Prayer and Science are as good a fit as chalk and cheese

If God hears your prayers and you hear his guidance then how does that happen?  Is it through telepathy?  The fact that God may be everywhere does not mean he is not using telepathy to communicate.  If a person can be pure spirit then why can't there be spiritual telepathy?  Or do we just have paranormal telepathy that God has concealed from the scientists?  Science needs to ascertain how prayers can be heard and then only then can it assess if they work.  There is no point in tests showing prayer works when we don't know what working entails!

Scientifically prayer does not work for it cannot get repeatable results.  Studies that claim to show prayer works are no good for when repeated there is nothing special found.  The dishonesty of these studies is palpable.  Science has found that praying for something and leaving it to chance makes no difference. It would be more liberating to let chance do its work. You will not always get a lovely surprise but a lot of the time you will feel comforted when things turn out okay or for the best.

Those who pray to trees and those who pray to God still imagine they get results. They like to excuse when their prayer is not answered. That way you can pray to anything and imagine that it works. It is very insulting to be that dishonest and then make out that your prayers saved Lana from her cancer. It is very flattering to your self-deception to say it had the power to help Lana.

Believers in God tell you to pray and imply that you are doing wrong or doing something harmful if you don't. But they set up their doctrine of the efficacy of prayer in such a way that nothing can disprove it. For example, if you pray fervently and with great sanctity and nothing happens they tell you that perhaps it did work but not in the way you expect. Or they say that God had other plans. This is actually a tactic for discouraging critical thought. The believers have something to hide. If prayer seems to get no response, they use guesswork to "explain" that. But science cannot accept such an approach. It needs tests and proofs that there really was a good reason why God didn't answer. A guessed explanation is not a scientific explanation.

The person who tells you to pray to help a seriously ill person and then who rigs it that you will never know if it really helped is exploitive. It is an insult to the sick person and her or his sickness.

Those who imagine that prayer works and lie to themselves about how effective it is sometimes form violent religions. Those evil religions thrive on their self-deception and arrogance. The terrorists feel that God is with them for they think they get a response to their prayers. They try to make out that when they get what they don't want that somehow there is good in it which proves their prayers were answered after all but not in the way they expected. That way if prayer is a failure they blind themselves from seeing it.

What kind of God would give you reason and the power to assess evidence and have you praying if prayer requires you to throw your brain away?

A loving God would know that since according to science our cognitive faculties are prone to error, they do not function in the right way, that if we have to adopt untestable beliefs that we will go into siege mode if anybody tries to make us see sense. That is an insult to the person who tries to help us become sensible.

Religion answers that God's mind is different from ours and he sees and hears all so we cannot see his plans clearly. But if you are poor at maths and you go to the local maths genius that does not mean you will necessarily learn little or nothing. God having his own plans and seeing a big picture could mean the plan is a near complete mystery to us but could also mean it should be reasonably understandable and perceptible. The Christians always bring in the hidden assumption that God's ways will make no sense to us for we are too uninformed and limited to see. That is a trick. It is exactly what they would say if there was no evidence that there was indeed a plan or if all attempts to explain how God allows evil are failures. Independent evidence is needed and it is not there. They are merely guessing.

Petitionary prayer encourages the vice of special pleading and leads to people lying to others about the power of prayer.

What if science finds that those who pray for others seem to develop a motivation to help others the natural way?

What if science finds that praising God is the best prayer and has a good effect on those who engage in it?

What about the fact that even if prayer seems to have no results you are still enhancing a sense of being in line with God's good intentions? You are still being kind like God is kind.

Religion makes God untestable. Even prayer is not about testing God. If you look at your prayers and notice how many of them were answered you cannot look at it at a testing way. You will see the "answers" as indicating that God is having a relationship with you. It becomes personal. All approaches to God start with the notion that people sometimes pray and what they ask for happens. The notion is the reason why some look for further evidence for God - eg the argument that the universe seems designed so God is probably the designer. The religious ask, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Even that is implicitly about a prayer relationship.

If prayer seems self-confirming anything can. Even if you think eating custard once a week brings you good fortune, you will notice that sometimes good things follow the eating of the custard. What you are doing is putting the cart before the horse.

Christians give reasons for believing in God. They think there would be nothing without God. They think God must have designed all things. But science says it's good to have reasons but they are not enough. They have to be tested. Science points out that there are good reasons to believe things that are actually not true at all. So the testing is the only way to be sure. It's the only honest way to work out if something is true.

If there is a God then prayer will work. We have the scientific right to use it as a test to see if there is a God. However, the Bible says we cannot put God to the test. But if that is true, what is to stop us putting MAN to the test. What if we reason: "It may be man saying there is a God of love. What if there is not?

We need to test God not because we wish to degrade God but because we respect God and want to make sure we are not making a God out of human ideas about the divine." This truth is NEVER mentioned by religion for it knows the test will not work.

If you request a birthday cake in prayer, will God minutely tamper with the universe to make sure you will get one? That would be against the laws of physics. Believers might say it is not for rather than tamper he sets up the universe in preparation for your cake. But that would be against physics as well. Why? Would it be as bad as or worse than tampering?  It is worse for it is still tampering and it won't admit it.  Prayer is more important to religion than miracles and miracles are supposed to be about getting people to pray and have a relationship with God.  Thus if prayer is anti-science then it follows that miracles are necessarily anti-science too.

We should be able to test because it is the only way to test. Religion tends to see miracles as signs more than answered prayers are. There is something vulgar about miracles being signs and a response to prayer not being. Miracles that are happen to astonish people are ridiculous and insulting to God.

Science and Harm

God is king and therefore has the right to forbid things even if they do little or no harm. Some believers say that there is no real belief in morality unless you believe in a God who decrees what is right and what is wrong. The teaching of the divine command basis of morality implies that morality is not discovered rationally. You hear what God has revealed about morality. You need him to tell you what's right for you cannot work it out yourself and indeed have no right to try to work it out. This approach puts morality beyond science. If morality is beyond science that does not mean it is moral to do something to put it beyond it. That would be intentional. It is science to say that you are doing harm to a baby by burning it. We must perceive the majesty of science and its infinite potential to make us better people. Prayer endorses the implicit and explicit evil of belief in God.

Harvard Medical School in 2006 found that people prayed for those recovering from heart surgery. For many, no improvement took place. For many, they even got worse. This is admitted in the pro-Christian book Quantum Leap, Dean Nelson and Karl Giberson, Monarch Books, Oxford, 2011, page 65.

Talk to yourself

Talking to yourself does work.  It is the best way to feel a bit of comfort and feel your inner guidance and wisdom flow.  All most of us needs is clarity of thought and talking to yourself feels like you have created another you to help you.  It triggers the higher power feeling.  If science wants prayer, it cannot have it but it can have this wonderful and more honest substitute.