This thread is in GD section. So there can be counter points.
Studies show it does not.
Prayer is a Placebo Effect at best. In studies like that performed by Harvard Medical School, prayer was shown to act no better than placebo. In fact, in this study prayer was specifically looked at in relation to recovery after surgery. It was found that those who were prayed for and knew of it did not recover faster than the control group with any statistical significance. And interestingly, the group that was prayed for but unaware of it (the group that would show if prayer had any real,n on-placebo effect) did WORSE than the control group.
Herbert Benson led a study to determine if prayers by congregations who did not know heart bypass patients would reduce the complications of surgery. They didn't. In fact, some prayed-for patients fared worse than those who did not receive prayers.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/04.06/05-prayer.html
http://www.freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Harvard_prayer_experiment
If prayer works it is not logical ? Can any favor be achieved by merely praying ?
Prayer is a psychological exercise. It may take you away from the stress and worry. But can it affect the outcome of anything? If it affects, is it logical ? Can i get a job i want merely by praying ? If i get it, is it not due to my suitability for the job or is it because i simply prayed ? Can a person avoid any outcome by merely chanting ? No doubt, chanting can give you some solace. But can it be a master magician or is it only our mental perception?
I do believe in Brahman. Prayer In am doubtful.
Science can easily dismiss everything outside it as nonsense. But that may not be right.
I am basically a scientist. I have trained as a scientist. Yet I would say this:
1. science can always say that the experiment was done under the gravitation field and so the result is subject to that fact.
2. Science can say there were photons(during day time) and cosmic rays and many other radiations were impinging on the whole experiment and so the results are subject to the effects of that.
3. Science can say that the experinenting individual and the whole set of apparatus used for experiment and the whole lab was in constant motion in the universe and perhaps this has to be factored in while looking at the results produced.
With so many uncertainties we keep moving confidently. We are not sure about even the basic axiomatic statement that the shortest distance between two points is a straightline. It needs a correction however small it may be.
So let us accept that science does not give us the whole truth and it is subject to many ifs and buts--known and un known.
So scientific truths are truths relative to time and given situations.
Now coming to what is observed outside science which is not explained by science:
1. Prayer is found to have an effect. We do not know why or how.
2. Go to Vaitheeswaran Koil and give your thumb impression and pretend to be a dumb who can not speak. So you would not have given any info about yourself other than the thum impression. Yet the fellow there goes through the bundles of palm leaf manuscripts in his dilapidated house using your thumb impression as the identifying label and comes out with your name, your wife's name and your son/daughter's names and goes further to tell you what all will happen in the lives of these individuals. Can science do a similar thing? Or can science explain this?
3. When I go to a local astrologer/prasnam expert to ask him whether I may go ahead with the project of samprokshanam for the Krishna Temple in my native village which is far away in the south, this man sitting in his drawing room in a 2BHK flat in Chennai, asks me as if he knew my mind whether I have come to find out about doing the samprokshanam of a Krishna Temple just looking at my face-even before I speak a word. Then he goes on to tell me after a few minutes of meditation that the Krishna is in sitting posture with navneeth in his two hands. I am floored. Then he further says that there is an irrigation canal flowing just behind the backyard of my village house. Now I have no words. I just sit there dumb and wait for him to give me the date and time (as he seems to know everything) and he gives me precisely that info and tells me to go ahead with the project and complete it as Krishna is happy about it. Now science can not explain any of this.
4. Nor is science able to explain the ability of some people to bend an iron strip standing away from it and just looking at it intently.
5. Scientific truths keep changing with time as humanity comes into possession of better and better tools with which it looks deeper and deeper into the mysteries of nature.
So what we know is just very little and what we do not know is large. Newton said it succinctly "I am like a child standing on the sands of the beach counting my pebbles and shells while the vast ocean with its mysteries/treasures lies before me unconquered".
