Director Roger Nygard traveled the world asking theologians, scientists, skeptics, and everyday people 85 tough questions to try to understand The Nature of Existence! Now that he’s asked the experts, it’s YOUR TURN! To offer your own insights on today’s question, “Does prayer work?”, Leave a Reply below!
I’m not convinced it can cure cancer or save my house during a tornado. It is a form of self reflection and meditation, so in that sense it has value. It depends on what you mean by “work”. Work to do what?
There are scientific studies that say prayer does not work, and it some cases actually made the situation worse. Of course, there are the ones that are going to say, “You can’t challenge God.” or “It doesn’t work like that.”. Then there are the people that make it sound like God works, whichever the outcome. If they have a sick relative and pray for them this is what happens. If the relative gets better, they say God healed them. If the relative passes away, they say God needed them. They bend whatever they can to make the god way the right way.
No.
Probably not. There’s no scientific mechanism by which it could work that we have discovered, and we have been looking for a long time. That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be one, just that it’s unlikely.
There have been studies where people who were preyed for demonstrated no advantage to their overall health over that of the control group.
No
A prayer can be defined in two ways:
One, a prayer is believed to be an instant way of asking “God” for help to cure illnesses, get rich, and so forth. What is being displayed here is often human’s laziness and ignorance. We simply want someone else (in this case “God”) to do everything for us while we rest peacefully on a king-size mattress. This happens just about everywhere….We want God to give us fortune, we want our government to give us jobs, we want our president to stop illegal loggings etc. Whether we are living in religious or secular society, this attitude remains….More often than not we seem to forget that we can act on what we want rather instead of waiting for someone else to do it for us……
The second definition is that a prayer is a way of cleansing our mind of all the problems and burdens that we face, get back to our pure consciousness, our true self or what some people call “God”. There can only so much that our brain can take at once. By removing the excess weight, we allow ourselves room and time to think more clearly about what really matters the most to us and therefore more likely to make the right decisions and ultimately achieve our goals. Would you be more likely to score well in your final exam when you’re fresh or tired?? Here we ACT rather than WAIT…Does it work, well it depends on what we decide to do of course……
Wishing, hoping and praying are all the same thing. None of them are beneficial.
Of course, it works, for those who belived it dos.
No, of course not.
other than to calm yourself and scare people walking by, no. why would some god give the lottery to my dog and not the neighbours cat?