In Vitro Prayer
I've already discussed of the nonsensical nature of prayer. It is nothing more than a modern form of incantation, and is about as effective. It is little more than talking in one's own hands.
Yet there is no logical necessity to conclude that prayer must necessarily not work. Like any other paranormal claims, there are physical mechanisms, as yet unknown, which may fulfill its supposed power. For example, there may very well be a "spiritual field effect" which somehow influences reality.
But to be able to claim that such a thing may exist, since the theory is contrary to it, one must have some kind of empirical evidence. And the mere notion of experiments about prayer is problematic. First, what method of prayer should be tested ? There is no theory, even in theology, to help us in that regard. All religions disagree on how one should pray, or even if one should pray at all.
A more serious objection is the notion of "background praying". Indeed, since it is generally admitted that many people pray for general categories of people, it must be the case that every single person in the world is already the recipient of a multitude of prayers. Therefore having a control group becomes a risky proposition. But more importantly, it is not obvious that this background praying is constant. For example, some people may be prayed more to than others. People may also pray for themselves, which would seem to be an overriding factor here. Unless one can control this also, one cannot have any kind of a control group.
One creative solution would be to recruit atheists, with atheist families, in order to be part of the control group. This would tend to minimize the influence of family or self prayer on the outcome. One must doubt that it would still be satisfactory enough, but it would seem to me as the only alternative.
Another objection to such experiments would be to point out that unnatural effects (i.e. effects that cannot happen naturally) that are prayed for, in fact do not happen at all. Despite millions of people praying for it, world peace still isn't around the corner. Despite claims of the power of prayer, no prayer has ever been shown to regrow a limb. One might call this convenient (I'd sure like to see statistics on what most people pray about, though). At any rate, perhaps natural effects can be furthered by prayer, although eventually the theory would have to account for that.
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