[Avodah] effects of relgious worship on health (fwd)

[Steven J Scher]

This discussion is transfered from Areivim at the suggestion of the 
Areivim moderators.


This is me:

>> I find it very hard to imagine studies that COULD offer proof of HaShem's
>> existence.  What would such evidence look like?
>

to which R'Yitzchak Grossman replied:

> Let's say a study were to show that people who have been prayed for by
> others, specifically by Jews praying to God, do statistically,
> significantly better than those who have no such prayers said on their
> behalf.  Assume that we can isolate all other factors, for example by
> ensuring that the studies are blind and controlled, in the sense that
> the patients don't know which of them are being prayed for, and we
> control for socioeconomics and culture. i.e. both groups are Orthodox
> Jews of similar Hashkafos and Yiras Shamayim, etc.
> 
> I'm sure I've missed some catches, but I see no reason that with enough
> care and forethought it should not be possible to design such a study.
> Whether this would be ethical or Halachically permitted are other
> questions, of course.



An important part of this kind of a study would have to be that the choice of 
who was prayed for and who wasn't prayed for was randomly assigned. And the 
thing that would make this evidence convincing is a large effect -- a clear 
difference between those prayed for and those not prayed for.

This is the big problem I have with this type of study.

What we are saying is that HaShem, simply to convince people of His existence, 
would treat one randomly chosen group of people substantially better than 
another randomly chosen group of people.  This doesn't sound to me like the God 
who was willing to spare a whole city of reshaim if 10 tzaddikim could be 
found.

(Actually, to give you your counter-argument.... It just occured to me that 
this MIGHT work if we assume that the selection of people were NOT random from 
HaShem's perspective.  In other words, if HaShem controlled the random 
selection process so that the people He actually wanted to get better were in 
fact placed into the group to be prayed for, then maybe this would make sense.

I'll have to think about this more, because in some sense this makes the 
assignment of people to groups non-random.... what I can't get my head around 
right now is if that means that the experiment no longer is valid because of 
that type of non-randomness.  My leaning is to say that it isn't a problem... 
after all, one way to think about randomness is to say that it is leaving the 
outcomes in HaShem's hands, without a human way of predicting how it's going to 
come out.)


Now, moving out of the hypothetical:

Even if we did the study that R'YG suggests, I don't think that it would 
come out in a way to provide clear evidence for HaShem's existence.  For 
it to do so, HaShem has to want to very clearly demonstrate that He 
exists.  And, in my opinion He has much better ways to do that then to 
affect the results of some scientific study!


  - Steve