Even then you often see major changes in outcome throughout the decades. Look at much simpler studies involving the effects of a single substance on human bodies. One decade the declaration will come out that Brand X is safe for you and the next it's the cancer scare of the day.

Let's just say your friends study is spot on, that there's definitive proof that groups of strangers praying for the recovery of some joker from their heart attack is truly effective. Obviously not everyone prayed for got better, some more than others. What does that say about the deity being prayed to? Was there this giant scorecard where each prayer is marked down in a register somewhere and compared against this dude's lifetime batting average and the prayer somehow adjusted it? Obviously, if the God is omnipotent, he or she is aware the prayer is being done for a study and that the choice of the prayee is based on some random selection. Is that taken into account? Oh wait. Religion requires we never ask questions like this. It is presumptuous to think you can know the mind of a god.

Eri, just the fact that the experiment is being conducted in the first place smacks of manipulation to me. It is full of the types of holes that are never allowed in a serious scientific test. How do you rate the praying in the first place without throwing in non-scientific values? Are the prayers being done out loud or in the person's head? If the latter, how do we know they're being done properly? How do we know that the person praying has lived a sufficiently pious life to be considered by this mythical God (as science must consider him/her/it) worthy of a conversation line?

So am I supposed to put more credence to your friend's study than to the lifetime of analysis by a person such as James Randi who has offered large sums of money to anyone with definitive proof of true spiritual interaction. Why not have your friend submit his findings to Randi? I'd love to see the results of that. I have the feeling there's a reason he hasn't payed out a cent over the years.

The truth is Eri, prayer is right there with the phenomena we see in the body's ability to heal itself based on positive attitude not on any celestial manipulation. I'm not advocating anyone stop praying if it gives hope to the person praying or their target. But just as in questions of where we all came from, putting in some creator only brings up more questions than answers. It's an end to thinking and analysis. I cannot imagine why the thought of a God randomly answering some prayers and ignoring seemingly just and necessary ones brings a believer peace. It creates this image of cosmic smartass, someone viewing us as a giant ant farm and not some all-knowing fatherly protector.

Art